Again, take the ring which the Earl of Essex sent to Queen Elizabeth, but which the queen did not receive.  This was intended as a sentence, but failed to become effectual language because the sensible material symbol never reached those sentient organs which it was intended to affect.  A book, again, however full of excellent words it may be, is not language when it is merely standing on a bookshelf.  It speaks to no one, unless when being actually read, or quoted from by an act of memory.  It is potential language as a lucifer-match is potential fire, but it is no more language till it is in contact with a recipient mind, than a match is fire till it is struck, and is being consumed.

A piece of music, again, without any words at all, or a song with words that have nothing in the world to do with the ideas which it is nevertheless made to convey, is very often effectual language.  Much lying, and all irony depends on tampering with covenanted symbols, and making those that are usually associated with one set of ideas convey by a sleight of mind others of a different nature.  That is why irony is intolerably fatiguing unless very sparingly used.  Take the song which Blondel sang under the window of King Richard’s prison.  There was not one syllable in it to say that Blondel was there, and was going to help the king to get out of prison.  It was about some silly love affair, but it was a letter all the same, and the king made language of what would otherwise have been no language, by guessing the meaning, that is to say, by perceiving that he was expected to enter then and there into a new covenant as to the meaning of the symbols that were presented to him, understanding what this covenant was to be, and acquiescing in it.

On the other hand, no ingenuity can torture “language” into being a fit word to use in connection with either sounds or any other symbols that have not been intended to convey a meaning, or again in connection with either sounds or symbols in respect of which there has been no covenant between sayer and sayee.  When we hear people speaking a foreign language—­we will say Welsh—­we feel that though they are no doubt using what is very good language as between themselves, there is no language whatever as far as we are concerned.  We call it lingo, not language.  The Chinese letters on a tea-chest might as well not be there, for all that they say to us, though the Chinese find them very much to the purpose.  They are a covenant to which we have been no parties—­to which our intelligence has affixed no signature.

We have already seen that it is in virtue of such an understood covenant that symbols so unlike one another as the written word “stone” and the spoken word alike at once raise the idea of a stone in our minds.  See how the same holds good as regards the different languages that pass current in different nations.  The letters p, i, e, r, r, e convey the idea of a stone to a Frenchman as readily