possesses these four elements of harmony in equal measure?  Too many vowels sound just as unpleasantly as too many consonants; a suitable number and interchange of both is requisite to produce true harmony.  Even harsh syllables belong to the necessary qualities of a language; for nature herself has harsh sounds, which the poet would be unable to paint without harsh sounding tones.  The roughness of the Slavic idioms, of which foreigners have complained so frequently, is therefore exclusively to be ascribed to the awkwardness of inexperienced or tasteless writers; or they are ridiculous mistakes of the reader, who, unacquainted with the language, receives the sounds with his eyes instead of his ears.”—­“The pure and distinct vocalization, which does not leave it to the arbitrary choice of the speaker to pronounce certain vowels or to pass them over, as is the case in German.  French, and English, gives at the same time to the Slavic languages the advantage of a regular quantity of their syllables, as in Greek; which makes them better adapted than any other for imitating the old classic metres.  We must confess, however, that this matter has been hitherto neglected in most of them, or has been treated with little intelligence.  We mean to say:  Each Slavic syllable is by its very nature either short or long; since each Slavic vowel has a twofold duration, both short and long.  This natural shortening and lengthening of a syllable is, as with the Greeks, entirely independent of the grammatical stress or falling of the voice upon them, or in other words, of the prosodic tone; the quantity being founded on the nature of the pronunciation, on the longer or shorter duration of the vowel itself, and not on the grammatical accent.  This latter may lie just as well on syllables prosodically short, as on those which are long.”

From these introductory remarks, we turn again to the historical part of our essay, referring the reader back to our division of the whole Slavic race into Eastern and Western Stems.  We have, first of all, that most remarkable Old or Church Slavonic, the language of their Bible, now no longer a living tongue, but still the inexhaustible source of the sublimest and holiest expressions for its younger sisters.  Then follow the four languages, perfectly distinct from each other, spoken by the Eastern Slavic nations, viz. the Russian, Illyrico-Servian, Vindish, and Bulgarian.  Three of them possess a literature of their own; and one of them, the Illyrico-Servian, even a double literature; for political circumstances and the influence of the early division of the oriental and occidental churches, having unfortunately split the nation into two parts, caused them also to adopt two different methods of writing one and the same language, as we shall show in the sequel.  And lastly, among the Slavic nations of the Western stem, we find either three or four different languages, according as we regard the Czekhish and Slovakian idioms as essentially the same or distinct, viz. the Bohemian, [Slovakian,] Polish, and Sorabic in Lusatia.  Of these, the first and third have each an extensive literature of its own.[25]