Words and Idioms [antikvár]

PREFACE Words," the poet Donne writes in one ofhis letters, "are our subtillest and delicatest outward creatures, being composed of thoughts and breath " ; and the creatures he thus describes—their echoes and overtones, and the effects which can be produced by the juxtapositions of these wonder-working sounds—^have always possessed for me what is perhaps an undue fascination. The art of words, or Literature, as we call it, was, I believed in my youth, an art like the other arts, whose technique could be acquired by study and application ; and no one ever told me—as the young are now authoritatively instructed—that if only our thoughts are sincere, and our feelings adequately excited, the right words will rush to our pens without care or trouble. It is my misfortune, I suppose, that having been born before the date of this great labour-saving discovery, I should have spent so much of my time in studying words and reading dictionaries. The human mind, moreover, is so constituted that pursuits which we take up as means to an end, become for us, not infrequently, ends in themselves ; the hunter we mount for the chase, often turning, before we know it, into a kind of hobby-horse which gallops off with us