Milton found that eight
thousand words could fairly and fully represent all the power, grandeur,
and creativeness of his almost seraphic soul, when he attempted to
express his whole nature in a literary form. All the words used by
Shakspeare and Milton are _alive_; "cut them and they will _bleed_." But
it is ridiculous for a college student to claim that he has the mighty
resources of the English language at his supreme disposal, when he has
not verified, by his own thought, knowledge, and experience, one in a
hundred of the words he presumptuously employs.
Now Daniel Webster passed safely through all the stages of the
"Sophomoric" disease of the mind, as he passed safely through the
measles, the chicken-pox, and other eruptive maladies incident to
childhood and youth. The process, however, by which he purified his
style from this taint, and made his diction at last as robust and as
manly, as simple and as majestic, as the nature it expressed, will
reward a little study.
The mature style of Webster is perfect of its kind, being in words the
express image of his mind and character,--plain, terse, clear, forcible;
and rising from the level of lucid statement and argument into passages
of superlative eloquence only when his whole nature is stirred by some
grand sentiment of freedom, patriotism, justice, humanity, or religion,
which absolutely lifts him, by its own inherent force and inspiration,
to a region above that in which his mind habitually lives and moves.
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