416 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



Passing to the Hebrew roots, Herder remarks how they 

 unite picturesqueness with feeling, repose with passion, 

 strength with softness of tone. 



&quot; The northern speeches imitate the sound of nature 

 but rudely, and as it were from without : they creak, jar, 

 and rustle like the objects themselves. In the south the 

 imitation of nature is more delicate. The words have 

 passed through the finer medium of emotion, they are 

 framed as it were in the region of the heart, and so give not 

 coarse reproductions of sound, but images which feeling 

 has modified by impressing upon them its softer seal. Of 

 this union in the tones of the roots between internal 

 feeling and external image, the Semitic languages are 

 a model. What ! cries the interlocutor of Herder s 

 dialogue, these barbarous, gurgling, gutturals ? Yes/ 

 replies Herder. We who live in smoke and fog speak 

 between tongue and lip, and open our mouths but little. 

 The Italian and the Greek again speak ore rotundo, and 

 do not bite their lips together. The East draws its tones 

 still deeper from the breast, from the heart itself, and 

 speaks as Elihu begins. 



I am full of words, 

 The spirit within me constrains me : 

 It ferments in my breast like must corked up. 

 It bursts like new bottles. 

 I must speak, that I may be refreshed : 

 Open my lips, and answer. 



&quot; When these lips opened it was doubtless a living 

 sound, image breathed forth in the stream of emotion, and 

 this, I think, is the spirit of the Hebrew tongue.&quot; l 



Our space precludes fuller reproduction of Herder s 

 admirable demonstration that the Hebrew language marks 

 out the nation that spoke it as a race through whose whole 

 life ran a deep vein of intense but very subjective poetry. 

 Let us, however, concentrate our attention on the quality 



1 Page 20. To appreciate the description of the gutturals as tones 

 drawn from the depths of the breast, the reader must remember that 

 the Hebrew gutturals do not, like the Scotch and German ch, strike the 

 palate, but are purely breathed up from the throat like the English h. 

 But while our alphabet has but one such letter, the Hebrew writes four 

 gutturals, and in pronunciation distinguished five or six. 



