X. THE BARK. 171 



' air ; ' while, in its orthography, it is identical with the 

 word representing the bodily sign of tenderest passion, 

 and grouped with a multitude of others,* in which the 

 mere insertion of a consonant makes such wide difference 

 of sentiment as between 'dear' and 'drear,' or 'pear' 

 and ' spear.' The Greek root, on the other hand, has per- 

 sisted in retaining some vestige of its excellent dissonance, 

 even where it has parted with the last vestige of the idea 

 it was meant to convey ; and when Burns did his best, 

 and his best was above most men's to gather pleasant 

 liquid and labial syllabling, round gentle meaning, in 



" Bonnie lassie, will ye go, 

 Will ye go, will ye go, 

 Bonnie lassie, will ye go, 

 To the birks of Aberfeldy ? " 



he certainly had little thought that the delicately crisp 

 final k, in birk, was the remnant of a magnificent Greek 

 effort to express the rending of the earth by earthquake, 

 in the wars of the giants. In the middle of that word 

 ' esmaragese,' we get our own beggar's ' rag ' for a pure 

 root, which afterwards, through the Latin frango, eoftens 

 into our fc break,' and ' bark,' the ' broken thing ' ; that 

 idea of its rending around the tree's stem having been, in 

 the very earliest human efforts at botanical description, 



* It is one of the three cadences, (the others being of the word* 

 rhyming to 'mind' and ' way.') used by Sir Philip Sidney in his mar* 

 vellous paraphrase of the 55th Psalm. 



