44 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts , Letters. 
Tlhe genius of the wonder-child had full play in choosing 
out of a crowd the words befitting the diversified natures he 
had detected before he could read. His skill became as saga¬ 
cious as the hunter’s who distinguishes dogs—the swift, the 
slow, the subtle, every one according to 1 the gift which bounte¬ 
ous nature hath in him! closed. In discernment of diction he 
must have been of an instinct as unerring as. Falstaff claimed 
that his was when he recognized the royal heir-apparent in the 
dark and where his last thought was of meeting him. Perhaps 
his instincts ought to be called those which teach bees from 
among flower's which are poisonous and hitter to select and 
fasten upon only the honey-hearing for bringing home to their 
tent-royal. 
The child is father of the man. The infantile word-needer 
and word-seeker became the greatest of word-masters, chiefly 
in those very lines where he had ferreted out his characters,— 
trees as it were which he pulled up with every rootlet and not 
a little of the surrounding soil. In the world of language and 
the corresponding world of human lineaments he was; alike orig¬ 
inal for he knit them into' a preestablished harmony. His 
unique companionships had afforded him better materials than 
any university could furnish, and his genius could so mould 
them dramatically that, parts into parts reciprocally shot— 
“They keep in one consent, 
Congreeing in a full and natural close 
Like music.” 
But Shakespeare’s words, equally multitudinous and match¬ 
less, where did he get them? The first and chiefest founda¬ 
tion of his vocabulary was English undefiled,—pure from Out¬ 
side adulterations,—his mother tongue and preeminently his 
mother’s tongue. While still mewling in his mother’s arms 
some of her love-inspired lullabies may have been so imprinted 
on his heart that in the fulness of time they relived in his own 
scfngs. Among such warblings 1ST-E-D finds, that ding-drding is 
an onomatope which has been caught up by no one before 
Shakespeare in 1600, who was also foremost to register Ham¬ 
lets buz, buz! and he will find that there were others as 
Juliet’s repeated “Hist!,” but whether Tu-whit Tu-who of the 
staring owl, and suum su of the cold wind were among those 
