THE INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO. 
181 
ferally speaks volumes against the habit, in which we too often 
indulge, of viewing such races, not from the basis of a common 
humanity, but from the pinnacle of our own advantages. But 
their manners, habits, and customs are as capable as their lan¬ 
guage of being translated into ours, and in such translation all 
may find interest; while, if a deep sense of the brotherhood of 
man, and of the duty of those who have received more light of any 
kind to hasten to impart it to those who sit in darkness, should 
breed in us a longing to excite and fertilize their stagnant existence, 
we shall soon learn that, without being able to impress them 
through the medium of their habits as of their language, we can 
never reach the spring from which all change must flow, and 
which never dries up, but is only choked by what it has brought 
from the depths of human nature to the surface of life ; as indeed it 
is apt to be in every nation, and with every man. If we are warmed, 
and incited by a true spirit, our own gain is great. It is the 
highest end of civilization to bring us back to that open and im¬ 
pressible disposition of our nature, which every race must have 
possessed while its language was fresh and growing. Nothing so 
powerfully assists in disenthralling the mind from the trammels of lan¬ 
guage as the study of another language, when we view it not 
merely as an acquisition to be made by an effort of the memory 
for the purpose of communication, but as the most noble and spirit¬ 
ual of all human creations; as the immediate growth and outcome 
of all the inner powers of our nature; as the grand record of the 
early and truly poetical life of man, when the fresh and vivid 
impressions of existence possessed all the mind, and wrought within 
it strongly, till it could contain them no longer, and they were bo¬ 
died forth in sound. If we seek the language of any island or 
mountain group of the Archipelago as the most complex, subtle, 
and beautiful production which nature there presents, and full of 
mysteries provoking thought and veiling deepest truth, we shall 
be rewarded by feeling our own nature quickened and expanded 
in the pursuit, and life becoming at once more intimately and 
wonderfully related to the shews of the external world, and more 
closely and immediately resting on the spiritual being in which we 
and they exist. The fresh breath of nature, moving in the language, 
will awaken a living motion in our own, and that which lay stiff 
