spirit of a nation is exhibited to our minds in the living words which have conveyed its ideas for ages, as clearly as its physical appearance is presented to our eyes,” and that “thus the national language is the only safe exponent of the national character,” have chosen, it appears to me, the more imperfect means of attaining the wished-for object.[1]
For Africa has an embryo literature, and hardly requires that one should be begotten by strangers, “for the propagation of Christian truth and the extension of civilisation.” Some peoples, as the wild and pastoral tribes of the southern regions, have been said to be destitute of traditions. “The savage custom of going naked,” we are told, “has denuded the mind, and destroyed all decorum in the language. Poetry there is none: the songs are mostly repetitions of a few hyperbolical expressions. There is no metre, no rhyme, nothing that interests or soothes the feelings, or arrests the passions; no admiration of the heavenly bodies, no taste for the beauties of creation. We miss the cultivated mind which delights in seizing on these objects, and embodying them in suitable words.” Finally, the
- ↑ Humboldt, Pers. Narr. Chap. IX., remarks, ‘‘There are certain points in which idioms the most dissimilar concur one with another. That which is common in the intellectual organisation of man is reflected in the general structure of language; and every idiom, however barbarous it may appear, discloses a regulating principle which has presided at its formation.”
