_Women's_, Keep-the-fire; Spiritual-woman;
Second-daughter-of-the-house; Blue-bird.
Certainly philologists have not given enough attention to this element
and its results, which, I repeat, can probably be found working every
where to-day, amid modern conditions, with as much life and activity
as in far-back Greece or India, under prehistoric ones. Then the
wit--the rich flashes of humor and genius and poetry--darting out
often from a gang of laborers, railroad-men, miners, drivers or
boatmen! How often have I hover'd at the edge of a crowd of them, to
hear their repartees and impromptus! You get more real fun from half
an hour with them than from the books of all "the American humorists."
The science of language has large and close analogies in geological
science, with its ceaseless evolution, its fossils, and its numberless
submerged layers and hidden strata, the infinite go-before of the
present. Or, perhaps Language is more like some vast living body, or
perennial body of bodies. And slang not only brings the first feeders
of it, but is afterward the start of fancy, imagination and humor,
breathing into its nostrils the breath of life.
AN INDIAN BUREAU REMINISCENCE
After the close of the secession war in 1865, I work'd several months
(until Mr. Harlan turn'd me out for having written "Leaves of Grass")
in the Interior Department at Washington, in the Indian Bureau. Along
this time there came to see their Great Father an unusual number of
aboriginal visitors, delegations for treaties, settlement of lands,
&c.
Pages:
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698