Whatever his outward demeanour may have been, his poetry gives us no indication of it, being full of delicate mysticism, almost impossible to reproduce in the
English language. For this reason I have chosen one of his simpler poems as a specimen.
My anxiety to be of service to you rushes into words; lays my meaning, in the rough, at your feet; and leaves your taste to polish it with the choicest ornaments of the
English language.
It must not be supposed, notwithstanding, that the Normans, however much they despised the
English language and literature, made any effort to destroy it.
They had nothing in common but the
English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.
Hayward surrounded his sordid and vulgar little adventures with a glow of poetry, and thought he touched hands with Pericles and Pheidias because to describe the object of his attentions he used the word hetaira instead of one of those, more blunt and apt, provided by the
English language. Philip in the daytime had been led by curiosity to pass through the little street near the old bridge, with its neat white houses and green shutters, in which according to Hayward the Fraulein Trude lived; but the women, with brutal faces and painted cheeks, who came out of their doors and cried out to him, filled him with fear; and he fled in horror from the rough hands that sought to detain him.
When the difficulty of learning the
English language was subtracted, I found that in the matter of learning trades and in mastering academic studies there was little difference between the coloured and Indian students.
And it is in the Canterbury Tales that we have, for the first time in the
English language, pictures of real men, and what is more wonderful, of real women.
The French police offered to send to London one of their best men, well acquainted with the
English language, if Lady Lydiard was desirous of employing him.
Adolf was one of that numerous band of Swiss and German youths who come to this country prepared to give their services ridiculously cheap in exchange for the opportunity of learning the
English language. Mr Blatherwick held the view that for a private school a male front-door opener was superior to a female, arguing that the parents of prospective pupils would be impressed by the sight of a man in livery.
I take shelter behind the inadequacy of the
English language. And now to the explanation of my use, or misuse, of the phrase.
Born in poverty at Boston, January 19 1809, dying under painful circumstances at Baltimore, October 7, 1849, his whole literary career of scarcely fifteen years a pitiful struggle for mere subsistence, his memory malignantly misrepresented by his earliest biographer, Griswold, how completely has truth at last routed falsehood and how magnificently has Poe come into his own, For "The Raven," first published in 1845, and, within a few months, read, recited and parodied wherever the
English language was spoken, the half-starved poet received $10!
Then came Eulalie, the proud beauty, the Juno of the school, whom six long years of drilling in the simple grammar of the
English language had compelled, despite the stiff phlegm of her intellect, to acquire a mechanical acquaintance with most of its rules.