What I have said has not the least
application to the natural forms of beauty which thought assumes in
speech. Between such beauty and such ornament there lies the same
difference as between the overflow of life in the hair, and the dressing
of that loveliest of utterances in grease and gold.
For, when I say that polish is the removal of everything that comes
between thought and thinking, it must not be supposed that in my idea
thought is only of the intellect, and therefore that all forms but bare
intellectual forms are of the nature of ornament. As well might one say
that the only essential portion of the human form is the bones. And
every human thought is in a sense a human being, has as necessarily its
muscles of motion, its skin of beauty, its blood of feeling, as its
skeleton of logic. For complete utterance, music itself in its right
proportions, sometimes clear and strong, as in rhymed harmonies,
sometimes veiled and dim, as in the prose compositions of the masters of
speech, is as necessary as correctness of logic, and common sense in
construction. I should have said _conveyance_ rather than utterance; for
there may be utterance such as to relieve the mind of the speaker with
more or less of fancied communication, while the conveyance of thought
may be little or none; as in the speaking with tongues of the infant
Church, to which the lovely babblement of our children has probably more
than a figurative resemblance, relieving their own minds, but, the
interpreter not yet at his post, neither instructing nor misleading any
one.
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