Origin of 100 different words from the preceding Extract from Longfellow's "Poets and Poetry of Europe," p. 3. As previously shown, Longfellow's famous "Psalm of Life" contains seventy-two per cent, Gotho-Germanic, and only twenty-four per cent. Greco-Latin; while the above Extract and Table from the criticism on Anglo-Saxon literature in his "Poets and Poetry.of Europe," exhibits forty-seven per cent. GrecoLatin and fifty-five per cent. Gotho-Germanic. We understand this vocabular difference, when we consider the New England bard, as moral poet in the former and as critic in the latter. Extract from William C. Bryant's "Thanatopsis" (Death Sight). "To him, who, in the love of Nature, holds Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground, Hence, Bryant's poetic style requires about 161 common words to furnish 100 different words, and averages about forty-eight per cent. particles, and thirty-seven per cent, repetitions. Origin of 100 different words from the preceding Extract of William C. Bryant's "Thanatopsis." "He is the translator of the silent language of the universe to the world."-GRISWOLD. *Spenser's "Faerie Queene," 1596, has thirty-three per cent. Greco-Latin, sixty-five Gotho-Germanic, one Celtic and one Semitic; hence, the author of "Thanatopsis" used eleven per cent. less Greco-Latin and twelve per cent. more Gotho-Germanic than the writer of "Faerie Queene," three hundred years ago. Extract from William C. Bryant's "Popular History of the United States." Preface, p. xxii. "The history of the United States naturally divides itself into three periods, upon the third of which we lately, at the close of our civil war, entered as a people, with congruous institutions in every part of our vast territory. The first was the colonial period; the second includes the years which elapsed from the Declaration of Independence to the struggle which closed with the extinction of slavery. The colonial period was a time of tutelage, of struggle and dependence, the childhood of the future nation. But our real growth, as a distinct member of the community of nations, belongs to the second period, and began when we were strong enough to assert and maintain our independence. To this second period a large space has been allotted in the present work. Not that the military annals of our Revolutionary War would seem to require a large proportion of this space, but the various attendant circumstances, the previous controversies with the mother country, in which all the colonies were more or less interested, and grew into a common cause; the consultations which followed; the defiance," &c. Hence, William C. Bryant's prose style requires about 185 common words to furnish 100 different words, and averages about forty-six per cent. repetitions and forty-nine per cent. particles. |