Columbia Encyclopedia World Factbook Columbia Gazetteer American Heritage Coll. An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Page 240 failure is of the greatest diagnostic value as an index of the pervasive presence in literature of a larger, more intuitive linguistic medium than any particular language. In them there is no effect of strain. With Heine, for instance, one is under the illusion that the universe speaks German.
Every language is itself a collective art of expression.
It is built out of spiritualized material, not out of spirit. The successes of the Swinburnes are as valuable for diagnostic purposes as the semi-failures of the Brownings. They show to what extent literary art may lean on the collective art of the language itself. The more extreme technical practitioners may so over-individualize this collective art as to make it almost unendurable. Click here to shop the Bartleby Bookstore .