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But he was much in vogue in the '50's. Harper's Magazine published a part of his history as a serial. His rounded periods and bombastic utterances were quoted with delight by those who thought that history was not history unless it was bombastic. Emerson says somewhere, "Avoid adjectives; let your nouns do the work." There was hardly a sentence in Alison which did not traverse this rule.
They did not know what parsing in writing could be. "You may first, when you take your seats, and are ready to prepare the lesson, write upon your slates a list of the ten first nouns that you find in the lesson, arranging them in a column. Do you understand so far?" "Yes, sir." "Then rule lines for another column, just beyond this. In parsing nouns, what is the first particular to be named?"
It is a wonder that I am as tolerable as I am. It is a sign of the greatness of my country, that I, who, if I lived in England, should be scattering my h-s in wild confusion, and asking whether Americans were black or copper-colored, am able in this land of free schools and equal rights to straighten out my verbs and keep my nouns intact. If you will see the highest, look on the heights.
But this labored picking the way along the rugged path of knowledge, stumbling and halting at the nouns, and verbs, and surmounting the polysyllables a letter at a time, seemed to give the reader a deeper feeling of the value and meaning of each word, than is usually gained by the more facile scholar.
That this should be applied to all languages, notwithstanding the habit of most German typographers of printing all nouns with capitals, is borne out by no less an authority than the new Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch, which prints all words in "lower case" type except proper names.
"And who may Duke Hildebrod be?" said Lord Glenvarloch. "Nouns! my lord," said the Templar, "have you lived so long on the town, and never heard of the valiant, and as wise and politic as valiant, Duke Hildebrod, grand protector of the liberties of Alsatia? I thought the man had never whirled a die but was familiar with his fame."
She was very busy and rather sad. She was helping Aunt Harriet to close the house and getting her small wardrobe in order. And once a day she went to a school of languages and painfully learned from a fierce and kindly old Frenchman a list of French nouns and prefixes like this: Le livre, le crayon, la plume, la fenêtre, and so on. By the end of ten days she could say: "La rose sent-elle bon?"
In the gradual multiplication of parts of speech out of these primary ones in the differentiation of verbs into active and passive, of nouns into abstract and concrete in the rise of distinctions of mood, tense, person, of number and case in the formation of auxiliary verbs, of adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles in the divergence of those orders, genera, species, and varieties of parts of speech by which civilized races express minute modifications of meaning we see a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.
Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.
12 About this mountain cherry there is a humorous saying which illustrates the Japanese love of puns. In order fully to appreciate it, the reader should know that Japanese nouns have no distinction of singular and plural. The word ha, as pronounced, may signify either leaves or teeth; and the word hana, either flowers or nose.
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