And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there . . . . and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light, and they shall reign forever and ever." VIII ENGLISH ETYMOLOGY A HELPFUL STUDY If we know the actual present meaning of words, the question may be asked, what do we want more? The answer to this question is that to limit ourselves to the actual present meaning is to defraud ourselves of thousands of years of history; to efface the great background against which the current meaning of words comes out into fullest relief. We are "heirs of all the ages," our words coming to us from the ancient Sanskrit and the Hebrew, from the classic Greek and Latin, from the wild shores of the North Sea, the Danish and Scandinavian peoples, from the songs of the troubadours and the buccaneers of Spain and the Indians of our own country. A man is more to us, whether he is a great public leader or an ordinary acquaintance, when we know something of his past life. The same is true even in a novel or a play. The novelist or the playwright takes upon himself to set before us the past history of each prominent actor, so that we associate him with what he has been. Our idea of words likewise will become more vivid, and our choice will be correspondingly more sure, when we know what is behind each word. Take, for instance, the well-known word miser-one who stints or |