literature—­those permanent and vital works which we will never let die—­require a devotion as unceasing, as patient, as inexhaustible, as the devotion that is required for the works that adorn your walls; and we have luckily in our age—­tho it may not be a literary age—­masters of prose and masters of verse.  No prose more winning has ever been written than that of Cardinal Newman; no verse finer, more polished, more melodious has ever been written than that of Lord Tennyson and Mr. Swinburne.

It seems to me that one of the greatest functions of literature at this moment is not merely to produce great works, but also to protect the English language—­that noble, that most glorious instrument—­against those hosts of invaders which I observe have in these days sprung up.  I suppose that every one here has noticed the extraordinary list of names suggested lately in order to designate motion by electricity; that list of names only revealed what many of us had been observing for a long time—­namely, the appalling forces that are ready at a moment’s notice to deface and deform our English tongue.  These strange, fantastic, grotesque, and weird titles open up to my prophetic vision a most unwelcome prospect.  I tremble to see the day approach—­and I am not sure that it is not approaching—­when the humorists of the headlines of American journalism shall pass current as models of conciseness, energy, and color of style.

Even in our social speech this invasion seems to be taking place in an alarming degree, and I wonder what the Pilgrim Fathers of the seventeenth century would say if they could hear their pilgrim children of the nineteenth century who come over here, on various missions, and among others, “On the make.”  This is only one of the thousand such-like expressions which are invading the Puritan simplicity of our tongue.  I will only say that I should like, for my own part, to see in every library and in every newspaper office that admirable passage in which Milton—­who knew so well how to handle both the great instrument of prose and the nobler instrument of verse—­declared that next to the man who furnished courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy he placed the man who should enlist small bands of good authors to resist that barbarism which invades the minds and the speech of men in methods and habits of speaking and writing.

I thank you for having allowed me the honor of saying a word as to the happiest of all callings and the most imperishable of all arts.

GENERAL SHERMAN

BY CARL SCHURZ