Babylon, Learned and wise, hath perished utterly, Nor leaves her speech one word to aid the sigh That would lament her. - William Wordsworth

Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.

Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way.

My eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirred, For the same sound is in my ears Which in those days I heard. Thus fares it still in our decay: And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away Than what it leaves behind.