ABSTRACT
This chapter claims that language is a fossil poetry. The poetry which has been embodied in the names of places, in those names which designate the leading features of outward nature, promontories, mountains, capes, is very worthy of being elicited and evoked anew, latent as it now has oftentimes become. Nowhere can it be easily forgotten that names had once a peculiar fitness, which was the occasion of their giving. In other ways also the names of places will oftentimes embody some poetical aspect under which now or at some former period men learned to regard them. Oftentimes when discoverers come upon a new land they will seize with a firm grasp of the imagination the most striking feature which it presents to their eyes, and permanently embody this in a word. Life is not otherwise so full of imagination and poetry that needs to be given any diligence to empty it of that which it possesses of these.
