Grimm's Law and the Brahmins

Abstract

IN his autobiography, Cheerful Yesterdays, Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled how he taught himself German by the preposterous advocated by Miss Elizabeth Peabody's Hungarian, Dr. Charles Kraitsir. The plan he vaguely remembered and facetiously described: Dr. Kraitsir a theory of the alphabet and held that by its means all the Indo-European languages could be resolved into one; so that we could pass from each to another by an effort of will, like the process of mind-healing.' Higginson had first encountered Miss Peabody in her atom of a bookshop on Boston's West Street, desultory, dreamy, but still insatiable in her love for knowledge and for helping others to it.2 Undoubtedly Miss Peabody had indoctrinated Higginson with the dictum later expressed in her Aesthetic Papers: Philology should be studied as the most important of the sciences, not only for the sake of knowing the works of art and science that the various languages contain, but because the words themselves are growths of Nature and works of art; ... and because their analysis and history reveal the universe in its symbolic character.3 Her method of searching history, language, and literature for spiritual truths had been learned from a study of Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, which she used in James Marsh's 1833 translation as a textbook in conversation classes for the ladies of Boston