On Accent

Strange accident in the history of men! What men most care for, what a particular society most cherishes, what is most vital to it, dies as the individual dies and can never be recovered by posterity. Would you understand a century in the past? You read of it and at once you are bewildered at finding a passionate attachment to things long since grown indifferent; at discovering standards taken for granted, and a scale of values taken for granted, which to-day have disappeared; what is more, at stumbling continually upon terms obviously fundamental _then_, and yet referring to things _now_ so dead that we cannot even translate them. And all this is true of the immediate past as well as of the remote past.

Among these astonishingly important things which disappear with the disappearance of living men, consider accent.