Roared as when the rolling breakers boom and blanch on the precipices. -Boadicea: Idem.

The murm'ring surge

That on the unnumber'd idle pebbles chafes.

-Lear, iv., 6: Shakespear.

And the ice and rocks, resounding with the clanging of armor and footsteps in this:

Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves

And barren chasms, and all to left and right

The bare black cliff clanged round him as he based

His feet on juts of slipp'ry crag that rang

Sharp smitten with the dint of armed heels.

-Mort D'Arthur: Tennyson.

And the roar and clash and speed of warriors and their chariots and weapons in this:

-nor stood at gaze

The adverse legions, nor less hideous joined
The horrid shock. Now storming fury rose
And clamor, such as heard in heaven till now
Was never; arms on armor clashing bray'd
Horrible discord, and the madding wheels
Of brazen chariots raged; dire was the noise
Of conflict; overhead the dismal hiss

Of fiery darts in flaming vollies flew,

And flying vaulted either host with fire.

-Paradise Lost, 6: Milton.

And the smooth water, lapping the body of the swimmer in this:

And softlier swimming with raised head
Feels the full flower of morning shed,
And fluent sunrise round him rolled,
That laps and laves his body bold
With fluctuant heaven in water's stead,
And urgent through the growing gold
Strikes, and sees all the spray flash red.

-Epilogue: Swinburne.

And the cursing and shrieking, fluttering, crawling, and generally appalling character of this:

-and then again

With curses cast them down upon the dust,

And gnashed their teeth and howled; the wild birds shriek'd
And terrified did flutter on the ground,

And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing but stingless-they were slain for food;
And War which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again ;—a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom; no love was left.

-Darkness: Byron.

And the climax of confusion, overthrow, and horror in almost every form, in this:

The overthrown he raised, and as a herd
Of goats or timorous flock together thronged
Drove them before him thunderstruck, pursued
With terror and with furies to the bounds
And crystal wall of heaven, which opening wide
Rolled inward, and a spacious gap disclosed
Into the wasteful deep; the monstrous sight

Struck them with horrow backward; but far worse
Urged them behind; headlong themselves they threw
Down from the verge of heaven, eternal wrath
Burned after them to the bottomless pit.
Hell heard th' insufferable noise, hell saw

Heaven ruining from heaven, and would have fled
Affrighted, but strict fate had cast too deep
Her dark foundations, and too fast had bound.
Nine days they fell; confounded Chaos roared,
And felt tenfold confusion in their fall
Through his wild anarchy; so huge a rout
Incumber'd him with ruin; hell at last

Yawning received them whole, and on them closed,
Hell their fit habitation, fraught with fire

Unquenchable, the house of woe and pain.

-P. L., 6: Milton.

In certain poems, as in fact in certain of the quotations already given, it is difficult to determine how far the effects correspond to those of dramatic or of discoursive elocution. We cannot clearly distinguish in them between that which is and is not strictly imitative. One of the finest examples of this kind which we have, is furnished by Robert Browning's Holy-Cross-Day, purporting to represent the feelings of the Jews in Rome, when forced, as was formerly the custom on that day, to attend church, and listen to an annual Christian sermon. Notice the concentrated spite and scorn represented in the qualities-mainly guttural and aspirate-of most of the sounds used. Only a part of the poem can be quoted; but the rest of it is almost equally effective:

Higgledy piggledy, packed we lie,
Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,
Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
Worms in a carcass, fleas in a sleeve.
Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs
And buzz for the bishop-here he comes.

It began when a herd of us, picked and placed,
Were spurred through the Corso, stripped to the waist;
Jew-brutes, with sweat and blood well spent

To usher in worthily Christian Lent.

It grew, when the hangman entered our bounds,
Yelled, pricked us out to this church, like hounds.
It got to a pitch when the hand indeed
Which gutted my purse would throttle my creed.
And it overflows, when, to even the odd,

Men I helped to their sins, help me to their God.

-Holy-Cross-Day : R. Browning.

In the following, too, we have similar effects, partly imitative and partly not. In the last two lines of each stanza, calling for the echo, we hear the resonant poetic orotund. Aside from these, the poem begins in the first stanza with the hush of the aspirate :

The splendor falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story;

The long light shakes across the lakes,

And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying.

Blow, bugle; answer echoes, dying, dying, dying.

Then we have mainly the thin, clear quality of the pure

tone:

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going;
O sweet and far, from cliff and scar,

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying;

Blow, bugle; answer echoes, dying, dying, dying.

And, lastly, the deeper feeling indicated by the orotund:

O love, they die in yon rich sky,

They faint on hill or field or river;

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow forever and forever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

And answer echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

-The Bugle, from the Princess: Tennyson.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SACRIFICE OF SENSE TO SOUND.

Verse in which Attention to Sound prevents Representation of Thought— Violating Laws of Natural Expression or Grammatical ConstructionExcellences exaggerated, the Source of these Faults-Insertion of Words, Pleonasm, Superfluity; Transposition of Words, Inversion, Hyperbaton, tending to Obscurity-Style of the Age of DrydenAlteration of Words in Accent; or by Apheresis, Front-Cut; Syncope, Mid-Cut; or Apocope, End-Cut-All these often show Slovenly Workmanship.

THE HE theory underlying all that has been said thus far is, that poetry is an artistic development of language; its versification, of the pauses of natural breathing; its rhythm and tune, of the accents and inflections of ordinary conversation; and the significance in its sounds, of ejaculatory and imitative methods actuating the very earliest efforts of our race at verbal expression. The inference suggested has been that these effects produced by sound are legitimate in poetry, because, like language, and as a part of it, and far more significantly than some forms of it, they represent thought. This inference necessarily carries with it another, which it seems important to emphasize before we leave this part of our subject. It is this, that no effects produced by sound are legitimate in poetry, which fail in any degree to represent thought. If a man's first impression on entering a picture-gallery comes from a suggestion of paint, he may know that he