IMITATION OF SOUNDS.

HARMONY OF SOUND AND SENSE.

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1. It is possible to make the Sound of the language an echo to the Sense.

This is a special and notable instance of the pervading principle of Harmony.

2. The effect is most easily attained when the subject-matter is sound.

Words, being themselves sounds, can imitate sounds. Our language (like others) contains many examples of imitative names, as whizz,' 'buzz,'burr,' hiss,' 'crash,' 'racket,' whistle,' splash,' wash,' 'scrunch,' munch,' thunder,' 'boom'.

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By the invention of such words Browning imitates very closely the sounds of the drum and the fife:

Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, and tootle-te-tootle the fife.

The imitation can be still further extended in a succession of words. Homer's line, near the beginning of the Iliad, describing the sea, is celebrated as an instance. The 'hoarse Trinacrian shore' is a similar attempt, one of many in Milton. The grating noise of the opening of Hell's gates is described thus:-

On a sudden open fly,

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound,

The infernal doors; and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder.

Contrast the opening of Heaven's doors :

Heaven opened wide

Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound,

On golden hinges turning.

Discordant sounds are effectively described in the line from Lycidas':

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.

The sounds of a battle in former times are represented by the language thus :—

Arms on armour clashing, bray'd

Horrible discord; and the maddening wheels
Of brazen fury raged.

The following is from Byron's Falls of Terni ' :·
The roar of waters !-from the headlong height

Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice;

The fall of waters! rapid as the light

The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss;

The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss,
And boil in endless torture; while the sweat
Of their great agony, wrung out from this
Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,

And mounts in spray the skies, and thence again
Returns in an unceasing shower, which round,
With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain,

Is an eternal April to the ground,
Making it all one emerald.

Compare the well-known lines of Southey on Lodore. By the use of sibilants Whittier suggests the ripple on the sea-shore:

And so beside the silent sea

I wait the muffled oar.

Tennyson describes the roaring of the sea by the reiteration of the letter r:

Those wild eyes that watch the wave

In roarings round the coral reef.

Poe employs the sibilants to express a rustling sound:-
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.
3. Imitation by language extends to movements.

A series of long syllables, or of words under accent, with the frequent occurrence of the voice-prolonging consonants, being necessarily slow to pronounce, is appropriate to the description of slow and laboured movement. As in Pope's couplet on the Iliad :

When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow.

Of the ten syllables in the first line, only two (when, to) can be rapidly pronounced; all the rest, for some reason or other, detain the voice. In the second, the two the's are the only short syllables. Moreover, the clash between words is retarding.

The opposite arrangement-that is to say, an abundance of short and unaccented syllables, and the more abrupt consonants alternated with the vowels, by making the pronunciation rapid, light and easy, corresponds to quickness of motion in the subject.

This harmony is finely brought out by Gray in the Ode to Spring':

EXPRESSION OF MOVEMENTS.

Yet hark! how through the peopled air
The busy murmur glows!

The insect youth are on the wing,
Eager to taste the honied Spring,
And float amid the liquid noon;
Some lightly o'er the current skim,
Some shew their gaily-gilded trim,
Quick-glancing to the sun.

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The lines in the Iliad describing Sisyphus are an admired example in the Greek, and the effect is aimed at by the English translators.

With many a weary step, and many a groan,

Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone;
The huge round stone resulting with a bound,

Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground. Up to the middle of the third line, we have the slow laborious motion; then the change to the rapid and impetuous descent. (See Gladstone's Homeric Primer, p. 143.)

Besides marking the difference of quick and slow, the measure of language may indicate various modes of motion, as in the expression Troy's turrets tottered,' where there is a sort of resemblance to the vibratory action of a building about to tumble.

The gliding motion of the clouds is expressed by the use of the liquid consonants in these lines of Keats:—

And let the clouds of even and of morn
Float in voluptuous fleeces o'er the hills.

Compare a similar use of the liquids here:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?

Here Tennyson's ingenuity is conspicuous. The movement of a wave at the beach is described

Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring.

The following explains itself:

Then would he whistle, rapid as any lark.

In many passages, the effect combines sound and motion,

as:

Tumbling all precipitate down dash'd.

So, in Pope's famous lines:

If nature thundered in our opening ears
And stunned us with the music of the spheres.

The word stunned,' by its short emphasis, well expresses the effect of a stunning blow.

Obstructed movement is readily responded to by the march of the language, as in the second of the lines on Sisyphus.

4. Huge, unwieldy bulk implies slowness of movement, and may be expressed by similar language:O'er all the dreary coasts

So stretched out, huge in length, the arch-fiend lay.

But ended foul in many a scaly fold

Voluminous and vast.

5. It is through combined sound and movement that language can harmonize with specific feelings. This element of poetic beauty appears in our oldest poetry-notably in Homer.

The soothing spirit of a lullaby is expressed by Shakespeare through the use of the liquid consonants :

Philomel, with melody,

Sing in our sweet lullaby;

Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby;

Never harm, nor spell nor charm,

Come our lovely lady nigh:

So, good night, with lullaby.

Goldsmith, in the opening line of the Traveller, suggests the feeling of sadness by the slow movement of the verse :— Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.

Wordsworth, in his lines At the Grave of Burns,' aims at the same effect in a succession of heavy syllables, intensified by a strong alliteration :

Oh! spare to sweep, thou mournful blast,

His grave grass-grown.

In expressing the feeling of hopelessness, Tennyson employs a harsh rhythm, the harshness increased by

alliteration:

And ghastly through the drizzling rain

On the bald street breaks the blank day.

The different measures of poetry are suited to different passions. Lively movements belong to cheerful emotions, slow movements to melancholy. The languishing reluctance of the spirit to quit the earth is finely expressed in the movement of Gray's stanza, beginning

For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey?

SOUND HARMONIZING WITH FEELINGS.

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Tennyson is very notable for his skill under this head. The following stanzas are from 'A Dream of Fair Women':—

Slowly my sense undazzled. Then I heard

A noise of some one coming thro' the lawn,
And singing clearer than the crested bird
That claps his wings at dawn.

She lock'd her lips; she left me where I stood:
'Glory to God,' she sang, and past afar,
Thridding the sombre boskage of the wood
Toward the morning star.

In both stanzas, the independent effect of each set of sounds and movements is enhanced by an opening contrast. In Browning's 'How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,' we have an example of a rapid measure well employed to express rapid motion and intensity of feeling. In Dryden's Alexander's Feast,' the measure is constantly varied in order to suit the action and the feeling expressed.

VERSIFICATION AND METRE.

Metre is the regular recurrence of similar groups of accented syllables at short intervals.

Essential alike to prose and to poetry is the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. When the voice has made a strong effort, it must be relaxed prior to a similar exertion.

This demand is answered both by alternating the syllables in accent with those out of accent, and by short pauses and stops, amounting to a total rest of the vocal organs. The modes of meeting these requirements admit of the largest variety, and contribute greatly to the charm of language.

When the accent is found to recur at regular intervals within a series of words or syllables, as in these examples

He plants' his foot' steps in' | the sea'

What' though you | tell' me each gay' little | rover

each of the groups receives the name of a Measure. We have different measures according to the extent of the groups and the place of the accent within them.

Between two accented Syllables in English words, there can lie one, or two, but not more than two, unaccented