structure. Tone-color is tangible quite as much as rhythm when one's ears are open. It seems to me that the appreciation of poetry must grow out of the study of poetry. We cannot arbitrarily say that there is no such thing as tone-color when we find evidence of it in all poetry. Burns, in his little poem on the alphabet, addresses the vowel o, saying,

"O, thou wailing minstrel of despairing woe;"

and Holmes speaks of the velvety vs. I should be willing to rest the whole case on the line from Burns. What does that line mean? That every o wails? By no means; but that o is the best vowel through which pity, pathos, etc., may find expression. This is the kernel of the whole argument. If one were to utter the word "slow" in such a sentence as, "He drives a slow horse," we should not expect much wailing; but in the line,—

"Sad and slow,

Let the long, long procession go,"

the o is the author's choice of avenue along which the tender emotion of pity and regret passes from reader to hearer. The following sonnet from Milton affords an excellent illustration of the use of o:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
E'en them who kept thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones
Forget not: In thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that roll'd

Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundred fold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."

It will be observed that eleven of the fourteen lines have an o in the rhyming word. We are well aware that in most stanzas this would be an artistic blemish. We object to this in English poetry because we claim it is monotonous. No poet was more keenly alive to the melody of verse than Milton: then, why did he apparently violate this canon of his art? To any one who understands Milton's religious beliefs, and can catch the spirit of the poem, the answer is clear: It is a wail from beginning to end. And what possibility for the portraying of that agony of spirit is given to the reader in the last words, "Babylonian woe." Another word than Babylonian might have expressed the author's meaning, but the reproduction of the o's was the expression of the author's intense emotion as he contemplated the fearful slaughter of God's saints.

Enough has been said to show the meaning of tonecolor. Let the student now read aloud the subjoined extracts until he appreciates the aid to emotional expression he receives from the tone-color. But, be it remembered, the effects are not so much imitative as suggestive of emotion.

"Like bright white mice at moonlight in their play,

Or sunfish shooting in the shining bay,

The swift feet shot and glitter'd in the dance."

"Hear the sledges with the bells, silver bells;

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!

While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells,

From the jingling, and the tinkling of the bells."

"Hop and Mop and Drop so clear,
Pip and Trip and Skip that were-

Fib and Tip and Prick and Pin,
Tick and Quick and Jill and Jin,
Tit and Wit and Wat and Win,

The train that wait on her."

"I have seen it when its crags seem'd frantic,
Butting against the mad Atlantic."

"The armaments which thunderstrike the walls of rock-built cities,
Bidding nations quake, and monarchs tremble in their capitals;
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make their clay creator
The vain title take of lord of thee, and arbiter of war,

These are thy toys; and as the snowy flake they melt into thy yeast

of waves,

Which mar alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar."

"The moonlit solitude mild of the midmost ocean."

66

Making moan, making moan."

"And let the mournful martial music blow."

"Into the lovely land of Italy

Whose loveliness was more resplendent made
By the mere passing of that cavalcade."

"Who passed forever in a glimmering land,
Lit with a low large moon."

"The waves come rolling, and the billows rose
Outrageously, as they enraged were,

Or wrathful Neptune did them drive before
His whirling chariot for exceeding fear."
"There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass."
"Out of my sight, thou serpent; that name best
Befits thee with him leagued, thyself as false
And hateful; nothing wants but that thy shape
Like his and color serpentine may show
Thy inward fraud."

"May my soul follow soon."

"My good blade carves the casques of men."

"Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds."

"He spoke, and Rustum answer'd not, but hurl'd
His spear; down from the shoulder, down it came,
As on some partridge in the corn a hawk,
That long has tower'd in the airy clouds,
Drops like a plummet; Sohrab saw it come,
And sprang aside, quick as a flash; the spear
Hiss'd, and went quivering down into the sand,
Which it sent flying wide;-then Sohrab threw
In turn, and full struck Rustum's shield; sharp rang,
The iron plates rang sharp, but turn'd the spear.
And Rustum seized his club, which none but he
Could wield."

"Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite."

"Our brows are wreathed with spindrift and the weed is on our knees;
Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.
From reef and rock and skerry- over headland, ness, and voe—
The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go.
Through the endless summer evenings, on the lineless, level floors;
Through the yelling Channel tempest where the syren hoots and

roars

By day the dipping house-fly and by night the rocket's trail

As the sheep that graze behind us so we know them where they

hail."

NOTES TO CHAPTER XII.

NOTE 1

The following excerpts from Professor Corson's Primer of English Verse make valuable reading in connection with this chapter:

"The fusing or combining principle or agency of a verse is Melody. We often meet with verses which scan, as we say, all right, and yet we feel that they have no vitality as verses. This may, in most cases, be attributed to their purely mechanical or cold-blooded structure. They are not the product of feeling, which attracts to itself (a great fact) vocal elements, either vowels or consonants which chime well together and in accord with the feeling; but they are rather the product of literary skill. The writer had no song, no music in his soul, when he composed them, and he should have written, if he wrote at all, in straightforward prose.

The principles of melodious combinations of vowels have not yet been established, so far as it is within the possibilities of analysis to establish them. But any one with an ear for vowel melody can appreciate it in a verse, and could distinguish, perhaps, nice degrees of melody in a number of given verses ranging through a pretty wide gamut. But he would not be able to set forth all the secrets of the different degrees of melody. Yet these secrets are, to some extent, within the possibilities of analysis. A noting of all the more musical lines of Shakespeare, and of a few other great authors, might lead to valuable results toward determining more of the secrets of melodious fusion than we yet possess.

"The melody secured through consonants is, to the general ear, more readily appreciable, and can be more easily explained. Much of it has a physiological basis, depending on the greater or less ease with which the organs of speech articulate certain successive consonants. Though the vowel element plays the main part in the melody and harmony of verse (representing, as it does, the more spiritual element of form), all the great English poets from Chaucer to Tennyson make frequent and effective use of alliteration. It veins the entire surface of English poetry to an extent but little suspected by most readers. . . .

-

"... The greater part of them may have been written unconsciously by the poet; his sense of melody often attracting words with the same initial or internal consonants, as well as assonantal words, all contributing, more or less, to the general melody and harmony. Feeling, according to its character, weaves its own vowel and conso`nantal texture.

...