"... But the use of vowels as a means of producing that musical accompaniment to thought, through which a poet voices his feelings and sympathies, and makes spiritual suggestions, demands a far subtler sense of spiritual affinities. This subtler sense was possessed, in an eminent degree, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and he has most strik ingly revealed it in the First Part of his Christabel and in his Kubla Khan. In the former poem he has signally illustrated the truth of a marginal note which he wrote in a copy of Selden's Table Talk, on this sentence: Verses prove nothing but the quantity of syllables; they are not meant for logic.' 'True,' writes Coleridge, they, that is, verses, are not logic, but they are, or ought to be, the envoys and representatives of that vital passion which is the practical cement of logic, and without which, logic must remain inert.' A profound remark.

Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak-tree.'

"The form of this stanza is quite perfect. Note the suggestiveness of the abrupt vowels in the first verse, the abatement required for the proper elocution in the second verse, the prolongable vowels and subvowels of the third, and then the short vowels again in the fourth. Then note how the vowels in the last verse swell responsive to the poet's conception; and how incased they are in a strong framework of consonants."

NOTE 2.

"Immediately the mountains huge appear,

Emergent, and their broad bare backs upheave
Into the clouds; their tops ascend the sky,
So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low
Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad and deep,
Capacious bed of waters. Thither they
Hasted with glad precipitance, up-rolled,
As drops on dust conglobing, from the dry;
Part rise in crystal wall, or ridge direct,
For haste; such flight the great command impressed
On the swift floods. As armies at the call

Of trumpet--for of armies thou hast heard -
Troop to their standard, so the watery throng,
Wave rolling after wave, where way they found;

If steep, with torrent rapture, if through plain,
Soft-ebbing nor withstood them rock or hill;
But they, or underground, or circuit wide
With serpent error wandering, found their way,
And on the washy ooze deep channels wore.'

Paradise Lost, vii. 285-303.

Here the letters b and h, not inaptly, mark the firmness and resistance of the earth, while w and r depict the liquid lapse of waters.

“His blank verse abounds in open-mouthed, deep-chested a's and o's. Here is a passage in which their assonance is all the more remarkable from the absence of alliteration:

"Say, Goddess, what ensued when Raphael,

The affable Archangel, had forewarned

Adam, by dire example, to beware
Apostasy, by what befell in Heaven

To those apostates; lest the like befall
In Paradise to Adam or his race,

Charged not to touch the interdicted tree,' etc.

Paradise Lost, vii. 40.

The opening lines of Book II., the passage about Mulciber at the end of Book I., and the great symphonious period which describes the movement of the fallen angels 'to the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders,' all serve to illustrate the gorgeousness of Milton's assonance. In attempting to characterize the effect of these deep-toned vowels, it is almost necessary to borrow words from the art of colors, since what colors are to painting vowels are to verse. It would seem, after drinking in draught after draught of these intoxicating melodies, as if Milton, with unerring tact, had selected from the English language only such words as are pompous, full-sounding, capable of being wrought into the liquid architecture of articulate music. Discord, who is so busy in the lines of even mighty poets, stands apart and keeps silence here. That tenuity of sound and want of volume from which the periods of otherwise great versifiers occasionally suffer, never occurs in Milton. Like Virgil, he is unerringly and unremittingly harmonious. Music is the element in which his genius lives, just as light is the element of Pindar, or as darkness covers the 'Inferno' like a pall.". Blank Verse, JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

CHAPTER XIII.

TRANSITIONS.

THIS feature of expression might appropriately have been treated under the head of emotion. All transitions are not necessarily emotional, and yet those most significant are certainly of this character. Let us first consider a few examples not strongly marked with emotion:

"Three quarters round your partners swing!'
'Across the set!' The rafters ring,
The girls and boys have taken wing,

And have brought their roses out!
'Tis Forward six!' with rustic grace,
Ah, rarer far than Swing to place!'
Than golden clouds of old point lace,

They bring the dance about."

In the foregoing we have a picture of the country dance. We hear the figures called out by the old fiddler, and see the ever-varying changes of The Money Musk. Study the lines so as to be able to bring out the calls clearly, noting the two distinct calls at the opening, and the abrupt break in the sixth line.

The next extract presents a wife confiding to a friend the story of her courtship. Her husband is a true knight, and would perhaps resent it to have even his bravery form the subject of conversation. The story has reached its conclusion when the speaker says,

"Our elder boy has got the clear

Great brow; tho' when his brother's black
Full eyes show scorn, it"

and she is probably about to add some such statement as "It behooves one to look out," when suddenly the husband appears on the scene. With a woman's ready wit she breaks off the sentence abruptly, saying,

"Gismond here?

And have you brought my tercel back?

I was just telling Adela

How many birds it struck since May."

-

We might put into words what has passed through her mind. She was about to add something further concerning the eyes of her boy, when she hears the sound of feet along the walk. Expecting her husband, the concluding words of her sentence pass from her mind as she turns to see the visitor. It is Gismond. He must not know that she has been speaking of him. The tercel in his hand gives her the opportunity of opening the conversation, which she is quick to do, adroitly pretending that it was of that very tercel she and her friend had been conversing before his arrival.

A ten

He is a

He is

One more illustration of this kind will suffice. der, loving woman is talking to her husband. learned poet, and perhaps just a trifle of a pedant. most minute and exact in all he does, ever losing sight of the spirit in the letter. The wife is the true poet, caring nothing for the archæology and the philology and the geography, but quick to perceive the inner meaning of the poetic. He has told her a story in the past, and she is going now to tell it back to him with a new moral,

Here is the first stanza:

"What a pretty tale you told me

Once upon a time

- Said you found me somewhere (scold me!)

Was it prose or was it rhyme,

Greek or Latin ?"

When the woman comes to "somewhere" she finds she has forgotten the source of the original story. That means so much to him! It is so important! With a quizzical look she pretends to rack her brains for the missing information, knowing all the time she will not find it, and knowing equally well that it makes no difference in the story. Then with a coy expression and a look of mock humility on her face she lets fall her eyes, and meekly acknowledges her awful guilt, and stands prepared to accept her just punishment, saying, Scold me! I deserve it. I have sinned; my punishment is just.

Many students find it no easy task to make these transitions naturally. Some do not make them at all, but run the two phases of thought or emotion together. Others anticipate the coming idea, and hurry the last two or three words before the break. The proper training is to write or think out the incomplete sentence, then let it more or less quickly vanish from the mind as the new conception grows clearer, without betraying the fact that one is conscious of a coming interruption. For instance, in the second example, one must read up to and through "it" without the slightest suggestion of the coming of Gismond, and even think the conclusion of the sentence. Then hear or suddenly see Gismond just as the word “it” falls