and ship before the apparently superfluous pronouns, really adds as much to the thought as if he had written a separate sentence, calling our attention to these objects. In reading his words, we think first of the objects as existing, and then of what they did:

The wind it blew, and the ship it flew

The skipper, he louted to the king.

-The Earl o' Quarterdeck: George MacDonald.

Even actual repetition, in certain cases the worst form of pleonasm, is not always a defect. Who does not perceive how much of the impressiveness of these lines depends on the repetition of the word red?

The light that seemed a twinkling star
Now blazed portentous, fierce and far,
Dark-red the heaven above it glowed,
Dark-red the sea beneath it flowed,
Red rose the rocks on ocean's brim,
In blood-red light her islets swim.

-Lord of the Isles 5: Scott.

Or who could wish to have the second of these lines omitted?

They glide like phantoms into the wide hall;
Like phantoms, to the iron porch they glide,

-Eve of St. Agnes: Keats.

But when the words producing the pleonasms merely fill out the form of the phraseology, and help the metre without amplifying or aiding the thought, then, like verbosity in prose, they weaken the passage in which they occur. Notice how the same thought is repeated in different lines of the following:

The spacious firmanent on high

With all the blue ethereal sky,

And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim.

-Hymn: Addison.

Notice too the italicized words, evidently placed in this merely to make out the line and rhyme:

Here he lives in state and bounty,

Lord of Burleigh, fair and free;

Not a lord in all the country

Is so great a lord as he.

-Lord of Burleigh: Tennyson.

To condemn fair and free for the reason given, may seem hypercritical; but probably all will recognize that at least in the two following stanzas, there are many words used for no higher purpose than the one just mentioned. If so, what is it that they represent ?—the poet's thought ?-Why not rather his lack of thought?

Across a deep swift river, and the door

Shut fast against him, did he see therein,

Where through with trembling steps he passed before,

That happy life above all lives to win,

And round about him the sharp grass and thin

Covered low mounds that here and there arose,

For to his head his forerunners were close.

Then with changed voice he moaned, and to his feet
Slowly he gat, and 'twixt the tree-boles gray

He 'gan to go, and tender words and sweet

Were in his ears, the promise of a day

When he should cast all troublous thoughts away.

He stopped and turned his face unto the trees

To hearken to the moaning of the breeze.

-The Man Who Never Laughed Again: W. Morris.

The transposition of words, called too inversion and hyperbaton, is also, like the insertion of them, a development of a tendency not only legitimate but essential to

the highest excellence, wherever the thought can be thus more strikingly represented; as, for instance, in the following, where the phraseology pictures the influence described in the order of its course from its beginning to its end:

From harmony, from heavenly harmony
This universal frame began:

From harmony to harmony

Through all the compass of the notes it ran,

The diapason closing full in man.

-Song for St. Cecilia's Day: Dryden.

Or in the opening lines of the Paradise Lost, in which Milton, following the examples of Homer and Virgil and Dante in their great epics, transposes the clauses of the introductory sentence so that the thought which is to form the theme of the poem, and to which he wishes to attract the reader's first attention, shall be read first:

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe, .

Sing heavenly Muse.

-Paradise Lost, I.

Keats opens his Hyperion in a similar way:

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star,
Sat gray-eyed Saturn, quiet as a stone.

And we all can recall the arrangement for analogous reasons of Shakespeare's description of the death of Cæsar.

Then burst his mighty heart.

-Julius Cæsar, iii., 2.

But transposition of the words for the sake of the thoughts in them is one thing, and for the sake of the sounds in them, is another. In the latter case, it may

become a very serious fault, rendering the phraseology not only obscure but artificial. The following, for in stance, is obscure:

"But reason thus: If we sank low,

If the lost garden we forego,

Each in his day, nor ever know

But in our poet-souls its face;
Yet we may rise until we reach
A height untold of in its speech-
A lesson that it could not teach

Learn in this darker dwelling-place.'
"And reason on; 'We take the spoil;
Loss made us poets and the soil
Taught us great patience in our toil,
And life is kin to God through death.
Christ was not one with us but so,
And if bereft of Him we go;
Dearer the heavenly mansions grow,

His home, to man that wandereth.'"

-Scholar and Carpenter: Jean Ingelow.

The following, illustrating the same fault, is a good example of the artificial, stilted, heroic couplet, which was the fashion in the times when it was written. It was against this style that Wordsworth was arguing when he asserted that poetic language from Pope's Translation of Homer to Darwin's Temple of Nature could "claim to be poetic for no better reason than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose."

For while he mischief means to all mankind,
Himself alone the ill effects does find;
And so like witches justly suffers shame,
Whose harmless malice is so much the same.
False are his words, affected is his wit;

So often he does aim, so seldom hit;

To every face he cringes while he speaks,

But when the back is turned the head he breaks.

-Essay upon Satire: Dryden.

The chief characteristic of this style is evidently a determination to produce rhyme and a sort of metrical balance in the lines, no matter how unnatural the effects may seem, as compared with the language of prose. What is remarkable, too, is that, with all this preponderating devotion to the supposed requirements of form, there appears to be, both in Pope and Dryden, a marked absence of any desire to produce the finer qualities of sound, like those of assonance, phonetic syzygy and gradation, which make poetry really musical. With all their transpositions, they never succeeded in producing the purely melodious effects of Tennyson and Longfellow.

By the alteration of words is meant either the changing of their conventional accents, or the adding to them or taking from them of letters or syllables. In some cases, these changes may augment the effect of the thought. On account of their real or supposed resemblance to archaic, dialectic, or colloquial uses of language, and for the very reason that the words are not in the highest sense elegant, they emphasize the fact that the style is natural for the circumstances; and the very quaintness of it, like the rustic air and dress of an otherwise pretty maiden, adds to its attractiveness. Thus Thomas Chatterton, in Bristowe Tragedy, in connection with many changes in spelling which need not be noted here, alters parts, crows, spectacle, and noble; e. g.:

The bloody axe his body fair

Into four parties cut ;

And every part and eke his head,

Upon a pole was put.

One part did rot on Kynwulft hill,
One on the minster tower,

And one from off the castle gate,

The crowen did devour ;