only from meaning but also from sound. To make these two suggestive powers of words work together is the perfect art of Milton. Pope describes for us the relation of sound to sense in a few lines which themselves illustrate the point:—
Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows.
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse, should like the torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow:
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn and skims along the main.
When a kindergarten child, the most timid one of a group, on listening to the telling of The Bremen Town Musicians, at the description of the Donkey and the Dog coming to the Cat, sitting in the road with a face "dismal as three rainy Sundays," chuckled with humor at the word "dismal," it was not because she knew the meaning of the word or the significance of "three rainy Sundays," but because the sounds of the words and the facial expression of the story-teller conveyed the emotional effect, which she sensed.
The connection between sound and action appears in Little Spider's First Web: The Fly said, "Then I will buzz"; the Bee said, "Then I will hum"; the Cricket said, "Then I will chirp"; the Ant said, "Then I will run to and fro"; the Butterfly said, "Then I will fly"; and the Bird said, "Then I will sing." The effect is produced here because the words selected are concrete ones which visualize. Repetitive passages in the
