"A bolt that overhung our home

Suspended till my curse was given,
Soon as it pass'd my lips of foam,

Peal'd in the blood-red heaven."

CXXII. Meeting of Opposites in one subject deserves a special name. S., " Macbeth," act i., scene iii., Ist and 2d Witch, 19th speech, 20th, and 21st. We have an approach to this at the close of scene v.:

"Look like the innocent flower,

But be the serpent under it."

Burns puts mice and men as dissimilars:

"The best laid schemes o' mice and men
Gang aft agley."

CHAPTER XVIII.

FIGURES OF RHETORIC.

PART THIRTEENTH.

Sound Resembling Sense, or Onomatopy.—Interrogation, or Erotesis. Question and Answer - Responsion or Responding.-Exclamation, Ecphonesis, or Epiphonema.—

Nomination.

CXXIII. OUR next rhetorical figure is Onomatopy, where the sound resembles the sense. There is a resemblance between the sound of the language you employ and the sounds or movements made by the object described; or else the words you use produce by their sound or their cadence a state of feeling similar to the feeling produced by the thing spoken of. Fine examples abound in the sonorous Greek of Homer, him through whose deep soul the ocean billows resounded. When Goldsmith speaks of

"The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door,"

the tick, tick, tick carries us back to the old years and deathless memories. Byron tells us of Lake Leman, how on the ear

"Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,

And chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more."

Southey's "Lodore Waterfall" is a very talented imitation of the confusion, the intermingling, the evervarying din and brawl and unresting varieties of a cascade:

"How does the water Come down at Lodore?

Rising and leaping,

Sinking and creeping;

Dividing and gliding and sliding,

And falling and brawling and sprawling,

And bubbling and troubling and doubling,

And rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing,
And flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping,
And thumping and plumping and bumping and jumping,
And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing,
All at once and all o'er, with a mighty uproar—
And this way the water comes down at Lodore."

The following by Dyer, in his heavy pastoral, "The Fleece," now hopelessly forgotten, represents well a tower's sudden, quick fall, the dash of some parts in the gurly dark river flowing at the base; the rough sound of other parts of the edifice on the mountain-side; the crash of the main bulk:

"The pilgrim oft

At dead of night 'mid his oraison hears,
Aghast, the voice of time-disparted towers,
Tumbling all precipitate down-dash'd,

Rattling around, loud thundering to the moon."

Pope writes ably of the importance of making the verse picture the theme:

"Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,

And the smooth strain 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."

Campbell lets us hear the cry of the wolf:

66

"There comes across the waves' tumultuous roar
The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore."

Let us surrender ourselves to Coleridge's mystery, in Christabel!"

"The night is chill, the forests bare;

Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?
There is not wind enough in the air
To move away the ringlet curl
From the lovely lady's cheek—
There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,

On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."

Spenser, to him next. He, the first who rolled forth our English melody:

"The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade,
Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet;
Th' angelical, soft, trembling voices made
To the instruments divine respondence meet.
The waters' fall, with difference discreet,
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call;
The gentle warbling wind low answered to all."

In his "Penseroso," Milton is exquisite:

"Oft on a plot of rising ground
I hear the far-off curfew sound,
Over some wide-water'd shore
Swinging slow with sullen roar."

Or contrast, in "Paradise Lost," the opening of Heaven's gates with the opening of Hell's gates. First, Hell's gates open:

"On a sudden open fly,

With impetuous recoil and jarring sounds,
The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder."

Listen then to Heaven's gates opening:

"Heaven opens wide

Her ever-during gates, harmonious sounds,
On golden hinges turning."

P. L., ii., 1021, 1022, 948, 950; vi., 546. In the last, mark the r's.

In Shakespeare the representative power of u, a, and

o are admirable:

い

"And thou, all-shaking Thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world."

Tennyson's famous line is familiar to you:

"The league-long roller thundering on the reef."

It is, however, but a small victory to represent in sounds the voices and movements of things outwardthe dash on the beach; the rustling of forest leaves; the melodies of the birds; the roar of the Afric lion; but the victory is great when the varying states of the mind are represented. Observe how beautifully the reluctant parting from life is expressed in the last line of the subjoined, from Gray's "Elegy," which utters every body's feeling:

"For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned;
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?"

Who so torpid as not to feel how different the state of the mind represented by Bishop Corbett in his pleasant "Farewell to the Fairies," when he is telling what services they rendered in their time, now gone forever, to the housewives:

"At morning and at evening both,

You merry were and glad,
So little care of sleep or sloth
These pretty ladies had.