ted the juxtaposition of sounds and the cadence
of sentences. It was the music, not of song, but of speech, in prose as
well as verse. The old onomatopea of primitive language was refined into
an onomatopea of a higher kind, in which it is no longer true to say
that a particular sound corresponds to a motion or action of man or
beast or movement of nature, but that in all the higher uses of language
the sound is the echo of the sense, especially in poetry, in which
beauty and expressiveness are given to human thoughts by the harmonious
composition of the words, syllables, letters, accents, quantities,
rhythms, rhymes, varieties and contrasts of all sorts. The poet with his
'Break, break, break' or his e pasin nekuessi kataphthimenoisin anassein
or his 'longius ex altoque sinum trahit,' can produce a far finer music
than any crude imitations of things or actions in sound, although a
letter or two having this imitative power may be a lesser element of
beauty in such passages. The same subtle sensibility, which adapts the
word to the thing, adapts the sentence or cadence to the general meaning
or spirit of the passage. This is the higher onomatopea which has
banished the cruder sort as unworthy to have a place in great languages
and literatures.

We can see clearly enough that letters or collocations of letters do by
various degrees of strength or weakness, length or shortness, emphasis
or pitch, become the natural expressions of the finer parts of human
feeling or thought. And not only so, but letters themselves have a
significance; as Plato observes that the letter rho accent is expressive
of motion, the letters delta and tau of binding and rest, the letter
lambda of smoothness, nu of inwardness, the letter eta of length, the
letter omicron of roundness. These were often combined so as to form
composite notions, as for example in tromos (trembling), trachus
(rugged), thrauein (crush), krouein (strike), thruptein (break), pumbein
(whirl),--in all which words we notice a parallel composition of sounds
in their English equivalents. Plato also remarks, as we remark, that the
onomatopoetic principle is far from prevailing uniformly, and further
that no explanation of language consistently corresponds with any system
of philosophy, however great may be the light which language throws
upon the nature of the mind. Both in Greek and English we find groups of
words such as string, swing, sling, spring, sting, which are parallel
to