ted. Every great poet writes, at times, more
significantly than he knows.

In the creation of every great work of genius, a large degree of
unconscious might enters; and this unconscious might the reader with the
requisite degree of spiritual susceptibility may respond to. This is an
activity of the highest order on the part of a reader. Melody, harmony,
and every mode of form, are, to some extent, the product of an
unconscious might. Deep feeling attracts to itself such elements of
language as serve best to conduct it. Assonance, especially, is a
manifestation of it. Paradise Lost abounds with the assonance which the
dominant feeling of the poet induced.

When Hamlet is subjecting his friends to a searching examination in
regard to the appearance of the ghost of his father, he asks 'His beard
was grisly?' and then adds, 'no.' (The word is followed by a period, in
the Folio.) What a varied expressiveness this little word 'no' admits
of! When Macbeth says to his wife, when they are considering the murder
of the king, 'If we should fail?' she replies 'We fail?' Though the
interrogative is used in the Folio, the period would, perhaps, be the
better pointing. However that be, the reading of 'we fail' involves much
consideration; and so does the reading of thousands of single words in
Shakespeare's Plays.

But, after all, it is not upon inflections and emphases and other vocal
functions which pertain more especially to the interpretation of the
articulating thought, that the true reader chiefly depends. The most
important thing with him is the choral atmosphere in which a
spiritualized composition requires to be presented. And it is in this
respect that the art of reading particularly corresponds with the sister
art of painting. The artist in form and color bathes his landscape in
'the light that never was, on sea or land,' or, if not that, in some
light or other, some 'tender light which heaven to gaudy day denies,'
and which serves to reveal the feeling which he aimed to express through
the landscape. The landscape itself corresponds in painting with the
articulating thought in reading; but the spiritual attitude of the
artist is exhibited through the light in which the landscape is bathed.
And so the spiritual attitude of the reader is exhibited through his
intonation, which corresponds with atmosphere in painting. A susceptible
reader will, on the first reading of a poem or an impassioned prose
composition, be more or