ram-
matical colourless or toneless element; and so when he had got
into the habit of doing without these relative pronouns--though
he must, I suppose, have supplied them in his thought,--he
abuses the licence beyond precedent, as when he writes (no. _17_)
'O Hero savest!' for 'O Hero that savest!'.

_Identical Forms_ Another example of this (from the 5th stanza of
no. _23_) will discover another cause of obscurity; the line

'Squander the hell-rook ranks sally to molest him'

means 'Scatter the ranks that sally to molest him':
but since the words _squander_ and _sally_ occupy similar positions
in the two sections of the verse, and are enforced by a similar
accentuation, the second verb deprived of its pronoun will follow
the first and appear as an imperative; and there is nothing to
prevent its being so taken but the contradiction that it makes in
the meaning; whereas the grammar should expose and enforce
the meaning, not have to be determined by the meaning. More-
over, there is no way of enunciating this line which will avoid the
confusion; because if, knowing that _sally_ should not have
the same intonation as _squander_, the reader mitigates the accent,
and in doing so lessens or obliterates the caesural pause which
exposes its accent, then _ranks_ becomes a genitive and _sally_
a substantive.

Here, then, is another source of the poet's obscurity; that in
aiming at condensation he neglects the need that there is for care
in the placing of words that are grammatically ambiguous.
English swarms with words that have one identical form for
substantive, adjective, and verb; and such a word should never
be so placed as to allow of any doubt as to what part of speech
it is used for; because such ambiguity or momentary uncertainty
destroys the force of the sentence. Now our author not only
neglects this essential propriety but he would seem even to
welcome and seek artistic effect in the consequent confusion;
and he will sometimes so arrange such words that a reader
looking for a verb may find that he has two or three ambiguous
monosyllables from which to select, and must be in doubt as to
which promises best to give any meaning that he can welcome;
and then, after his choice is made, he may be left
with some homeless monosyllable still on his hands. (_Homophones_)
Nor is our author apparently sensitive to the irrelevant
suggestions that our numerous homophones cause; and he
will provoke further ambiguities o