r obscurities by straining the
meaning of these unfortunate words.

_Rhymes_ Finally, the rhymes where they are peculiar are often
repellent, and so far from adding charm to the verse that they
appear as obstacles. This must not blind one from recognizing
that Gerard Hopkins, where he is simple and straightforward
in his rhyme is a master of it--there are many instances,--but
when he indulges in freaks, his childishness is incredible. His
intention in such places is that the verses should be recited
as running on without pause, and the rhyme occurring in their
midst should be like a phonetic accident, merely satisfying the
prescribed form. But his phonetic rhymes are often indefensible
on his own principle. The rhyme to _communion_ in 'The Bugler'
is hideous, and the suspicion that the poet thought it ingenious is
appalling: _eternal_, in 'The Eurydice', does not correspond with
_burn all_, and in 'Felix Randal' _and some_ and _handsome_ is as
truly an eye-rhyme as the _love_ and _prove_ which he despised and
abjured; and it is more distressing, because the old-fashioned
conventional eye-rhymes are accepted as such without speech-
adaptation, and to many ears are a pleasant relief from the fixed
jingle of the perfect rhyme; whereas his false ear-rhymes ask to
have their slight but indispensable differences obliterated in the
reading, and thus they expose their defect, which is of a disagree-
able and vulgar or even comic quality. He did not escape full
criticism and ample ridicule for such things in his lifetime; and
in '83 he wrote: 'Some of my rhymes I regret, but they are past
changing, grubs in amber: there are only a few of these; others
are unassailable; some others again there are which malignity
may munch at but the Muses love.'

_Euphony and emphasis_ Now these are bad faults, and, as I said, a
reader, if he is to get any enjoyment from the author's genius,
must be somewhat tolerant of them; and they have a real relation
to the means whereby the very forcible and original effects of
beauty are produced. There is nothing stranger in these poems than
the mixture of passages of extreme delicacy and exquisite diction
with passages where, in a jungle of rough root-words, emphasis
seems to oust euphony; and both these qualities, emphasis and
euphony, appear in their extreme forms. It was an idiosyncrasy
of this student's mind to push everything to its logical extreme,
and take pleasure in a paradoxical result; as