ese conditions may be for
signification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimes
remain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony,
metre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm wholly
extrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the medium
and in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miracle
grows as there is more or less native analogy between the medium's
movement and that of the subject-matter.

Both language and ideas involve processes in the brain. The two
processes may be wholly disparate if we regard their objects only and
forget their seat, as Athena is in no way linked to an elephant's tusk;
yet in perception all processes are contiguous and exercise a single
organism, in which they may find themselves in sympathetic or
antipathetic vibration. On this circumstance hangs that subtle congruity
between subject and vehicle which is otherwise such a mystery in
expression. If to think of Athena and to look on ivory are congruous
physiological processes, if they sustain or heighten each other, then to
represent Athena in ivory will be a happy expedient, in which the very
nature of the medium will already be helping us forward. Scent and form
go better together, for instance, in the violet or the rose than in the
hyacinth or the poppy: and being better compacted for human perception
they seem more expressive and can be linked more unequivocally with
other sources of feeling. So a given vocal sound may have more or less
analogy to the thing it is used to signify; this analogy may be obvious,
as in onomatopoeia, or subtle, as when short, sharp sounds go with
decision, or involved rhythms and vague reverberations with a floating
dream. What seems exquisite to one poet may accordingly seem vapid to
another, when the texture of experience in the two minds differs, so
that a given composition rustles through one man's fancy as a wind might
through a wood, but finds no sympathetic response in the other organism,
nerved as it may be, perhaps, to precision in thought and action.

[Sidenote: Syntax positively representative.]

The structure of language, when it passes beyond the phonetic level,
begins at once to lean upon existences and to imitate the structure of
things. We distinguish the parts of speech, for instance, in
subservience to distinctions which we make in ideas. The feeling or
quality represented by an adjective, the relation ind