LECTURE XXXIII.

Of the Refemblance between SOUND and SENSE.

AVING confidered words as they serve to convey the sense,

HAY

I come now to confider the properties of them as mere founds, or as they affect the external ear only.

vals.

Speech confifts of founds divided by a great variety of interAll ideas, therefore, either of real founds, or of intervals, and confequently all ideas analogous to thofe of founds and intervals, admit of a natural expreffion by words: that is, the words may not be mere arbitrary signs of such ideas, but bear a real refemblance to them; fo that a perfon, without being previoufly acquainted with the meaning of the words, might be made fenfible of it, by the pronunciation only: or, at least, if he could not perceive the particular ideas they denoted without an explanation, he might be affected by the found of the words only, in a manner similar to what he would have been by the sentiment.

That mere founds are capable of this kind of expreffion, is evident from the well-known power of mufic, which, according to the different fpecies of it which are employed, is capable of introducing very different flates of mind. And indeed, fince these states of mind may afterwards, by affociation, introduce particular ideas, the ideas themselves may, with propriety enough,

be faid to be excited by the power of music, that is, of mere found.

All the properties of founds, befides those which depend upon their effential differences (as confifting of particular combinations of vowels and confonants) are the greater eafe or difficulty of pronouncing them, and the longer or fhorter time which the distinct pronunciation of them requires; which properties arise from the forementioned radical differences.

Articulate founds may resemble those which are inarticulate, because the former are often copied from the latter; as the bleating of the sheep, the lowing of the ox, the roaring of the lion, the clangor of arms, &c. It is by this advantage that Pope defcribes the falling of trees, in the following paffage, which fo happily correfponds to the fenfe:

deep-echoing groan the thickets brown,

Then rustling, crackling, crafhing, thunder down.

Milton's description of the found made by the opening of hellgates is equally happy, on the fame account :

On a fudden open fly,

With impetuous recoil and jarring found,
Th' infernal doors, and on their hinges grate

Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook
Of Erebus.

A fentence conftructed fo as not to be pronounced without difficulty (which, by the way, it requires very little ingenuity to do, in our language) may very naturally represent any effort of labour and difficulty. Thus Milton hath well described Satan ftruggling through chaos:

So

So he with difficulty and labour hard,

Mov'd on, with difficulty and labour he.

Mr. Pope hath not been quite so happy in his professed imitation of Ajax's effort to throw a rock, and of the expreffion of that effort in words:

When Ajax strives fome rock's vaft weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move flow.

The latter of these lines, in particular, is by no means of more difficult pronunciation than the generality of English verses. It runs much smoother, and more easily, than his description of the gentle flow of a current:

And the fmooth ftream in fmoother numbers flows.

But this miscarriage is not owing primarily to the poet, but to the language, in which every poffible advantage was not taken of all the properties of found. This is also the case in another particular.

Nothing is more obvious than that short fyllables may aptly represent Speed, and long fyllables flowness, and that quickness and flowness are analogous to a variety of other mental conceptions, which, by this means, might likewife be expreffed by founds. But, unfortunately, the structure of most languages is fuch as to take little or no advantage of this property of found, any more than of the former. In no language, perhaps, are the fyllables of the words which express swiftness, upon the whole, shorter than those of words which exprefs flowness. In Latin, we find the penultima of velox and feftino unnaturally long, while the penultima of mora and piger is fhort, as alfo thofe of labor

and opus, which is an unfortunate circumstance for the following often-quoted line of Virgil:

Hic labor, hoc opus eft.

On this account Pope's description of Camilla's swiftness (which English word, by the way, is far from correfponding to the idea it conveys) is very unfortunate:

Not fo when swift Camilla fcours the plain,

Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and fkims along the main.

His own fuccefs might have taught him that an Alexandrine verfe is more proper to exprefs flowness and heaviness than speed:

A needlefs Alexandrine ends the fong,

Which, like a wounded fnake, drags its flow length along.

However, the univerfal admiration with which, till very lately, every body read that paragraph of the Effay on Criticifin, from which these extracts are made, fhews us how naturally we tranffer the properties of ideas upon the words which exprefs them.. Hence it is easy to imagine a resemblance of the found to the sense in almost every thing. But fince this is wholly the work of the reader's imagination, a writer doth not need to give himself trouble about it. Those who understand. the language will imagine the correspondence, and it will hardly ever be tried by the only fair teft, the ear of a foreigner (or rather the eye, for if it were read, he would be impofed upon) whether the correfpondence be any thing more than imaginary..

The paufes or intervals of found a writer hath more command: of,, as they are, in a great measure, independent of the caprice

of language. Indeed, greater advantage may be taken of this property of speech to make the found an echo to the sense, than of the mere found of the words themselves. In particular, intervals are peculiarly adapted to express a variety of affections of the mind. For it is manifeft that the breaks or refts we make in our voice, the length or fhortness of our fentences, and the like, vary with the state of the mind with which we deliver ourfelves upon any occafion. For instance, when the mind is agitated, the voice is interrupted, and a man expreffes himself in short and broken fentences. A foliloquy, alfo, is expreffed in a more disjointed manner than a converfation equally calm. In short, every train of thought, and every circumftance attending it, hath its own peculiar divifions; and therefore if the pauses of a fentence be disposed in such a manner as to correspond to the intervals of thought, the found will be a juft echo to the fenfe, and this independent of the peculiar characters of the words themselves.

By the artful disposition of the pauses of a sentence, Mr. Pope hath described the catching of a butterfly, in a manner which gives us a lively idea of the action :

I.faw and started from its vernal bower

The rifing game, and chaced from flower to flower.

It fled, I follow'd; now in hope, now pain.

It stop'd, I stop'd; it moved, I moved again.

At last it fix'd. 'Twas on what plant it pleased,
And where it fix'd the beauteous bird I feized.

DUNCIAD, B. IV. v. 425.

A full