Welcome, welcome, ye dark blue waves And when you fail my sight, Welcome, ye deserts and ye caves! My native land, good night!”
Two Latin words, “native” and “desert”; one French, “adieu”; the rest, English purely. The third and fourth lines paint the scene to the life; yet all the words but one are monosyllables.
How graceful, tender, thoughtful, and melancholy, are the following lines by Moore, of which the monosyllabic music is one of the principal charms:
“Those evening bells! those evening bells! How many a tale their music tells, Of youth and home, and that sweet time, When last I heard their soothing chime.
Those joyous hours have passed away; And many a heart, that then was gay, Within the tomb now darkly dwells, And hears no more those evening bells.
And so ’twill be when I am gone; That tuneful peal will still ring on, While other bards shall walk those dells, And sing your praise, sweet evening bells!”
The following brief passage from one of Landor’s poems strikingly illustrates the metrical effect of simple words of one syllable:
“She was sent forth To bring that light which never wintry blast Blows out, nor rain, nor snow extinguishes-- The light that shines from loving eyes upon Eyes that love back, till they can see no more.”
Here, out of thirty different words, but one is a long one; nearly all the rest are monosyllables.
Herbert Spencer, in an able paper on the “Philosophy of Style,” has pointed out the superior forcibleness of Saxon-English to Latin-English, and shown that it is due largely to the comparative brevity of the Saxon. If a thought gains in energy in proportion as it is expressed in fewer words, it must also gain in energy in proportion as the words in which it is expressed have fewer syllables. If surplus articulations fatigue the hearer, distract his attention, and diminish the strength of the impression made upon him, it matters not whether they consist of entire words or of parts of words. “Formerly,” says an able writer, “when armies engaged in battle, they were drawn up in one long line, fighting from flank to flank; but a great general broke up this heavy mass into several files, so that he could bend his front at will, bring any troops he chose into action, and, even after the first onslaught, change the whole order of the field; and though such a broken line might not have pleased an old soldier’s eye, as having a look of weakness about it, still it carried the day, and is everywhere now the arrangement. There will thus be an advantage, the advantage of suppleness, in having the parts of a word to a certain degree kept by themselves; this, indeed, is the way with all languages as they become more refined; and so far are monosyllabic languages from being lame and ungainly, that such are the sweetest and gracefulest, as those of Asia; and the most rough and untamed (those of North America) abound in huge unkempt words,--yardlongtailed, like fiends.”