“Here lay Duncan, His silver skin laced with his golden blood; And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in Nature For ruin’s wasteful entrance. There the murderers, Steep’d in the colors of their trade, their daggers Unmannerly breech’d with gore.”
Are monosyllables passionless? Listen, again, to the “Thane of Cawdor”:
“That is a step On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap, For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires, Let not light see my black and deep desires. The eye winks at the hand. Yet, let that be Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”
Two dissyllables only among fifty-two words!
Bishop Hall, in one of his most powerful satires, speaking of the vanity of “adding house to house and field to field,” has these beautiful lines:
“Fond fool! six feet shall serve for all thy store, And he that cares for most shall find no more.”
“What harmonious monosyllables!” exclaims the critic, Gifford; yet they may be paralleled by others in the same writer, equally musical and equally expressive.
Was Milton tame? He knew when to use polysyllables of “learned length and thundering sound”; but he knew also when to produce the grandest effects by the small words despised by inferior artists. Read his account of the journey of the fallen angels:
“Through many a dark and dreary vale They passed, and many a region dolorous, O’er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp, _Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death_,-- A universe of death.”
In what other language shall we find in the same number of words a more vivid picture of desolation than this? Hear, again, the lost archangel calling upon hell to receive its new possessor:
“One who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be--all but less than He Whom thunder hath made greater? Here, at least, We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built Here for His envy; will not drive us hence; Here we may reign secure, and, in my choice, To reign is worth ambition, though in hell; Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”
Did Collins lack lyric beauty, grace, or power? Read the following exquisite lines, in which the truth of the sentiment that “poetry is the short-hand of thought” is strikingly illustrated: