sequence of consonants and vowels from syllable to syllable? Those
few artificial restrictions, which verse invents for itself, once
agreed on, a necessary and perilous license makes up the rest of
the code. Literature can never conform to the dictates of pure
euphony, while grammar, which has been shaped not in the interests
of prosody, but for the service of thought, bars the way with its
clumsy inalterable polysyllables and the monotonous sing-song of
its inflexions. On the other hand, among a hundred ways of saying
a thing, there are more than ninety that a care for euphony may
reasonably forbid. All who have consciously practised the art of
writing know what endless and painful vigilance is needed for the
avoidance of the unfit or untuneful phrase, how the meaning must be
tossed from expression to expression, mutilated and deceived, ere
it can find rest in words. The stupid accidental recurrence of a
single broad vowel; the cumbrous repetition of a particle; the
emphatic phrase for which no emphatic place can be found without
disorganising the structure of the period; the pert intrusion on a
solemn thought of a flight of short syllables, twittering like a
flock of sparrows; or that vicious trick of sentences whereby each,
unmindful of its position and duties, tends to imitate the
deformities of its predecessor;--these are a select few of the
difficulties that the nature of language and of man conspire to put
upon the writer. He is well served by his mind and ear if he can
win past all such traps and ambuscades, robbed of only a little of
his treasure, indemnified by the careless generosity of his
spoilers, and still singing.

Besides their chime in the ear, and the images that they put before
the mind's eye, words have, for their last and greatest possession,
a meaning. They carry messages and suggestions that, in the effect