For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.


Here the tenderness of affection returns again to the loved name,
and the grief of the mourner repeats the word "dead." But this
monotony of sorrow is the least part of the effect, which lies
rather in the prominence given by either repetition to the most
moving circumstance of all--the youthfulness of the dead poet. The
attention of the discursive intellect, impatient of reiteration, is
concentrated on the idea which these repeated and exhausted words
throw into relief. Rhetoric is content to borrow force from
simpler methods; a good orator will often bring his hammer down, at
the end of successive periods, on the same phrase; and the
mirthless refrain of a comic song, or the catchword of a buffoon,
will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity. Some modem
writers, admiring the easy power of the device, have indulged
themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnold particularly,
in his prose essays, falls to crying his text like a hawker,


Beating it in upon our weary brains,
As tho' it were the burden of a song,


clattering upon the iron of the Philistine giant in the effort to
bring him to reason. These are the ostentatious violences of a
missionary, who would fain save his enemy alive, where a grimmer
purpose is glad to employ a more silent weapon and strike but once.
The callousness of a thick-witted auditory lays the need for coarse