What time with thee indeed I reach the strand
Of the pale wave which knows thee what thou art,
And drink it in the hollow of thy hand?


And as a keen eye for the imagery attendant on a word is essential
to all writing, whether prose or poetry, that attempts the heart,
so languor of the visual faculty can work disaster even in the calm
periods of philosophic expatiation. "It cannot be doubted," says
one whose daily meditations enrich The People's Post-Bag, "that
Fear is, to a great extent, the mother of Cruelty." Alas, by the
introduction of that brief proviso, conceived in a spirit of
admirably cautious self-defence, the writer has unwittingly given
himself to the horns of a dilemma whose ferocity nothing can
mitigate. These tempered and conditional truths are not in nature,
which decrees, with uncompromising dogmatism, that either a woman
is one's mother, or she is not. The writer probably meant merely
that "fear is one of the causes of cruelty," and had he used a
colourless abstract word the platitude might pass unchallenged.
But a vague desire for the emphasis and glamour of literature
having brought in the word "mother," has yet failed to set the
sluggish imagination to work, and a word so glowing with picture
and vivid with sentiment is damped and dulled by the thumb-mark of
besotted usage to mean no more than "cause" or "occasion." Only
for the poet, perhaps, are words live winged things, flashing with
colour and laden with scent; yet one poor spark of imagination
might save them from this sad descent to sterility and darkness.

Of no less import is the power of melody which chooses, rejects,
and orders words for the satisfaction that a cunningly varied