iii. Next in order to analogy in the formation of language or even prior
to it comes the principle of onomatopea, which is itself a kind of analogy
or similarity of sound and meaning. In by far the greater number of words
it has become disguised and has disappeared; but in no stage of language is
it entirely lost. It belongs chiefly to early language, in which words
were few; and its influence grew less and less as time went on. To the ear
which had a sense of harmony it became a barbarism which disturbed the flow
and equilibrium of discourse; it was an excrescence which had to be cut
out, a survival which needed to be got rid of, because it was out of
keeping with the rest. It remained for the most part only as a formative
principle, which used words and letters not as crude imitations of other
natural sounds, but as symbols of ideas which were naturally associated
with them. It received in another way a new character; it affected not so
much single words, as larger portions of human speech. It regulated the
juxtaposition of sounds and the cadence of sentences. It was the music,
not of song, but of speech, in prose as well as verse. The old onomatopea
of primitive language was refined into an onomatopea of a higher kind, in
which it is no longer true to say that a particular sound corresponds to a
motion or action of man or beast or movement of nature, but that in all the
higher uses of language the sound is the echo of the sense, especially in
poetry, in which beauty and expressiveness are given to human thoughts by
the harmonious composition of the words, syllables, letters, accents,
quantities, rhythms, rhymes, varieties and contrasts of all sorts. The
poet with his 'Break, break, break' or his e pasin nekuessi
kataphthimenoisin anassein or his 'longius ex altoque sinum trahit,' can
produce a far finer music than any crude imitations of things or actions in
sound, although a letter or two having this imitative power may be a lesser
element of beauty in such passages. The same subtle sensibility, which
adapts the word to the thing, adapts the sentence or cadence to the general
meaning or spirit of the passage. This is the higher onomatopea which has