Inheritest the lion's Den;
Or hast been summoned to the Deep,
Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep
An incommunicable sleep.

These lines, supposed to be uttered by "a poor widow at Penrith,"
afford a fair illustration of what Wordsworth calls "the language
really spoken by men," with "metre superadded." "What other
distinction from prose," he asks, "would we have?" We may answer
that we would have what he has actually given us, viz., an
appropriate and attractive music, lying both in the rhythm and in the
actual sound of the words used,--a music whose complexity may be
indicated here by drawing out some of its elements in detail, at the
risk of appearing pedantic and technical. We observe, then (_a_),
that the general movement of the lines is unusually slow. They
contain a very large proportion of strong accents and long vowels,
to suit the tone of deep and despairing sorrow. In six places only
out of twenty-eight is the accent weak where it might be expected to
be strong (in the second syllables, namely, of the Iambic foot), and
in each of these cases the omission of a possible accent throws
greater weight on the next succeeding accent--on the accents, that
is to say, contained in the words inhuman, desert, lion, summoned,
deep, and sleep, (_b_) The first four lines contain subtle
alliterations of the letters d, h, m, and th. In this connexion it
should be remembered that when consonants are thus repeated at the
beginning of syllables, those syllables need not be at the beginning
of words; and further, that repetitions scarcely more numerous than
chance alone would have occasioned, may be so placed by the poet as
to produce a strongly-felt effect. If any one doubts the
effectiveness of the unobvious alliterations here insisted on, let