him read (1) "jungle" for "desert," (2) "maybe" for "perhaps,"
(3) "tortured" for "mangled," (4) "blown" for "thrown," and he will
become sensible of the lack of the metrical support which the
existing consonants give one another. The three last lines contain
one or two similar alliterations on which I need not dwell,
(_c_) The words _inheritest_ and _summoned_ are by no means such as
"a poor widow," even at Penrith, would employ; they are used to
intensify the imagined relation which connects the missing man with
(1) the wild beasts who surround him, and (2) the invisible Power
which leads; so that something mysterious and awful is added to his
fate. (_d_) This impression is heightened by the use of the
word _incommunicable_ in an unusual sense, "incapable of being
communicated _with_," instead of "incapable of being communicated;"
while (_e_) the expression "to keep an incommunicable sleep" for
"to lie dead," gives dignity to the occasion by carrying the mind
back along a train of literary associations of which the well-known
[Greek: atermona naegreton upnon] of Moschus may be taken as the type.

We must not, of course, suppose that Wordsworth consciously sought
these alliterations, arranged these accents, resolved to introduce
an unusual word in the last line, or hunted for a classical allusion.
But what the poet's brain does not do consciously it does
unconsciously; a selective action is going on in its recesses
simultaneously with the overt train of thought, and on the degree of
this unconscious suggestiveness the richness and melody of the
poetry will depend.

So rules can secure the attainment of these effects; and the very
same artifices which are delightful when used by one man seem
mechanical and offensive when used by another. Nor is it by any