Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/285

259 THE FIRST MORRIS 259 And their speech, when it does come, has the same laboured stiffness. They use words with a stumbling intensity, each syllable patiently articulated but all the stresses misplaced, with an effect half-childish, as of people who talk with numb lips. Not otherwise would words fall, uttered in an actual void — each a flake of dead sound, congealing as it comes, leaving no echoes or vibrations to ease the entrance of the next : — "O knights and lords, it seems but little skill To talk of well-known things past now and dead. God wot I ought to say, I have done ill, And pray you all forgiveness heartily ! Because you must be right, such great lords ; still In these sentences, as in the scene itself, there are no planes or modulations : every syllable, down to the slightest, is wrung up to one raw pitch. And this unrelaxing siege of the senses and hectic confusion of values is heightened and intensified further by the intrinsic nature of the words. For each stands for something as bright and solid as the speakers, as palpable as the lips through which they force their way. They trail no audible murmurs to loiter in the memory, and blend and melt and dwindle there ; in- stead, they stamp the page with a visible pattern that hangs instantly and unremittingly before the mind. The appeal is unsparingly optical : — "Listen, suppose your time were come to die, And you were quite alone and very weak ; Yea, laid a-dying while very mightily The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak Of river through your broad lands running well : Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak,