Be it granted me to behold you again, in dying.
Hills of home, and to hear again the call.
Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying—
And hear no more at all.
But for energy and masculine emotion the unknown author takes the palm. The verse is like a great wave of the sea, rolling in to the mother shore, gathering impetus and grandeur as it goes, culminating in the note of vision and scattering itself triumphantly in the splendour of that word "Hebrides."
It is a beautiful illustration of the magic of a word used in its perfect setting. It gathers up the emotion of the theme into one chord of fulfilment and flings open the casement of the mind to far horizons. It is not the only instance in which the name has been used with extraordinary effect. Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" has many beautiful lines, but the peculiar glory of the poem dwells in the couplet in which, searching for parallels for the song of the Highland girl that fills "the vale profound," he hears in imagination the cuckoo's call
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Wordsworth, like Homer and Milton, and all who touch the sublime in poetry, had the power of transmuting a proper name to a strange and significant beauty. The most memorable example, perhaps, is in the closing lines of the poem to Dorothy Wordsworth:
But on old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
"Lapland" is an intrinsically beautiful word, but it is its setting in this case that makes it shine, pure and austere, like a star in the heavens of poetry. And the miraculous word need not be intrinsically beautiful. Darien is not, yet it is that word in which perhaps the greatest of all sonnets finds its breathless, astonished close:
Silent—upon a peak—in Dar—ien.
And the truth is that the magic of words is not in the words themselves, but in the distinction, delicacy, surprise of their use. Take the great line which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Antony—
I am dying, Egypt, dying.