Plutarch tells us that the tragedian Æsopus, when he spoke the opening lines of the ‘Atreus,’ a tragedy by Attius,
I’m Lord of Argos, heir of Pelops’ crown.
As far as Helle’s sea and Ion’s main
Beat on the Isthmus,
entered so keenly into the spirit of this lofty passage that he struck dead at his feet a slave who approached too near to the person of royalty; and Professor Tyrrel notes how these verses affect us with “the weight of names great in myth-land and hero-land,” and he suggests that they produce “a vague impression of majesty,” like Milton’s
Jousted in Aspromont or Montalban,
Damasco or Morocco or Trebizond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric’s shore,
When Charlemagne with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabia.
It is a question how far the beauty of the resonant lines of the ‘Agamemnon’ of Æschylus, where the news of the fall of Troy is flashed along the chain of beacons from hilltop to promontory, is due even more to the mere sounds of the proper names than it is to the memories these mighty names evoke. Far inferior to this, and yet deriving its effect also from the sonorous roll of the lordly proper names (which had perhaps lingered in the poet’s memory ever since the travels of his childhood), is the passage in the ‘Hernani’ of Victor Hugo, when, the new emperor ordering all the conspirators to be set free who are not of noble blood, the hero steps forward hotly to declare his rank:
Puisqu’il faut être grand pour mourir, je me lève.
Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna
M’a fait duc de Segorbe et duc de Cardona,
Marquis de Mouroy, comte Albatera, vicomte
De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j’ignore le compte.
Je suis Jean d’Aragon, grand maître d’Avis, né
Dans l’exil, fils proscrit d’un père assassiné
Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille!
Lowell, after telling us that “precisely what makes the charm of poetry is what we cannot explain any more than we can describe a perfume,” proceeds to point out that it is a prosaic passage of Drayton’s ‘Polyolbion’ which gave a hint to Wordsworth, thus finely utilized in one of the later bard’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’:
Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
Took up the Lady’s voice, and laughed again;
The ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag
Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar,
And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth
A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone;
Helvellyn, far into the clear blue sky,
Carried the Lady’s voice,—old Skiddaw blew
His speaking-trumpet;—back out of the clouds
Of Glaramara southward came the voice;
And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.
Not a little of this same magic is there in many a line of Walt Whitman; especially did he rejoice to point out the beauty of Manahatta:
I was asking something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.