Longfellow has recorded his feeling that
The destined walls
Of Cambalu and of Cathain Can
(from the eleventh book of ‘Paradise Lost’) is a “delicious line.” Longfellow was always singularly sensitive to the magic power of words, and not long after that entry in his journal there is this other: “I always write the name October with especial pleasure. There is a secret charm about it, not to be defined. It is full of memories, it is full of dusky splendors, it is full of glorious poetry.” And Poe was so taken with the melody of this same word that in ‘Ulalume’ he invented a proper name merely that he might have a rime for it:
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid-region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
The charm of these lines is due mainly to their modulated music, and to the contrast of the vowel sounds in Auber and Weir, just as a great part of the beauty of Landor’s exquisite lyric, ‘Rose Aylmer,’ is contained in the name itself. Is there any other reason why Mesopotamia should be a “blessed word,” save that its vowels and its consonants are so combined as to fill the ear with sweetness? Yet Mr. Lecky records Garrick’s assertion that Whitefield could pronounce Mesopotamia so as to make a congregation weep. And others have found delight in repeating a couplet of Campbell’s:
And heard across the waves’ tumultuous roar
The wolfs long howl from Oonalaska’s shore—
a delight due, I think, chiefly to the unexpected combination of open vowels and sharp consonants in the single Eskimo word, the meaning of it being unknown and wholly unimportant, and the sound of it filling the ear with an uncertain and yet awaited pleasure.
Just as Oonalaska strikes us at once as the fit title for a shore along which the lone wolf should howl, so Atchafalaya bears in its monotonous vowel a burden of melancholy, made more pitiful to us by our knowledge that it was the name of the dark water where Evangeline and Gabriel almost met in the night and then parted again for years. Charles Sumner wrote to Longfellow that Mrs. Norton considered “the scene on the Lake Atchafalaya, where the two lovers pass each other, so typical of life that she had a seal cut with that name upon it”; and shortly afterward Leopold, the King of the Belgians, speaking of ‘Evangeline,’ “asked her if she did not think the word Atchafalaya was suggestive of experience in life, and added that he was about to have it cut on a seal”—whereupon, to his astonishment, she showed him hers.
It would be difficult indeed to declare how much of the delight our ear may take in these words—Atchafalaya, Oonalaska, Mesopotamia,—is due simply to their own melody, and how much to the memories they may stir. Here we may see one reason why the past seems so much more romantic than the present. In tales of olden time even the proper names linger in our ears with an echo of “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.” Here is, in fact, an unfair advantage which dead-and-gone heroes of foreign birth have over the men of our own day and our own country. “If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating the same sentiment,” said Emerson in his essay on ‘Heroism,’ and he added that the first step of our worthiness was “to disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times.” And he asks, “Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia, and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves the names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and if we hurry a little, we may come to learn that here is best.... The Jerseys were honest ground enough for Washington to tread.”
Emerson penned these sentences in the first half of the nineteenth century, when we Americans were still fettered by the inherited shackles of colonialism. Fifty years after he wrote, it would have been hard to find an American who thought either Boston Bay or Massachusetts a paltry place. And Matthew Arnold has recorded that to him, when he was an undergraduate, Emerson was then “but a voice speaking from three thousand miles away; but so well he spoke that from that time forth Boston Bay and Concord were names invested to my ear with a sentiment akin to that which invests for me the names of Oxford and Weimar.”