Here incense, clarion, and echoing give a vivid colouring to the plainer hues of the homely English phrases.—Tennyson, in the Lotos-Eaters, vi., writes:—
“Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,
And dear the last embraces of our wives
And their warm tears: but all hath suffer’d change;
For surely now our household hearths are cold:
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.”
Most powerful is the introduction of the French words suffered change, inherit, strange, and trouble joy; for they give with painful force the contrast of the present state of desolation with the homely rest and happiness of the old abode, the love of the loving wives, the faithfulness of the stalwart sons.
[47.] English and other Doublets.—We have already seen how, by the presentation of the same word at two different doors—the door of Latin and the door of French—we are in possession of a considerable number of doublets. But this phenomenon is not limited to Latin and French—is not solely due to the contributions we receive from these languages. We find it also within English itself; and causes of the most different description bring about the same results. For various reasons, the English language is very rich in doublets. It possesses nearly five hundred pairs of such words. The language is all the richer for having them, as it is thereby enabled to give fuller and clearer expression to the different shades and delicate varieties of meaning in the mind.
[48.] The sources of doublets are various. But five different causes seem chiefly to have operated in producing them. They are due to differences of pronunciation; to differences in spelling; to contractions for convenience in daily speech; to differences in dialects; and to the fact that many of them come from different languages. Let us look at a few examples of each. At bottom, however, all these differences will be found to resolve themselves into differences of pronunciation. They are either differences in the pronunciation of the same word by