Alliteration is a natural and obvious method of emphasis in English—and often difficult to avoid rather than to obtain. Popular sayings—wind and weather, time and tide, kith and kin, ever and aye, to have and to hold—are fond of it for its own sake. The early English, German, and Scandinavian prosodies made it a determining principle; and in the north of England it survived well into the fifteenth century; but since then it has been considered a too 'easy' kind of metrical ornament, one to be used sparingly and only for very special effects. "Apt alliteration's artful aid" is very well when it is apt and artful; but when some poets in their simplicity have gone so far as to "hunt the letter to the death," one cannot but condemn it, in John Burroughs' ironic phrase, as a "leprosy of alliteration." Most of the poets, however, have made skilful use of it, notably Tennyson and Swinburne, though the latter frequently overdid it, as in—
... rusted sheaves
Rain-rotten in rank lands.
A Ballad of Death.
Very remarkable is the combination of rime and frequent alliteration in Browning's Abt Vogler.
Analogous to alliteration and perhaps to be classed as a by-form of it is the subtle use of the same sound in unstressed parts of neighboring words, as in—
Over the dark abyss, whose boiling gulf
Tamely endured a bridge of wondrous length.
Paradise Lost, II, 1027-28.
Consonance is very similar to this latter form of alliteration. Its use is irregular and usually hidden. Note the alliteration and consonance in Milton's line, both the s's and the n's—
Through the soft silence of the list'ning night.
Assonance, like alliteration and consonance, occurs in modern verse sporadically, almost accidentally, but with great frequency in all languages. As a regular principle of verse (in place of rime) it is characteristic of Spanish and of Old French; in English its deliberate use is very rare—the best example is perhaps the song "Bright, O bright Fedalma" in George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy.
Minute analysis is tedious and unsatisfactory, often indeed misleading, but a single example will perhaps suggest some of the ways in which alliteration, consonance, and assonance are interwoven for harmonic effects that, not being altogether obvious, are felt rather than directly perceived. Similar experiments may be made by the reader with other passages. The opening stanza of Gray's Elegy, quoted on page 55, above, is remarkable for its smooth and quiet flow, symbolic of the atmosphere described by the words. How is this 'atmosphere' produced? or rather, what is there that produces in us this sense of appropriate atmosphere? In the first place, the lines are 5-stress and have the "long iambic roll," and the rimes are simple abab. Furthermore, the coincidence of prose and verse rhythms is noticeable; there are only three variations: wind in the second line, which is too important to occupy the metrically unstressed position, and o'er in the second line and the second and in the fourth, which are not quite strong enough to stand in the stressed position. By a sort of substitution or 'occult balance' the weakness of o'er is compensated by the slight overweight of wind. And the weakness of and is strengthened by the rhetorical pause after darkness. A rough approximation in semi-musical notation would give for the second line