“O’er all the dreary coasts
So, stretched out, huge in length, the arch-fiend lay.”
“But ended foul, in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast.”
How inflated with bulky meaning are these lines from Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”!—
“The large Achilles, on his pressed bed lolling,
From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause.”
The greatest of the Greek and Roman poets have employed those “echoes of nature,” the onomatopes, as freely as the modern. Every schoolboy is familiar with the words in which Virgil describes thunder,—“Iterum atque iterum fragor intonat ingens,” as well as with those in which he represents the rapid clatter of horses’ hoofs:
“Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,”
and the vivid words in which Homer recalls the snapping of a sword: