DOUBLING OF CONSONANTS. 22li 



to burst into the sublimest of all adorations "Our Father who art iu 

 heaven ! " As lovers of the arts, we may feel in the passing away of a 

 system with which sculpture, the purest of them all, was associated, a 

 more than momentary regret. Tliat consummation is not without its 

 pain, which a poet of our day has touched with the finest lines of his 



art. 



"The altar flames with flowers no more ; 



But on the fallen and crumbled shrines 



The mournful moon-beam palely shines." — Brook's Sclp. Anth., p. 41. 



Yet our pain must ever, with the glories of the Messiah's reign, by 

 which heathen arts and gods were superseded, mingle also the reflection 

 that in those arts we have lost much that was repulsive. The heart of 

 the sculptor never acted with his arm. It was the pure work of the brain. 

 God is living — all these were dead — and he that lingered too long as he 

 gazed on their beauty, found that dissolution is succeeded by decay. 

 In them the shades of death-like expressiveness is cast on forms so 

 vital, so full of marble breathfulness, as to mingle the mysterious and 

 seemingly severed principles of life and death, as they unite in no other 

 being of the fancy, save the spectral woman who diced with death for the 

 ship's crew and won the ancient mariner, 



" The night-mare Life in Death was she 

 Who thicks nftn's blood with' cold. " 



ON THE DOUBLING OF CONSONANTS IN ENGLISH. 



Real reduplications of consonants, that is, reduplications of their 

 sound, are in most languages comparatively rare. It cannot be too 

 clearly understood that in words like pitted, stabbing, massy, etc. there 

 is no repetition of the sound of t, b, or s. Between the word pitted, 

 that is, marked by the small-pox, and pitied, as being an object of pity, 

 there is no diflerence of pronunciation, so far as the sound of the t is 

 concerned. 



There are, however, a few cases of true reduplication. In com- 

 pound and derived words, when the former part of the whole word ends, 

 and the latter part begins with the same consonant sound, tliat sound is 

 repeated distinctly. Thus : 



K is doubled to the ear in book-case. 

 L is doubled in civil-list, soulless, solely., vilely. 

 JY is doubled in innate, unnatural, oneness. 

 T is doubled in state-tax., seaport-town. 

 Even here one of the doubled sounds is sometimes dropped by 

 those who would yet be thought correct speakers. 

 29 



