190 PROSERPINA. 



rhyme with two words entirely musical and peace- 

 ful — words, indeed, which I always reserve for final 

 resource in passages which I want to be soothing 

 as well as pretty, — ' fair,' and ' air ' ; while, in its 

 orthography, it is identical with the word repre- 

 senting the bodily sign of tenderest passion, and 

 grouped with a multitude of others,* in which the 

 mere insertion of a consonant makes such wide 

 difference of sentiment as between ' dear ' and 

 ' drear,' or ' pear ' and ' spear.' The Greek root, 

 on the other hand, has persisted in retaining some 

 vestige of its excellent dissonance, even where it 

 has parted with the last vestige of the idea it was 

 meant to convey ; and when Burns did his best, — 

 and his best was above most men's, — to gather 

 pleasant liquid and labial syllabling round gentle 

 meaning, in 



" Bonnie lassie, will ye go, 

 Will ye go, will ye go, 

 Bonnie lassie, will ye go, 

 To the birks of Aberfeldy ? " 



Tie certainly had little thought that the delicately 

 crisp final k, in birk, was the remnant of a mag- 

 nificent Greek effort to express the rending of the 



* It is one of the three cadences, (the others being of the words 

 rhyming to ' mind ' and ' way,') used by Sir Philip Sidney in his 

 marvellous paraphrase of the 55th Psalm. 



