But we dwell too long with disease; the writer nourished on thought, whose nerves are braced and his loins girt to struggle with a real meaning, is not subject to these tympanies.  He feels no idolatrous dread of repetition when the theme requires, it, and is urged by no necessity of concealing real identity under a show of change.  Nevertheless he, too, is hedged about by conditions that compel him, now and again, to resort to what seems a synonym.  The chief of these is the indispensable law of euphony, which governs the sequence not only of words, but also of phrases.  In proportion as a phrase is memorable, the words that compose it become mutually adhesive, losing for a time something of their individual scope, bringing with them, if they be torn away too quickly, some cumbrous fragments of their recent association.  That he may avoid this, a sensitive writer is often put to his shifts, and extorts, if he be fortunate, a triumph from the accident of his encumbrance.  By a slight stress laid on the difference of usage the unshapeliness may be done away with, and a new grace found where none was sought.  Addison and Landor accuse Milton, with reason, of too great a fondness for the pun, yet surely there is something to please the mind, as well as the ear, in the description of the heavenly judgment,

That brought into this world a world of woe.

Where words are not fitted with a single hard definition, rigidly observed, all repetition is a kind of delicate punning, bringing slight differences of application into clear relief.  The practice has its dangers for the weak-minded lover of ornament, yet even so it may be preferable to the flat stupidity of one identical intention for a word or phrase in twenty several contexts.  For the law of incessant change is not so much a counsel of perfection to be held up before the apprentice, as a fundamental condition of all writing whatsoever; if the change be not ordered by art it will order itself in default of art.  The same statement can never be repeated even in the same form of words, and it is not the old question that is propounded at the third time of asking.  Repetition, that is to say, is the strongest generator of emphasis known to language.  Take the exquisite repetitions in these few lines:-

Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.

Here the tenderness of affection returns again to the loved name, and the grief of the mourner repeats the word “dead.”  But this monotony of sorrow is the least part of the effect, which lies rather in the prominence given by either repetition to the most moving circumstance of all—­the youthfulness of the dead poet.  The attention of the discursive intellect, impatient of reiteration, is concentrated on the idea which these repeated and exhausted words throw into relief.  Rhetoric