style, we have a very different experience.  If we go along with Johnson or Gibbon, we are carried along by Burke.  Take the finest specimen of him, for example, “The Letter to a Noble Lord.”  The sentences throb with the very pulse of the writer.  As he kindles, the phrase glows and dilates, and we feel ourselves sharing in that warmth and expansion.  At last we no longer read, we seem to hear him, so livingly is the whole man in what he writes; and when the spell is over, we can scarce believe that those dull types could have held such ravishing discourse.  And yet we are told that when Burke spoke in Parliament he always emptied the house.

I know very well what the charm of mere words is.  I know very well that our nerves of sensation adapt themselves, as the wood of the violin is said to do, to certain modulations, so that we receive them with a readier sympathy at every repetition.  This is a part of the sweet charm of the classics.  We are pleased with things in Horace which we should not find especially enlivening in Mr. Tupper.  Cowper, in one of his letters, after turning a clever sentence, says, “There! if that had been written in Latin seventeen centuries ago by Mr. Flaccus, you would have thought it rather neat.”  How fully any particular rhythm gets possession of us we can convince ourselves by our dissatisfaction with any emendation made by a contemporary poet in his verses.  Posterity may think he has improved them, but we are jarred by any change in the old tune.  Even without any habitual association, we cannot help recognizing a certain power over our fancy in mere words.  In verse almost every ear is caught with the sweetness of alliteration.  I remember a line in Thomson’s “Castle of Indolence” which owes much of its fascination to three m’s, where he speaks of the Hebrid Isles

  Far placed amid the melancholy main.

I remember a passage in Prichard’s “Races of Man” which had for me all the moving quality of a poem.  It was something about the Arctic regions, and I could never read it without the same thrill.  Dr. Prichard was certainly far from being an inspired or inspiring author, yet there was something in those words, or in their collocation, that affected me as only genius can.  It was probably some dimly felt association, something like that strange power there is in certain odors, which, in themselves the most evanescent and impalpable of all impressions on the senses, have yet a wondrous magic in recalling, and making present to us, some forgotten experience.

Milton understood the secret of memory perfectly well, and his poems are full of those little pitfalls for the fancy.  Whatever you have read, whether in the classics, or in medieval romance, all is there to stir you with an emotion not always the less strong because indefinable.  Gray makes use of the same artifice, and with the same success.