‘Are Japanese Aprils always as lovely as this?’ asked the man in the light tweed suit of two others in immaculate flannels with crimson sashes round their waists and puggarees folded in cunning plaits round their broad Terai hats.

Explore, next, what (though critics have strangely neglected it) to my mind stands the first, or almost the first, secret of beautiful writing in English, whether in prose or in verse; I mean that inter-play of vowel-sounds in which no language can match us.  We have so many vowel sounds indeed, and so few vowels to express them, that the foreigner, mistaking our modesty, complains against God’s plenty.  We alone, for example, sound by a natural vowel that noble I, which other nations can only compass by diphthongs.  Let us consider that vowel for a moment or two and mark how it leads off the dance of the Graces, its sisters:—­

     Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the
     Lord is risen upon thee.

Mark how expressively it drops to the solemn vowel ‘O,’ and anon how expressively it reasserts itself to express rearisen delight:—­

Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.  For behold the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people:  but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.  And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and Kings to the brightness of thy rising.

Take another passage in which the first lift of this I vowel yields to its graver sisters as though the sound sank into the very heart of the sense.

  I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, ’Father,
  I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more
  worthy to be called thy son.’

‘And am no more worthy to be called thy son.’  Mark the deep O’s.  ’For this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’  ’O my son, my son Absalom’—­observe the I and O how they interchime, until the O of sorrow tolls the lighter note down:—­

     O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!  Would God I had died
     for thee, O Absolom, my son, my son!

Or take this lyric, by admission one of the loveliest written in this present age, and mark here too how the vowels play and ring and chime and toll.

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
    And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
  Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
    And live alone in the bee-loud glade.[2]
  And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping
       slow,
    Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket
       sings;
  There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
    And evening full of the linnet’s wings. 
  I will arise and go now, for always night and day
    I hear lake-water lapping, with low sounds by the shore;
  While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
    I hear it in the deep heart’s core.