In these and many similar passages, which the reader will recall for himself, it would seem that the mere juxtaposition of more or less plain and ordinary words has led to such action and reaction between them as to charge each with vastly increased powers of evocation and suggestion, to which the mind of the reader, roused and stimulated, instinctively responds. Similarly, the satisfaction thus afforded to our æsthetic sense, or our emotional appreciation, is often evoked by a happy conjunction of epithet and noun placed together in a new relation, instantly recognized as adding an unsuspected beauty to an otherwise colourless word. The poets and versifiers of the eighteenth century were not particularly noteworthy for their skill or inspiration in the matter of the choice of epithet, but the genius of Blake, in this as in other respects of poetic achievement, raised him “above the age” and led him to such felicities of expression as in the last stanza of “The Piper”: And I made a _rural pen_ And I stained the water clear, where, as has been aptly remarked,[266] a commonplace epithet is strangely and, apparently discordantly, joined to an equally commonplace noun, and yet the discord, in virtue of the fact that it sets the mind and memory working to recover or recall the faint ultimate associations of the two terms, endows the phrase with infinite suggestiveness. In the same way a subtle and magic effect is often produced by inversion of epithet, when the adjective is placed after instead of before the noun, and this again is a practice or device little favoured in the eighteenth century; the supremacy of the stopped couplet and its mechanical requirements were all against it.