the formal side becomes prominent. Let us take Landor’s description[49] of a lioness suckling her young— On perceiving the countryman, she drew up her feet gently, and squared her mouth, and rounded her eyes, slumberous with content; and they looked, he said, like sea-grottoes, obscurely green, interminably deep, at once awakening fear and stilling and suppressing it. After ‘obscurely green’ would it be possible (quite apart from sense) to have ‘deeply dark’ or ‘impenetrably gloomy’? Why, apart from sense, can so few of the syllables be changed in vowel sound, in emphasis, in duration or otherwise, without disaster to the total effect? As with all such questions about sensory form and its effects, only an incomplete answer can be given. The expectancy caused by what has gone before, a thing which must be thought of as a very complex tide of neural settings, lowering the threshold for some kinds of stimuli and raising it for others, and the character of the stimulus which does actually come, both play their part. Even the most highly organised lyrical or ‘polyphonic’ prose raises as it advances only a very ambiguous expectation. Until the final words of the passage, there are always a great number of different sequences which would equally well fit in, which would satisfy the expectancy so far as that is merely due to _habit_, to the routine of _sensory stimulation_. What is expected in fact is not this sound or that sound, not even this kind of sound or that kind of sound, but some one of a certain thousand kinds of sounds. It is much more a negative thing than a positive. As in the case of many social conventions it is easier to say what disqualifies than to say what is required. Into this very indeterminate expectancy the new element comes with its own range of possible effects. There is, of course, no such thing as _the_ effect of a word or a sound. There is no one effect which belongs to it. Words have no intrinsic literary characters. None are either ugly or beautiful, intrinsically displeasing or delightful. Every word has instead a range of possible effects, varying with the conditions into which it is received. All that we can say as to the sorting out of words, whether into the ‘combed’ and ‘slippery’, the ‘shaggy’ and ‘rumpled’ as with Dante, or in any other manner, is that some, through long use, have narrower ranges than others and require more extraordinary conditions if they are to change their ‘character’. What effect the word has is a compromise between some one of its possible effects and the special conditions into which it comes. Thus in Shakespeare hardly any word ever looks odd until we consider it; whereas even in Keats the ‘cold mushrooms’ in the _Satyrs’ Song_ give the mind a shock of astonishment, an astonishment which is full of delight, but none the less is a shock.