And
rather than that he spoke would I say that he cooingly and flutingly
sang of his experience. The wonders of this morning's wind and sun and
clouds were expressed in a flow of words so right and sentences so
perfectly balanced that they would have seemed pedantic had they not
been clearly as spontaneous as the wordless notes of a bird in song.
The frail, sweet voice rose and fell, lingered, quickened, in all
manner of trills and roulades. That he himself could not hear it,
seemed to me the greatest loss his deafness inflicted on him. One
would have expected this disability to mar the music; but it didn't;
save that now and again a note would come out metallic and over-
shrill, the tones were under good control. The whole manner and method
had certainly a strong element of oddness; but no one incapable of
condemning as unmanly the song of a lark would have called it
affected. I had met young men of whose enunciation Swinburne's now
reminded me. In them the thing had always irritated me very much; and
I now became sure that it had been derived from people who had derived
it in old Balliol days from Swinburne himself. One of the points
familiar to me in such enunciation was the habit of stressing
extremely, and lackadaisically dwelling on, some particular syllable.
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