ttacked this exquisite love-lyric was
so businesslike, so matter of fact, so utterly out of key, that we who
listened saw not the lover hastening to his beloved, but a real-estate
agent "out to buy" a farm. The "gray sea, the long black land, the
yellow half-moon large and low, the startled little waves that creep in
fiery ringlets from their sleep, the pushing prow of the boat quenched
in the slushy sand, the warm, sea-scented beach, and the three fields"
all assumed a merely commercial value. They were interesting exactly as
would be a catalogue of properties in a deed of real estate. If you are
not a very _intense_ member of a Browning society you will, I think,
enjoy the test of tone-color involved in reading this poem from the
contrasted standpoints of the business man and the lover. Of course, in
the first instance you must stop where I, in desperation, stopped the
student on the words, "a farm appears." For I defy any one to read the
last two lines in a gray, matter-of-fact tone.

As was the case in our consideration of inflection, so in this study of
tone-color there is an embarrassment of rich material for the exercise
of this element. Lanier's _Sunrise_ and _Corn_; Browning's prologue to
_The Two Poets of Croisic_, with a vivid contrast of color in each
verse; Swinburne's almost every line; Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson--but why enumerate? All the colorists among
the poets will reward your search of a text for the development of
_timbre_.

For a final brief study of the three elements we aim to acquire, with
especial emphasis in thought upon the last one, let us take this
prologue to _The Two Poets of Croisic_, with its color-contrast in each
verse:

Such a starved bank of moss
Till that May morn,
Blue ran the flash across:
Violets were born!

Sky--what a scowl of cloud
Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud:
Splendid, a star!

World--how it walled about
Life with disgrace
Till God's own smile came out:
That was thy face

The vocal treatment of the first two verses will be very much alike. The
voice starts in minor key, a gray monotone, in harmony with the absence
of color in the bare bank of dull moss. The inflection of the word
"starved" must emphasize the grayness. It must be a dull push of the
tone on the first syllable, with little, if any, lift above the level of
the low pitch on which the whole line i