ABSTRACT
The same thing is seen on a large scale in songs and in poetry generally. It is specially manifest in the countless refrains, which, analysed in the light of reason, hardly mean anything at all, but which by their mere sound produce an impression, and either call up an emotion, or reinforce the emotion called up by the content of the song. t When we have such great difficulty in understanding the old religious hymns of various countries that philologists have often given them up as insoluble, the reason, as Meillet insists, does not entirely lie in the archaic forms of the language, in which they are written, and our ignorance of many of the allusiom they contain: 'We must also take into consideration that the authors have not as a rule, striven to be easily intelligible, but on the contrary have found a pleasure in being obscure and eccentric, and in expressing themselves in a non-natural manner. If the gatha's of the Avesta are more than unintelligible, it is because the writers wilfully made them so, the arrangements of words are unnatural. . . . . The Vedic hymns and the song of the Arval Brethren of Rome are also intentionally obscure . . . The poets must follow custom and usage, and allow their language to get very remote from th~ speech of every day they are addressing a public which is trained to understand this special dialect, and is besides content to admire what it does not entirely understand'. 2!
