PLACE NAMES

Evening Star, Issue 18052, 21 August 1922, Page 7

PLACE NAMES

■■■■4THEIR ROMANCES AND MAGIC. (Written by “Ci’eano" for the ‘Evening Star.’) Two proposals have been made recently touching names to which New Zealanders are accustomed. One is that the word Australasia should bo dropped, since it merges New Zealand to Australia; and the other that the Tasman Sea should bo known as the Anzao Sea. Both the names that it is proposed to change are fine names in sound and sense. “ Australasia ” Is spacious, and its length of vowels and consonants goes well in a lino of verso. It suggests sea-girt lands, and its association with the sea is finely used' in Tcnnyton’s ‘By iho Long Wash of Australasian Seas,’ and in William Watson's And round the streaming of whose raiment shines, The iris of the Australasian spray - .

Whether or not’ we banish it from New Zealand, the world will probably retain It as a convenient, designation. “Tasman” haa not the same sweep, but Us sounds is attractive and its origin romantic. One might borrow from Tennyson and write “Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, in the sundering Tasman Sea.” The word “Anzac” has a clipped sound compared with. “Tasman”; but it would serve a poet’s purpose. It has memories very different from those of the older word, and its adoption would form another link between tfc.« magnificent failure by Homer’s “wins dark seas” and within sight of the ruins of Troy, and the younger lands and * wider stormier waters of the South. Starting with the stimulus of these two words, it is pleasant and easy to let the imagination travel in quest of the romance and magic of place names. All of us who have any imagination must have been fired from time to time by the sound and associations of names. Sometimes they make music, sounding, like trumpets or symphonies ; sometimes they come in blazes of color; sometimes they arc rich in exotic scents; sometimes they lead in pageants of history. Sound alone may en trance. Professor Gilbert Murray, recalling that De Quincey describes the emotion roused in him in his dreams by the tremendous name “ Tiberius Claudius Nero, Consul Bomus,” remembers “in the bush !n Australia a child who heard for the first time that there was somebody called ‘The Marquis of Lome’ and felt that the name was almost too beautiful for a human being.” This was not snobbishness, but “merely a natural love of the romantic.” The same child—surely it was Gilbert Murray himself—“ was qnite intoxicated by the name Arizona,” which “sounded like heaven,” but "preferred to forget that a zrsat river in Arizona was called Billy Williams.” Exactly ; Arizona is romantic and Billy Wiliams is not. If a name is to catch the heart it must have something strange and poetic about it. Think of Rio Grande and Eldorado. Samareand and Babylon, Ophir and Palmyra. Is there a more stately place nam« than Rio Grande del Norte? Not even a surfeit of “Lasca ” can wear away the charm of the shorter version. Yet it means only Great River of the North. And what a wonderful word is Eldorado!

Superb amid majestic hills The domes of Eldorado burn.

These two lines open before you the whole vista of ‘ Westward Ho! ’

The strongest appeal is made by the combination, sometimes subtly interwoven, of sound and association. Looking at the map you may sweep “past shores where the names are the names of the victoriesof England ” ; hut all these words have not the same magic. Nelson %von resplendentfame at Aboukir Bay as well as at Trafalgar; bnt Trafalgar is the more resounding word. Waterloo was an earth-shaking battle; bnt the nam-e—to meat any rate—has not the symphonic sound, the subtle suggestion, of a string of Wellington’s Peninsular battles. Talavera, Salamanca, Bnsaco, Albuera, Puentes de Onoro, Vittoria—what names indeed! The names of many of the world’s great battles, such ns •Marathon,; Sal amis, ' Thennopyhe are clarion-tongued. But the shades of tone and perfume in names are infinite. England’s names range from the drum-roll of Northumberland to the tang of Mendip find the soft beauty of Evesham. Consider, says Mr Hilaire Belloc in an engaging comment on this matter, “that at orte junction on a railway where a mournful desolation of stagnant waters and treeless-,-stone-walled fields threatens you with experience and awe, a melancholy porter is told off to put his head into your carriage and to ohant like Charon. ‘ Change here for Ashton under the Wood, Moreton on ! jhe Marsh, Bmrrton on the Water, and Stow in the Wold.’ ” Such names are like apples that have mellowed long among the straw in the loft. And of the town of Charmes in France, Mr Belloc says that the wonderful thing about such a name is that it. Lands down the dead. “ For some 'dead man gave it a keen name proceeding from hia own immediate delight, and made general what had been a private pleasure, and, so to speak, bequeathed a poem to his town.” Spain is superbly rich in poem names. Consider Arragon and Castile, Andalusia and Seville, Navarre and Toledo, Valencia and Estremadura. Some are like symphonic poems ; others set tho pride and pomp of history marching before your eyes. I remember how as a boy when I "heard a piece of music played called ‘The Rose of Castile,’ the beauty of the name filled me with wonder.

Then there is the East; whence come lames with association not only of strange lights and colors and-scents, but of “the drums and tramplings of a thousand conquests.”

Quinquiremes of Nineveh, from distant Ophi?, Sowing home to haven in sunny Palestine. With a cargo of ivory . And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, ccdarwood, and sweet white . wine.

And how Milton revels in Eastern names: City of old or modern fame, the seat Of mightiest Empire, from the destined - wal la Of Camhalu, scat of Cathaian Can, And Sama-rchand by Orus, Terair’s throne, To Paquin, of Sinaean Kings, and thence To Agra and Labor of Great Mogul, Down to the golden Chersonese, or where The Persian in Ecbatan sat, or since In Hisaahan, or where the Russian TsaF In Mosco, or the Sultan in Bizance, Turcheatan-bom. Nineveh and Babylon are tremendous names —“ the mystery and magnificence, the myriad beauty and the sins.” They suggest, however, -power rather than beauty. The lovely name of Palmyra is cast over what was once a proud city, templed and colonnaded, that guarded a trade route between Syria and Mesopotamia. Now all that is left of all this pride and beauty are a few columns in the desert, Living and dead, the pames of Asia called to us—Delhi, the capital of Moguls, ringed with the ruins of Shnpifee; Peshawur, that guards the Indian entrance to the Khyber Pass, whence through the ages conqueror after conqueror has descended upon, India; Kashmir, the vale of beauty; and all those redolent names of Central Asia, The almond-groves of Samarcand, Bokhara, where red lilies blow, Orus, by whose yellow sand The grave white-turbaned merchants ‘ And there is Damascus, that “rose-red city half as dd at) time,” which “had been an emporium when Tyre was young, and was still a mighty city centuries after Tyre had become a shadow.” Its beautiful name is one of the doors of history. In ail this there is comfort for those who cannot travel. They have the map, books, and imagination. After considering ’* the old question what one would take to a desert island, Mr W. P. James, author of that fascinating little book ‘The Lure of the Map,’ decided that iie should choose an atlas. An atlas is a garden that contains flowers and perfumes of all lands, and is haunted, by the music of history.