Grammatical Puzzle.
Let the rich, great and noble, banquet in the festal halls,And pass the hours away, as the most thoughtless revel;Then seek the poor man’s dreary home, whose very dingy wallsProclaim full well to all how low his rank and level.
Let the rich, great and noble, banquet in the festal halls,And pass the hours away, as the most thoughtless revel;Then seek the poor man’s dreary home, whose very dingy wallsProclaim full well to all how low his rank and level.
Let the rich, great and noble, banquet in the festal halls,And pass the hours away, as the most thoughtless revel;Then seek the poor man’s dreary home, whose very dingy wallsProclaim full well to all how low his rank and level.
Let the rich, great and noble, banquet in the festal halls,
And pass the hours away, as the most thoughtless revel;
Then seek the poor man’s dreary home, whose very dingy walls
Proclaim full well to all how low his rank and level.
Take away one letter from a word in the above stanza and substitute another, leaving the word so metamorphosed still a word of the English language; and, by that change, totally alter the syntactical construction of the whole sentence, changing the moods and tenses of verbs, turning verbs into nouns, nouns into adjectives, and adjectives into adverbs, etc., and so make the entire stanza bear quite a different meaning from that which it has as it stands above.