sensible how very little this grand principle is regarded in forming our earliest habits of elocution; and therefore how hopeless are all efforts to correct what is wrong in these habits, without a just knowledge of emphasis.

What then is emphasis? Without staying to assign reasons why I am dissatisfied with definitions heretofore given, by respectable writers, the following is offered as more complete, in my opinion, than others which I have seen. Emphasis is a distinctive utterance of words, which are especially significant, with such a degree and kind of stress, as conveys their meaning in the best manner.

According to this definition, I would include the whole subject under emphatic stress and emphatic inflection.

19] SECT. 1.-Emphatic Stress.

This consists chiefly in the loudness of the note, but includes also the time in which important words are uttered. Both these are commonly united; but the latter, since it will require some notice when I come to speak of rate and emphatic pause, may be dismissed here, as to its separate consideration, with a single remark. A good reader or speaker, when he utters a word on which the meaning of a sentence is suspended, spontaneously dwells on that word, or gives it more time, according to the intensity of its meaning. The significance and weight which he thus attaches to words that are important, is a very different thing from the abrupt and jerking emphasis, which is often witnessed in a bad delivery. Bearing this fact in mind, we may proceed to consider, more particularly, why emphatic stress belongs to some words, and not to others.

The indefinite description which was formerly given of emphasis, as a stress laid on one or more words to distinguish them from others,' was attended with a correspondent confusion in practice. In some books of elocution, more than half the words were printed in Italics, and regarded as equally emphatical. To remedy so great a fault, Walker proposed his threefold classification of words, as pronounced with emphatic force, accented force, or unaccented force.' The first he considered as belonging to words of peculiar significance; the second to nouns, verbs, &c.—the third to connectives and particles. But these distinctions, after all, leave a very plain subject in obscurity; for it is enough to say that emphatic force is to be governed solely by sense; and that the word, to whatever part of speech it belongs, which renders but little aid in forming the sense, should be passed over with but little stress of voice. It is indeed generally true that a subordinate rank belongs to particles, and to all those words which merely express some circumstance of a thought. And when a word of this sort is raised above its relative importance, by an undue stress in pronunciation, we perceive a violence done to other words of more significance; and we hardly admit even the metrical accent of poetry to be any excuse for so obvious an offence against propriety. One example of this sort we have in the common manner of reading this couplet of WattsShow pity, Lord, O Lord, forgive, Let a repenting rebel live.

་

This stress upon a, in the second line, shows the absence of just discrimination in the reader.*

* I beg leave to ask here, if it shows want of taste in the reader, in such a case, to sacrifice the sense to the syllabic accent of po

But to show that emphasis attaches itself not to the part of speech, but to the meaning of a word, let one of these little words become important in sense, and then it demands a correspondent stress of voice.

We have an example in the two following sentences, ending with the particle so. In one it is used incidentally, and is barely to be spoken distinctly. In the other it is the chief word, and must be spoken forcibly. "And Saul said unto Michal, why hast the deceived me so?"" Then said the high priest, are these things só?"

In

Another example may show how a change of stress on a particle changes the entire sense of a sentence. the narrative of Paul's voyage from Troas to Jerusalem, it is said, "Paul had determined to sail by Ephesus.' This sentence, with a moderate stress on Ephesus, implies that the Apostle meant to stop there; just as a common phrase, "the ship is going to Holland by Liverpool," --implies that she will touch at the latter place.

Now what was the fact in the case of Paul? The

etry, why is it, that, in the sister art of music, as applied to metrical psalmody, no practical distinction is made between accent and emphasis? On the contrary, a choir is so trained in psalmody, as not to reflect whether one word has more meaning than another, but whether its relative position requires strong or feeble utterance. Thus a full volume of sound is poured out on a preposition, for example, just because it happens to coincide with a musical note at the beginning of a bar. Illustrations of this are so many that they may be taken almost at random. In the Hymn beginning,

God of the morning, at whose voice,

the musical accent, in many tunes would recur four times during the line, and two of these on prepositions. But is there no philosophy and rhetoric in music? Is the spirit of this divine art to be rigidly tied down by mere rules of harmony and metrical stress? Music is but an elegant and charming species of elocution. And, important as accent is, it should never contravene the laws of sentiment in the former, more than in the latter art.

historian says, "he hasted to be at Jerusalem, on the day of Pentecost." Therefore he could not afford the time

it would require to visit his dear friends, the Ephesian church, and he chose to pursue his voyage without seeing them. But can the words be made to express this sense? Perfectly;-and that with only an increase of stress on one particle. "Paul had determined to sail by Ephesus.”

Another example shows us a succession of small words raised to importance, by becoming peculiarly significant. In Shakspeare's Merchant of Venice, Bassanio bad received a ring from his wife, with the strongest protestation that it should never part from his finger; but, in a moment of generous gratitude for the preservation of his friend's life, he forgot this promise, and gave the ring to the officer to whose kind interposition he ascribed that deliverance. With great mortification at the act, he afterwards made the following apology to his wife, an unemphatic pronunciation of which leaves it scarcely intelligible; whlie distinct emphasis on a few small words gives it precision and vivacity, thus:

If you did know To whom I gave the ring,
If you did know FOR whom I gave the ring,
And would conceive for WHAT I gave the ring,
And how UNWILLINGLY I left the ring,

When nought would be accepted BUT the ring,
You would abate the strength of your displeasure.

In the case that follows too, we see how the meaning of a sentence often depends on the manner in which we utter one short word. "One of the servants of the high priest, (being his kinsman whose ear Peter cut off,) saith,

did not I see thee in the garden with him?" Now if we utter this, as most readers do, with a stress on kinsman, and a short pause after it, we make the sentence affirm that the man whose ear Peter cut off was kinsman to the high priest, which was not the fact. But a stress upon his, makes this servant, kinsman to another man, who received the wound.

One more example may suffice, on this point. When our Saviour said to Peter ;-" Lovest thou me more than these?"--he probably referred to the confident professions of his own attachment to Christ, which the apostle had presumed would remain unshaken, though that of his brethren should fail; but which professions he had wofully violated in the hour of trial. If this is the spirit of the question, it is a tender but severe admonition, which would be expressed by emphasis, thus; "Lovest thou me, more than these ?" that is, more than thy brethren love me?

But respectable interpreters have supposed the question to refer to Peter's affection merely, and to contrast two objects of that affection; and this would change the emphasis thus ;—" Lovest thou me more than these ?”— that is, more than thou lovest thy brethren?

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These illustrations show that the principle of emphatic stress is perfectly simple; and that it falls on a particular word, not chiefly because that word belongs to one or another class in grammar, but because, in the present case, it is important in sense. To designate the words that are thus important, by the action of the voice in emphasis, is just what the etymological import of this term implies, namely, to show, to point out, to make manifest. But farther to elucidate a subject, that has been treat