66

(3) 'On, on he went, gone one moment and in sight the next, on up to the flaming cannon themselves.

See page 298.

(4) Over the dead and wounded, over breastworks and fallen foe, over cannon belching forth their fire of death, he led the way to victory."

66

(5) Go to Hayti, and stand on those graves of the best soldiers France ever had, what they think of the negro's sword."

See page 293.

fifty thousand and ask them See page 308.

waves—she answers He is gone

(6) "At the turn of the road a hand by holding high in her loving arms the child. and forever.

See page 326.

(7) If, then, you ask, why I have come back, to let you work your will on this poor body which I esteem but as the rags that cover it,-enough reply for you, it is because I am a Roman! As such, here in your very capital I defy

you!"

(8) "Go! bring your threatened tortures! (9) "If you could touch those bronze lips with the fire of speech, what do you think they would say? said ' yield' in their life.”

They never See page 13.

(10) "The new South is enamoured of her new work. As she stands upright, full statured and equal, among the people of the earth, breathing the keen air and looking out upon the expanded horizon, she understands that her emancipation came because, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, her honest purpose was crossed and her brave armies were beaten. See page 314.

(11) "New England Civilization said to Slavery, 'thus far and no farther forever,' and when in its insolence it overstepped the bounds, seized it by the throat and throttled it to the death!" See page 5.

PREPARATION FOR READING AND SPEAKING

Thorough preparation for reading and speaking means primarily care for the body. To stand the stress and strain of our complex life, to achieve much of anything in business, scholarship, statesmanship, law, or medicine, a man must be first of all a healthy animal. He must have steady nerves, "lungs like bull's hide", a heart like clockwork, and a stomach that will grind its grist even when he is doing his hardest task. Especially true is this of the person who undertakes such exhaustive work as swaying large audiences, of the lawyer, the preacher, the statesman, the orator. Leaders in these professions have as a rule been men of powerful physiques, of exuberant vitality, and of phenomenal endurance; such were Lincoln, Webster, Gladstone, Beecher, and Brooks. The young man, then, who wills to influence men and women in public speech, must live much in the open air, play baseball and tennis, row and swim, play golf and ride a bicycle, and work and sleep in rooms that have a good supply of sunshine and oxygen. Seldom in college does a man with shaky nerves or poor digestion win a prize in declamation or debate; much more often the winner is an athlete. In the world at large, other things equal, influence and following are won by the speaker physically strong.

Rest. A person when he speaks should be well rested. Many a preacher has learned from an experience dearly bought that the exhaustive work of sermon-writing on Saturday evening is poor preparation for effective speaking on Sunday. After a sleep crowded with dreams of appearing before an audience sans neck-tie, collar, coat, or manuscript, a preacher is in no mental or physical condition to speak persuasively. Try to be in earnest as he may, his voice tells the tale of depleted nervous force. The preacher should. have his sermon ready for delivery by Saturday noon.

Saturday afternoon he should “loaf", read Mr. Dooley, g sailing or fishing, do something that will recreate his min and rest his nerves. What is true of the preacher is also tru of the lawyer, lecturer, and public speaker of every sort School boys and girls should not rehearse their declamation: the day on which they speak; neither should they engage in fatiguing work or play. College students who have learned their declamations thoroughly sometimes fail at the last moment because of being physically tired. A game of baseball or too long a walk has so wearied them that their memories play them false. "An English lecturer relates that at the beginning of his career he was forced to walk from one town to another in filling his engagements. He found that if he lectured on the evening following a long walk his memory invariably proved treacherous. It was only after repeated failures that he came to realize the connection between weariness and loss of memory.

Practice. A sprinter or oarsman would not think of entering a race without previous training. Every day he practices that he may get the right start and may not lose his wind at the critical moment. He can thus make a supreme exertion without injury. Public speaking is as exacting as a race. To speak effectively two or three hours a man must train. The reason, Hullah says, why the voices of many clergymen fail is not that they use their voices too much; they use them too little, but they do not use them regularly. They enter a two-mile race on Sunday without having run a lap on the six preceding days. To keep the vocal organs at their best and to gain control of the agents of expression, one should use the voice in reading, speaking, or singing an hour or so every day.

* Koopman's " Mastery of Books," p. 84. American Book Co., Boston. "Sir Henry Holland has recorded that, after an exhausting exploration of a mine in Germany, he found himself no longer able to speak German with his guide; and not until he had taken rest and refreshment did he recover his memory of the language."-Ibid.

PREPARATION FOR READING AND SPEAKING xcvii

Thorough preparation also means mental and spiritual training. The messenger must have a message. There must be behind the voice an intellect to think and a heart to feel. However clear the articulation, graceful and apt the gestures, pure and resonant the quality, the expression is ineffective unless vitalized by intellect and inspired by emotion. 'People go to schools of oratory with nothing within themselves which is clamorous for expression; not even a very still small voice' urging them to express something. Many who desire, or think they do, to be readers, as there are many who desire, or think they do, to be artists, evidently believe that if they be trained in technique they can be readers or artists.

"But suppose some one is impelled to cultivate vocal power because of his desire to express what he has sympathetically and lovingly assimilated, of a work of genius: if he endeavor to give an honest expression, so far as in him lies, to what he feels, and avoid trying to express what he does not feel, and if he persevere in his endeavor, with always a coefficient ideal back of his reading, he may—in time he certainly will -become a better reader than another could if he should set out, with malice prepense, to be an elocutionist, and, with that malicious purpose, were to employ a mere voicetrainer who should teach him to perpetrate all sorts of vocal extravagances, to make faces, and to gesticulate when reading what does not need any gesture. Such an one, after passing out of the hands of his trainer, is most likely to go forth and afflict the public with his performances, which will be wholly a pitiable exhibition of himself.

66 Some of the best readers I have ever known have been of the former class, who honestly voiced what they had sympathetically assimilated, and did not strain after effect. But it seems when one sets out to read, with no interior capital, he or she, especially she, is apt to run into all kinds of extravagances which disgust people of culture and taste.

The voice, instead of being the organ of the soul, is the betrayer of soullessness.

"Without the interior life that can respond to the indefinite life of a work of genius (indefinite, that is, to the intellect), a trained voice can do nothing of itself in the way of real interpretation.

How can a person acquire this power to lay hold of the thought and respond to the emotion of a literary masterpiece? In general, by a thorough mental and spiritual training; toughening the mental fiber by wrestling with problems in Euclid, strengthening the memory and the power of expression by conning the Latin grammar and translating Cæsar's" Commentaries ", sharpening the powers of observation and discrimination by research with the testtube, the scalpel, and the microscope, developing a love for the true and an appreciation of the noble and the masterful by "brooding for the thousandth time" over Homer, Dante, Shakespere, and Milton.

In particular cases, to get firm hold of the thought, the reader should know his lines thoroughly; he should be certain of the meaning of the words and the construction of the sentences-an absurdly simple suggestion, yet not so obvious that it is always observed. Boys and girls sometimes speak

"Archons of Athens, topped by the tettix, see, I return! who haven't guessed the meaning of tettix ; or

"Unhand me, gentlemen.

By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him who let's me!"

who have given an entirely wrong meaning to "lets". They read "I prevented the dawning of the morning" entirely ignorant of the fact that "prevented" means not

* Corson : "The Voice and Spiritual Education," p. 116. The Macmillan Company, New York.