6.

VARIED STATEMENT.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird,—*
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown1:
Perhaps the self-same song, that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien2 corn-
The same that ofttimes hath

Charmed magic casements,3 opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn.1

1. Hasten. 2. Shore. 3. Money. (To p. 67.)

KEATS.

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1. With no centre for his thoughts and feelings but himself. 2. Lose. 3. In prose, Sir Walter Scott would have written sprang. 4. It would be. 5. Cry of pain. 6. Steward-a man of means who dispenses his wealth as being held by him in trust for God. (To p. 68.)

1. Agricultural labourer. 2. Alien-foreign. 3. Window casements in lands where magicians and magic are at home. 4. Deserted by ordinary human folk. (To p. 69.)

* This stanza is from Keats's Ode to a Nightingale; and in the poem he imagines that the nightingale never dies, but has power-through her power of song-to live for ever.

INTERJECTIONAL OR EXCLAMATORY STATEMENTS.

THESE statements are still more impassioned, and in a more excited key, than the questions of appeal. The "rising inflection" is therefore predominant; and the main point to be observed the chief difficulty to be got over-is to settle on what word this inflection ought to culminate. An indiscriminate raising of the voice becomes mere "spouting," which destroys all right feeling in the listener, and therefore defeats its own object. The reader must try never to forget that he is addressing an object; but he must and ought at the same time to forget the presence of any listeners in the room-he must have his mind full of the object he is supposed to be speaking to.

1.

2.

3.

4.

"Come back! come back!" he cried in grief,
"Across this stormy water1;

And I'll forgive your Highland chief,
My daughter!-O my daughter!"

"Oh, by thy father's head! by thine own soul!
Art thou not Rustum ? Speak! art thou not he?

Farewell, happy fields,2
Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! 3

Awake! arise! or be for ever fallen!4

5. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings! 5

Sweet pleasing sleep! of all the powers the best!

*This is said by King Lear, when his madness is beginning. He thinks that under some roof or other, one of his undutiful daughters may be found.

INTERJECTIONAL OR EXCLAMATORY STATEMENTS.

O peace of mind! repairer of decay,
Whose balms renew the limbs to labours of the day;
Care shuns thy soft approach, and sullen flies away.
DRYDEN.

Thou unassuming common place?
Of Nature, with that homely face,
And yet with something of a grace,
Which love makes for thee!

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call to-day his own!

He who secure within3 can say,

To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.

DRYDEN.

Eternal Hope! when yonder spheres9 sublime
Pealed their first notes to sound the march of time
Thy joyous youth began-but not to fade.

CAMPBELL.

Beautiful objects1o of the wild bee's love!
The wild bird joys your opening bloom to see,
And in your native woods and wilds to be;
All hearts to nature true ye strangely move;
Ye are so passing fair—so passing free.

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14.

TO THE RAINBOW.

How glorious is thy girdle cast
O'er mountain, tower, and town,
Or mirrored in the ocean vast,
A thousand fathoms down!

As fresh in yon horizon dark,
As young thy beauties seem,
As when the eagle from the ark
First sported in thy beam.

A SUMMER EVENING.

CAMPBELL.

15. How fine has the day been, how bright was the sun,
How lovely and joyful the course that he run,
Though he rose in a mist when his race he begun,
And there followed some droppings of rain!

16.

But now

His rays

the fair traveller's come to the west,
are all gold, and his beauties are best;
He paints the sky gay, as he sinks to his rest,
And foretells a bright rising again.

RAIN IN SUMMER.

How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and the heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,

How beautiful is the rain!

How it clatters along the roofs,

Like the tramp of hoofs!

How it gushes and struggles out

DR. WATTS.

From the throat of the overflowing spout!

Across the window-pane

It pours and pours;

And swift and wide,

With a muddy tide,

Like a river down the gutter roars

The rain, the welcome rain!

LONGFELLOW.

1. The loch, or arm of the sea which the two runaways were crossing. 2. Of heaven. 3. These lines are uttered by Satan, after he has been cast down. 4. This is the last line of Satan's address to the fallen angels. 5. News. 6. Anxiety produces sleeplessness. 7. Spoken to the daisy. 8. Secure-used here in the old sense of free from care. 9. The stars and planets, which were believed to make celestial music. 10. Spoken to the flowers. (To p. 70 and 71.)

CHAPTER XIV.

COMPARATIVE STATEMENTS, OR SIMILES.

THIS kind of statement might have been classed under the head of Level Affirmative. But the books on "elocution" all agree in stating that a simile ought to be read in a lower tone, and at a quicker pace, than the rest of the statement. This direction, if mechanically and unthinkingly obeyed, might produce bad reading. The right direction to be given here is, that the pupil should have a due sense of the proportion which the simile bears to the chief statement; and, as the simile can never be equal to the chief statement, that proportion must be fractional or inferior. (No. 9 is an exception to this general view.)

Before reading these sentences aloud, it would be well to have the similes explained and questioned upon.

1.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,

Her cheeks like the dawn of day,

And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.'

3.

And thy heart as pure as they;

One of God's holy messengers
Did walk with me that day.

True ease in writing

comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learnt to dance.

4. The illusion3 that great men and great events came oftener in early times than now, is partly due to historical perspective. As in a range of equi-distant columns, the farthest off look the closest ; so the conspicuous objects of the past seem more thickly clustered the more remote they are.