SECTION XXXIX.

LONG QUANTITY.

Long quantity is an indefinite prolongation in the utterance of syllables and words.

To cultivate long quantity practice the following words in the Effusive and Expulsive Forms, in Pure Tone and Orotund, with different degrees of Force, Stress and Pitch.

Long quantity is employed in the expression of pathos, solemnity, sublimity, grandeur, reverence, adoration, shouting, calling, commanding, and various other emotions and passions. The degree of prolongation will depend on the degree of emotion, the size of the audience, and other circumstances. Two or three illustrations will suffice, as quantity has been already illustrated under the attributes.

EXAMPLES: I. PATHOS.

Moderately Long Quantity, Slow-Movement, Low Pitch, Median Stress, Subdued Force, Pure Tone, Effusive Form.

[From "Missing."—Anon.]

Far away, through all the autumn,

In a lonely, lonely glade,

In a dreary desolation

That the battle-storm has made,

With the rust upon his musket,
In the eve and in the morn,
In the rank gloom of the fern leaves,
Lies her noble, brave first-born.

II. SUBLIMITY AND GRANDEUR.

Very Long Quantity, Slow Movement, Low Pitch, Median Stress, Ener getic Force, Orotund, Effusive Form.

[From "Bells."-Poe.]

Hear the tolling of the bells, iron bells!

What a world of solemn thought their monody compels !
In the silence of the night, how we shiver with affright

At the melancholy menace of their tone!

For every sound that floats from the rust within their throats

Is a groan.

And the people-ah, the people; they that dwell up in the steeple

All alone,

And who tolling, tolling, tolling, in that muffled monotone,

Feel a glory in so rolling on the human heart a stone

They are neither man nor woman, they are neither brute nor human,

They are ghouls:

And their king it is who tolls; and he rolls, rolls, rolls, rolls

A pæan from the bells! and his merry bosom swells

With the pean of the bells! and he dances and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time, in a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the pean of the bells, of the bells:

Keeping time, time, time, in a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tolling of the bells,

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells-
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

III. SHOUTING AND CALLING.

Very Long Quantity, Slow Movement, High Pitch, Thorough Stress passioned Force, Orotund, Effusive Form.

[From Satan's Call to his Legions.--Milton.]

Princes! Potentates!

Warriors! The flower of heaven! once yours, now lost,
If such astonishment as this can seize eternal spirits,
Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!

SECTION XL.

SHORT QUANTITY.

Short quantity is the instantaneous utterance of syllables and words.

To obtain control of this element of delivery practice the following words in the Explosive Form, with Pure Tone and Orotund, and various degrees of Force, Stress and Pitch.

SHORT QUANTITY-EXERCISE.

Short quantity is employed in the expression of joy, gladness, excited command, anger, scorn, contempt, revenge, hate, and other malignant passions.

EXAMPLES: I. ANGER AND THREATENING.

Short Quantity, Rapid Movement, High Pitch, Radical and Final Stress, Impassioned Force, Aspirate-Pectoral Orotund, Explosive Form. [From Death to Satan.-Milton.]

Back to thy punishment,

False fugitive! and to thy speed add wings;

Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue

Thy lingering, or, with one stroke of this dart,

Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before.

II. EXCITED COMMAND.

Short Quantity, Rapid Movement, High Pitch, Final Stress, Impassioned Force, Pure Tone, Explosive Form.

[From "Life-Boat.”—Anon.]

Quick! man the life-boat! See yon bark,
That drives before the blast!

There's a rock ahead, the fog is dark,

And the storm comes thick and fast.

Can human power, in such an hour,
Avert the doom that's o'er her?

Her mainmast's gone, but she still drives on
To the fatal reef before her.

The life-boat! Man the life-bout!

"The power and beauty of vocal expression' are necessarily dependent, to a great extent, on the command which a reader or speaker possesses over the element of 'quantity.' Poetry and eloquence derive their audible character from this source more than from any other. The music of verse is sacrificed unless the nicest regard be paid to 'quantity,' as the basis of rhythm and of meter, and, with the exception of the most exquisite strains of well-executed music, the ear receives no pleasure comparable to that arising from poetic feeling, embodied in the genuine melody of the heart, as it gushes from the expressive voice which has the power of

"Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony.'

"Milton, in his Paradise Lost, affords innumerable examples of the majestic grandeur of long 'quantities' in epic verse, and without the just observance of these, the reading of the noblest passages in that poem becomes flat and dry. The same is true, still more emphatically, of the magnificent language of the poetic passages of Scripture, in those strains of triumph and of adoration which abound in the Book of Psalms and in the prophets.

"The necessity, on the other hand, of obeying the law of 'immutable quantity,' even in the grandest and most emphatic expression, is an imperative rule of elocution. A false, bombastic swell of voice never sounds so ridiculous as when the injudicious and unskillful reader or

speaker attempts to interfere with the conditions of speech, and to prolong, under a false excitement of utterance, those sounds which nature has irrevocably determined short. We have this fault exemplified in the compound of bawling, drawling and redoubled 'wave' which some reciters contrive to crowd into the small space of the syllable vic in the conclusion of Moloch's war-speech,

"Which if not victory is yet revenge.'

"The fierce intensity of emotion, in the true utterance of this syllable, brings it on the ear with an instantaneous ictus and tingling effect, resembling that of the lash of a whip applied to the organ. A similar case occurs in Shylock's fiendish half-shriek on the word hip in his exclamation referring to Antonio:

"If I do catch him once upon the hip

I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him!'

"The sprawling, expanded utterance, which the style of rant preposterously endeavors to indulge on this word, causes the voice, as it were, to fall in pieces in the attempt, and to betray the falsity of the style which it affects.

"But it is in the chaste yet generous effect of the judicious prolongation and indulgence of 'mutable quantities' that the skill of the elocutionist, and the power and truth of expression, are peculiarly felt. It is in these that the watchful analyst can trace at once the full soul and the swelling heart, which would impel the speaker to prolong indefinitely the tones of passion, to give 'ample scope' and verge enough to overflowing feeling, but no less surely the manly force of judgment, and the disciplined good taste, which forbid any display of mere sound in the utterance of earnest emotion."