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OF PAUSE.

They wept, and turning homeward, cried,

66

'In heaven we all shall meet,"

When in the snow the mother spied

The print of Lucy's feet.

19

In this verse, it will have to be explained to the reader that he must make a pause after snow and then allow the sense to run into the next line. Nothing is more common than this necessity; and were poetry written otherwise, it would become intolerably monotonous. This is a case in which there is only an apparent pause-a pause made by the printer, and yet no real pause in the sense.

The general rule may be laid down thus: Take care of the SENSE; and the verse will take care of itself.

But it is excellent practice and will conduce to the early formation of good taste in reading, if the teacher will make a selection of verses in which the sense overflows from one line to another. This can easily be done by making a certain mark against such verses in the ordinary Reading-book, and by having them read separately now and then as practice. The following are a few examples* which may serve for introductory practice:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

EXAMPLES OF OVERFLOWING SENSE.

No mate, no comrade, Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor;

The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door.

You yet may spy the fawn at play,
The hare upon the green;

But

the sweet face of Lucy Gray

Will never more be seen.

And all the neighbourhood could tell
His granaries were furnished well;

'Twas autumn-and sunshine arose

on the way

To the home of my fathers, that welcomed me back.

'Twas evening, and the frozen streets

Were cheerless to behold.

* It would be well if the teacher gave some information to place the pupil in the right mental attitude for reading them. See p. 22.

6.

7.

8.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

And therefore was it she was sent
Abroad to beg for bread.

We saw a woman sitting down
Upon a stone to rest.

She turned her head, and bade the child
That screamed behind be still.

And therefore to her parish she
Was begging back her way.

chill;

Sudden and swift a whistling ball
Came out of a wood, and the voice was still,
Something I heard in the darkness fall,
And for a moment my blood grew
I spake in a whisper, as he who speaks
In a room where some one is lying dead;
But he made no answer to what I said.

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"The bird and cage they both were his;
'Twas my son's bird, and neat and trim
He kept it: many voyages

The singing bird had gone with him."

For-when the morn came, dim and sad,
And chill with early showers,

Her quiet eyelids closed-sbe had
Another morn than ours!

"Is he there now?" said Mahmoud.-No;-he left
The house when I did, of my wits bereft;

And laughed me down the street, because I vowed

I'd bring the prince himself to lay him in his shroud."

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

OF PAUSE.

Now light the light, the Sultan cried aloud.
'Twas done; he took it in his hand and bow'd
Over the corpse, and looked upon the face;
Then turned and knelt beside it in the place,
And said a prayer, and from his lips, there crept
Some gentle words of pleasure, and he wept.

That was the grandest funeral
That ever passed on earth.

We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing
That skies are clear and grass is growing.

The skeletons of nations
Around that lonely man.

were

Up to the throne of God is borne
The voice of praise at early morn.

Nor will He turn His ear aside
From holy offerings at noon-tide.

A church in every grove that spreads
Its living roof above our heads.

""Tis well that such seditious words are sung
and in the Latin tongue.

Only by priests

From an impostor who usurps my throne!"

26.

27.

"I am the king

and come to claim my own

28.

And

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

The passion of his woe

Burst from him in resistless overflow

lifting high his forehead he would fling
The haughty answer back, "I am, I am the king

The Pope received them with great pomp and blare
Of bannered trumpets on Saint Peter's Square.

And through the chant a second melody
like the throbbing of a single string.

Rose

Some beloved mother, bending

O'er the infant she is tending.

Or that other pleasures be
Sweeter even than gaiety.

These, these are things that may demand
Dread memories for years.

But, lovely child! thy magic stole
At once into my inmost soul.

21

35.

They love thee well; thou art the queen
Of all their sports, in bower or green.

Pauses, then, have a two-fold use: 1°, They throw the words of each sentence into certain groups, and thus enable the ear to catch more quickly the relations of the clauses to each other; and—

2°, They enable the reader to express and the listener to sympathize with the feeling of each sentence.

3. From Southey's Ballad of Bishop Hatto. 11. This and the next three are from Mr. Browning's poem, Incident in the French Camp. 18. This and the next are from Leigh Hunt's poem, Mahmoud. 20. Said of the funeral of Moses. 22. Said of the Last Man, by T. Campbell.

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"Emphasis is the key to GooD READING."

SULLIVAN

"The laws of EMPHASIS form a study of the highest intellectual value. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any study is more directly calculated to exercise the mind in all its faculties than the investigation of the precise meaning of a standard author." BELL.

Ir we see a company of soldiers marching past, we know, or we find out, that all the soldiers are not of equal rank, and have not the same function, but that, while most of them are private soldiers, some are captains, some lieutenants, some sergeants, and some corporals. And as, in war, these higher officers form the centres and the pivots round which all movements of importance take place, so-in the case of a sentence-the emphatic words are the words round which the others cluster, on which they depend for their power and force, and without which, the other words are nothing. The emphatic words in a sentence are the words which carry the greatest weight of meaning.

The same is the case with a word. Every word of two or more syllables has one syllable which is much more important than the others-which, in fact, is the syllable to which the others attach themselves and on which they depend. This important syllable is the accented syllable. Thus remarkable, habitual, contemporary, have the accent on the second syllable. Now, what takes place with a certain syllable in a word takes place also with a certain word in a clause or sentence. There is always one word which has a certain stress or accent upon it, and which attracts and supports all the others. Even in a sentence so simple as: "This is my brother," there is a slight accent upon this, and the word this

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