Ex. 19. Once in the flight of ages past There lived a man; and who was he? He suffered, but his pangs are o'er; He saw whatever thou hast seen; He was whatever thou hast been; He is what thou shalt be. Slow Time. 30. Slow Rate is used to express awe, dignity, deliberation, grief, and solemn discourse generally. Ex. 20. His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, Ex. 21. High Middle Short and Quick. High and Quick. Very High and Quick. The attribute to awe and majesty, Whereon doth sit the dread and fear of kings. Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne, Time and Tone combined. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Whose blood is fetched from fathers of war-proof! EMPHASIS. 31. Emphasis is a special stress laid upon one or more words of a sentence, in order to give them the prominence and importance which the author intends. Emphasis generally may be divided into two kinds : 1. Emphasis of Sense. 2. Emphasis of Feeling. 32. Words may be rendered prominent or emphatic in several ways, e.g. By an increased stress of the voice on the emphatic word; by varying the inflection, to denote antithesis, doubt, negation, irony, &c.; by varying the time, by prolonging or abridging the sound of the emphasised word; by altering the pitch, to express any sudden emotion, or in descending from a higher to a lower note, or vice versâ; by the use of monotone, to give expression to solemn or sublime passages; or by the pause, by which the emphatic word is separated from those parts of the sentence which precede or follow it. To determine the emphatic word of a sentence, as well as the degree and kind of emphasis to be employed, the reader must be governed wholly by the sentiment to be conveyed. The idea is sometimes entertained that emphasis consists merely in force or loudness of tone. But it should be borne in mind that the most marked emphasis may often be expressed by a whisper. Emphasis of Sense. 33. The Emphasis of Sense is a stress laid upon one or more words in a sentence to bring out its meaning more clearly. 34. The reader must be guided in the application of the Emphasis of Sense by the grammatical arrangement of the words of the sentence, and by the relation which the whole sentence bears to the context. The importance of Emphasis is such that, if it be not laid in the proper place, the meaning of the sentence will be completely altered. This will be obvious from the following examples, which have been arranged in the form of question and answer, and it will be seen that the answers vary in each case according to the position of the emphatic word. Shall you ride to town to-day? Yes; why did you think I would not? In all these Examples it will be seen that there is an opposition or antithesis implied. When the question is asked, 'Shall you ride to town to-day?' the emphatic 'to-day' is in opposition or contrast to the statement that I shall go to-morrow. Hence this kind of Emphasis is often described as antithetic, in contrast to the absolute Emphasis of Feeling, which distinguishes words without suggesting relation or contrast. Emphasis of Feeling. 35. Emphasis of feeling is a stress laid upon words, not because the sense intended to be conveyed requires it, but because it is prompted by the force of the speaker's own feelings. 36. This species of Emphasis, used under strong emotion and in vehement or impassioned discourse, is one of the chief instruments of effective speaking. It is an expression of strong feeling in a form that breaks through ordinary rules, and renders the most insignificant particle important. As it distinguishes words without any suggestion of contrast or relation, it is, as already stated, sometimes called general or absolute Emphasis, in contradistinction to antithetic Emphasis, where contrast is always implied. It is not so much regulated by the sense of the author as by the taste and feelings of the reader, and therefore does not admit of any precise rules. Its use will be best illustrated by a few Examples. Ex. 23. Examples of the Emphasis of Feeling. But see! the enemy retire. Why will ye die? O house of Israel. To-morrow, didst thou say? To-MORROW? It is a period nowhere to be found In all the hoary registers of time. What men could do Is done already; heaven and earth will witness, There was a time, my fellow citizens, when the Lacedemonians were sovereign masters by sea and land; when their troops and forts surrounded the entire circuit of Attica; when they possessed Euboea, Tanagra, the whole Boeotian district, Megara, Egina, Cleone, and the other islands; while this state had not one ship, no, not-one-wall. PAUSE. 37. Pauses are suspensions of the voice in reading and speaking, used to mark various states of feeling, and to give effect to expression. Like emphasis, with which it is closely allied, it may be considered under two heads,—the Logical Pause and the Pause of Feeling. 38. The Pause is one of the most effective elements in reading and declamation, and its importance cannot be too strongly impressed on the pupil. The ordinary marks of punctuation, though useful so far as they go, are insufficient for the purposes, not only of expression, but of sense, even when they are (as they are not always) correctly placed; for as Mr. Walker justly observes, 'Not half the pauses are found in printing which are heard in the pronunciation of a good reader or speaker.' The difficulty of laying down absolute rules for the proper use of these pauses, is shown by the arbitrary and perplexing directions on this subject given in most of our current text-books on elocution. In the following Exercises an attempt has been made to place the theory of pauses on its only true basis, the relations developed by the logical analysis of the sentence. The Logical Pause, 39. This Pause has for its object the separation of the sentence into its logical elements, and indicates the breaks or pauses of the sense formed at each recurring group of words made up of the subject predicate and object, and their extensions. As already explained (§ 14), these must be considered as forming so many oratorical words, indivisible in meaning, however made up of grammatical parts. 40. In the following extract from the Deserted Village' of Goldsmith, the logical relations of the successive sentences and their several parts, and the pauses founded on them, are indicated to the eye by breaks in the proper places. Each sentence is separated into its logical elements, and the distinction between principal and subordinate clauses is indicated by a very simple notation. Principal clauses are distinguished by capital letters, and the clauses subordinate to them by a corresponding small letter, the degree of subordination in each case being indicated by the index figure attached to the letter, as shown in the following scheme: Principal Clauses A, B, C, D, E, &c. Subordinate 1st remove a,, 2a, 3a,; b1, 2b,, 3b1, &c. The perpendicular line denotes the Casural Pause. • A full account of the Analysis of Sentences, with an explanation of the notation here employed, will be found in the writer's Elements of English Grammar.' Ex. 24. THE VILLAGE PASTOR. A b1 B D; d, E; e F G; 91 H; h1 J; j Marked to show the Logical Pauses founded on the Analysis of Sentences. Near yonder copse, |- where once the garden smiled, - 'A B C D E And passing rich with forty pounds a year; Remote from towns he ran his godly race, B Nor e'er had changed, |- nor wish'd to change, his place; - C; D Unskilful he to fawn, or seek for power By doctrines fashion'd to the varying hour; Claim'd kindred there, and had his claims allow'd; - Sat by his fire, - and talk'd the night away; E F A B; C D d. E F ; A * A divided sentence, of which there are several other examples in the extract. 'There' belongs to the principal clause B on the next line, from which it is separated by the intervening subordinate clause b1. |