MENTAL TECHNIQUE AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION. CHAPTER I. STUDIES IN FORMULATION. I. TIME. "The relative time apportioned to a word indicates the mind's measurement of it, - represents the speaker's judgment as to the amount of meaning or importance that it conveys." THE above quotation from Raymond's Orator's Manual is a succinct statement of the principles underlying 'Formulation." In the following examples, and in the chapter on "Cases of Formulation" in Part I., will be found ample opportunity to test the principles set forth in the above extract. The succeeding passages will have a prevailingly slow movement. Let the student measure the thought carefully, and think the expansive paraphrase. These drills are not to train him to read slowly (for any one can do that), but to think largely. The movement will take care of itself. It is further urged that the student give considerable attention to this part of the subject; for the time so spent will be valuable not only in so far as it results in expressive movement, but because it is only through medi tation that the fullest insight into the meaning of a passage can be attained. Hence, dwelling for a long period upon a phrase or sentence gives opportunity for the enkindling of the imagination and emotion. It has been frequently found that where a student's movement was out of harmony with the sentiment of the passage, his emotional rendition was equally poor. A careful further study of the text to improve the movement has generally resulted in the improvement of the emotional expression. "Mr. Speaker: The mingled tones of sorrow, like the voice of many waters, have come unto us from a sister State - Massachusetts -weeping for her honored son. The State I have the honor in part to represent once endured, with yours, a common suffering, battled for a common cause, and rejoiced in a common triumph. Surely, then, it is meet that in this the day of your affliction we should mingle our griefs." "Search creation round, where can you find a country that presents so sublime a view, so interesting an anticipation? Who shall say for what purpose mysterious Providence may not have designed her! Who shall say that when in its follies or its crimes, the Old World may have buried all the pride of its power, and all the pomp of its civilization, human nature may not find its destined renovation in the New! When its temples and its trophies shall have mouldered into dust, when the glories of its name shall be but the legend of tradition, and the light of its achievements live only in song, philosophy will revive again in the sky of her Franklin, and glory rekindle at the urn of her Washington." "Often have I swept backward, in imagination, six thousand years, and stood beside our great ancestor, as he gazed for the first time upon the going down of the sun. What strange sensations must have swept through his bewildered mind, as he watched the last departing ray of the sinking orb, unconscious whether he should ever behold its return. 66 Wrapped in a maze of thought, strange and startling, he suffers his eye to linger long about the point at which the sun has slowly faded from view. A mysterious darkness creeps over the face of Nature; the beautiful scenes of earth are slowly fading, one by one, from his dimmed vision." "You think me a fanatic to-night, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocion for the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, La Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown as the ripe fruit of our noonday, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L'Ouverture." 66 Figure to yourself a cataract like that of Niagara, poured in foaming grandeur, not merely over one great precipice of two hundred feet, but over the successive ridgy precipices of two or three thousand, in the face of a mountain eleven thousand feet high, and tumbling, crashing, thundering down with a continuous din of far greater sublimity than the sound of the grandest cataract. The roar of the falling mass begins to be heard the moment it is loosened from the mountain; it pours on with the sound of a vast body of rushing water; then comes the first great concussion, a booming crash of thunders, breaking on the still air in mid-heaven; your breath is suspended, and you listen and look; the mighty glittering mass shoots headlong over the main precipice, and the fall is so great that it produces to the eye that impression of dread majestic slowness of which I have spoken, though it is doubtless more rapid than Niagara. But if you should see the cataract of Niagara itself coming down five thousand feet above you in the air, there would be the same impression. The image remains in the mind, and can never fade from it; it is as if you had seen an alabaster cataract from heaven. The sound is far more sublime than that of Niagara, because of the preceding stillness in those Alpine solitudes. In the midst of such silence and solemnity, from out the bosom of those glorious, glittering forms of nature, comes that rushing, crashing thunder-burst of sound! If it were not that your soul, through the eye, is as filled and fixed with the sublimity of the vision as, through the sense of hearing, with that of the audible report, methinks you would wish to bury your face in your hands, and fall prostrate, as at the voice of the Eternal." "How lovely are thy dwellings fair! O Lord of Hosts, how dear The pleasant tabernaclés are Where thou dost dwell so near! My soul doth long and almost die There even the sparrow, freed from wrong, The swallow there, to lay her young, Even by thy altars, Lord of Hosts, They find their safe abode; And home they fly from round the coasts Towards thee, my King, my God." Let The following will illustrate fast movement. there be no attempt to accelerate the speed, but let the thought and emotion govern that entirely. No examples are given to illustrate moderate time, since the student gets sufficient practice of this kind in almost everything he reads. 66 Gloriously, Max! gloriously! There were sixty horses in the field, all mettle to the bone; the start was a picture — away we went in a cloud — pell-mell — helter-skelter the fools first, as usual, using themselves up. We soon passed them first your Kitty, then my Blueskin, and Craven's colt last. Then came the tug Kitty skimmed the walls - Blueskin flew over the fences-the colt neckand-neck, and half a mile to run- at last the colt balked a leap and went wild. Kitty and I had it all to ourselves she was three lengths ahead as we breasted the last wall, six feet, if an inch, and a ditch on the other side. Now, for the first time, I gave Blueskin his headHa, ha! Away he flew like a thunderbolt over went the filly I over the same spot, leaving Kitty in the ditch walked the steeple, eight miles in thirty minutes, and scarcely turned a hair." "Nice clothes I get, too, traipsing through weather like this! My gown and bonnet will be spoiled. Needn't I wear 'em, then? Indeed, Mr. Caudle, I shall wear 'em. No, sir! I'm not going out a dowdy to please you or anybody else. Gracious knows! it isn't often that I step over the threshold." "Before a quarter pole was pass'd, The chuckling crowd had ceased to laugh; The gravel flying in his track, His neck stretched out, his ears laid back, His tail extended all the while Behind him like a rat-tail file! 'Hould tight! hould tight! Then methought I heard a mellow sound, |