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EXERCISES TO BE WRITTEN.

Let dashes be introduced into these sentences, in accordance with the Rule:

The collision of mind with mind; the tug and strain of intellectual wrestling; the tension of every mental fibre, as the student reaches forth to take hold of the topmost pinnacle of thought; the shout of joy that swells up from gladsome voices, as he stands upon the summit, with error under his feet, these make men.

The modest flower, nestling in the meadow-grass; the happy tree, as it laughs and riots in the wind; the moody cloud, knitting its brow in solemn thought; the river that has been flowing all night long; the sound of the thirsty earth, as it drinks and relishes the rain, these things are as a full hymn when they flow from the melody of nature, but an empty rhythm when scanned by the finger of art.

If we would see the foundations laid broadly and deeply on which the fabric of this country's liberties shall rest to the remotest generations; if we would see her carry forward the work of political reformation, and rise the bright and morning star of freedom over a benighted world, let us elevate the intellectual and moral character of every class of our citizens, and especially let us imbue them thoroughly with the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Above all the fret and tumult of actual existence, above the decrees of earth's nominal sovereigns, above all the violence and evil which render what is called history so black a record of folly and crime, above all these, there have ever been certain luminous ideas, pillars of fire in the night of time, which have guided and guarded the great army of humanity, in its slow and hesitating, but still onward, progress in knowledge and freedom.

When, at God's decree, human greatness from all its state falls to the ground like a leaf; when death, usually doing its work in silence, seems to cry out over the bier of the high and distinguished; when some figure, that has moved with imposing tread in our sight, towers still more out of the dark valley; when the drapery of mourning unrolls itself from private chambers to line the streets, darken the windows, and hang the heavens in black; when the stroke of the bell adds a sabbath solemnity to the days of the week, and the boom of guns, better fired over the dead than at the living, echoes all through our territory; while the wheels of business stop, and labor leans its head, and trade foregoes its gains, and communication, save on one theme, ceases, we may well ask the meaning and

cause.

Insert both semicolons and dashes in their respective places :Wherever on this earth an understanding is active to know and serve the truth wherever a heart beats with kind and pure and generous affections wherever a home spreads its sheltering wing over husband and wife, and parent and child, there, under every diversity of outward circumstance, the true worth and dignity and peace of man's soul are within reach of all.

When, in addition to the mere spectacle and love of nature, there is a knowledge of it too when the laws and processes are understood which surround us with wonder and beauty every day when the great cycles are known, through which the material creation passes without decay, then, in the immensity of human hopes, there appears nothing which need stagger faith it seems no longer strange that the mind which interprets the material creation should survive its longest period, and be admitted to its remoter realms.

The infinite importance of what he has to do the goading conviction that it must be done the utter inability of doing it the dreadful combination, in his mind, of both the necessity and incapacity the despair of crowding the concerns of an age into a moment the impossibility of beginning a repentance which should have been completed, of setting about a peace which should have been concluded, of suing for a pardon which should have been obtained, all these complicated concerns without strength, without time, without hope with a clouded memory, a disjointed reason, a wounded spirit, undefined terrors, remembered sins, anticipated punishment, an angry God, an accusing conscience, all together intolerably augment the sufferings of a body which stands in little need of the insupportable burthen of a distracted mind to aggravate its torments.

If thou art a child, and hast ever added a sorrow to the soul, or a furrow to the silvered brow, of an affectionate parent if thou art a husband, and hast ever caused the fond bosom that ventured its whole happiness in thy arms to doubt one moment of thy kindness or thy truth if thou art a friend, and hast ever wronged, in thought, word, or deed, the spirit that generously confided in thee if thou art a lover, and hast ever given one unmerited pang to that true heart that now lies cold and still beneath thy feet, then be sure that every unkind look, every ungracious word, every ungentle action, will come thronging back upon thy memory, and knocking dolefully at thy soul then be sure that thou wilt lie down sorrowing and repentant on the grave, and utter the unheard groan, and pour the unavailing tear, more deep, more bitter, because unheard and unavailing.

RULE III.

The Echo, or Words repeated Rhetorically.

The dash is used before, what is termed by elocutionists, the echo; that is, before a word or phrase repeated in an exclamatory or an emphatic manner.

EXAMPLES.

1. Shall I, who was born, I might almost say, but certainly brought up, in the tent of my father, that most excellent general — shall I, the conqueror of Spain and Gaul, and not only of the Alpine nations, but of the Alps themselves shall I compare myself with this half-year captain? — -a captain, before whom should one place the two armies without their ensigns, I am persuaded he would not know to which of them he is consul.

2. Newton was a Christian; Newton! whose mind burst forth from the fetters cast by nature on our finite conceptions; Newton! whose science was truth, and the foundation of whose knowledge of it was philosophy; not those visionary and arrogant presumptions which too often usurp its name, but philosophy resting on the basis of mathematics, which, like figures, cannot lie; - Newton! who carried the line and rule to the utmost barriers of creation, and explored the principles by which, no doubt, all created matter is held together and exists.

REMARKS.

a. Before the iteration of the words "shall I," in the first example, dashes are put without any other point, to show that what precedes is unfinished. After the expression, "this half-year captain," a note of interrogation is placed, because the question terminates here.

b. In the second example, semicolons are introduced before the dashes, in order to separate with greater clearness the various members, some of which are divisible into clauses. But, in the more simple kinds of sentences (as in the first five under the Oral Exercise, p. 183), a comma will be sufficient before the dash.

c. After expressions of the kind under consideration, it is seldom necessary to put the exclamatory mark; as, "Edmund Burke was a man who added to the pride, not merely of his country, but of his species; a man who robed the very soul of inspiration in the splendors of a pure and overpowering eloquence." The construction of the language used, and the nature of the sentiment, will readily indicate what point, if any, should be inserted.

d. When a parenthesis is introduced before an iterated expression, the dash should both precede and follow the parenthetical marks; as,

When I am old—(and, oh, how soon
Will life's sweet morning yield to noon,
And noon's broad, fervid, earnest light
Be shaded in the solemn night!
Till like a story well-nigh told
Will seem my life, when I am old),—
When I am old, this breezy earth
Will lose for me its voice of mirth;
The streams will have an undertone
Of sadness not by right their own.

e. The dash is also sometimes used before that which is merely an echo of the thought previously expressed; or, in other words, when the same idea is repeated in a different form in the same sentence; as, Our own nature is the first and nearest of all reali

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ties, the corner-stone of the entire fabric of truth." In many of these passages, however, when they are of a less rhetorical nature, the dash may be omitted; as, "There is nothing more prejudicial to the grandeur of buildings than to abound in angles; a fault obvious in many, and owing to an inordinate thirst for variety, which, whenever it prevails, is sure to leave very little true taste."

ORAL EXERCISE.

Explain the reason why dashes are inserted in these sentences:—

You speak like a boy,-like a boy who thinks the old, gnarled oak can be twisted as easily as the young sapling.

Never is virtue left without sympathy, - sympathy dearer and tenderer for the misfortune that has tried it, and proved its fidelity. There are, indeed, I acknowledge, to the honor of the human kind, there are persons in the world who feel that the possession of good dispositions is their best reward.

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The faithful man acts not from impulse, but from conviction, conviction of duty, the most stringent, solemn, and inspiring conviction that can sway the mind.

All great discoveries, not purely accidental, will be gifts to insight; and the true man of science will be he who can best ascend into the thoughts of God, he who burns before the throne in the clearest, purest, mildest light of reason.

Man is led to the conception of a Power and an Intelligence superior to his own, and adequate to the production and maintenance of all that he sees in nature; -a Power and Intelligence to which he may well apply the term infinite.

Can Parliament be so dead to its dignity and duty as to give its sanction to measures thus obtruded and forced upon them? -mea sures, my lords, which have reduced this late flourishing kingdom to scorn and contempt.

He hears the raven's cry; and shall he not hear, and will he not avenge, the wrongs that his nobler animals suffer? - wrongs that cry out against man, from youth to age, in the city and in the field, by the way and by the fireside.

The voices in the waves are always whispering to Florence, in their ceaseless murmuring, of love; — of love, eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of this world or by the end of time, but ranging still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away.

"Twas my cradle in childhood,

that ocean so proud;

And in death let me have its bright waves for my shroud;

Let no sad tears be shed, when I die, over me;

But bury me deep in the sea, -in the sea.

Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great-grandmother Field once was; and how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancer (here Alice's little right foot played an involuntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted) the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel disease, called a cancer, came, and bowed her down with pain; but it could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright, because she was so good and religious.

Harriet complied, and read; - read the eternal book for all the weary and the heavy-laden; for all the wretched, fallen, and neglected of this earth;-read the blessed history in which the blind, lame, palsied beggar, the criminal, the woman stained with shame, the shunned of all our dainty clay, have each a portion that no human pride, indifference, or sophistry, through all the ages that this world shall last, can take away, or by the thousandth atom of a grain reduce; read the ministry of Him who, through the round of human life, and all its hopes and griefs, from birth to death, from infancy to age, had sweet compassion for and interest in its every scene and stage, its every suffering and sorrow.

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