DECLAMATION. 17 run into the prosaic utterance, when the most eloquent thoughts are made half-ridiculous by their seeming bombast or affectation of language. The student's aim must be to intone, emphasize, and deliver the unrhymed lines and stanza just as if they were rhymed, preserving a sustained or consistent energy to the end, especially avoiding haste, which always mars a poetic effect. Poetry more than prose requires precision in syllabification and pausation. A half-spoken word and a neglected pause destroy many an otherwise effective passage. And, far more than prose, verse demands the student's attention to emphasis. Two readers or speakers will make the same poem appear like two distinct productions by their mere differences in its enunciation. He is the truest expositor who, by due emphasis, brings the best thoughts to the surface. Our best poets have given us some of their finest compositions in blank verse. Bryant, Whittier, John Neal, Longfellow, Taylor, Willis, Alice Cary, Buchanan Read, Stoddard, Lowell, Baker-all have used that form with great success. We submit for recitation one of the late George D. Prentice's most admirable productions. It is distinguished alike for beauty and force, and will demand the student's best efforts in its delivery. A passionless, un demonstrative recitation of it will indeed be "a failure." The orator must feel its spirit to reproduce it. GOD SAVE THE UNION !-George D. Prentice. God has made (442) A wilderness of worlds; his will, and strong He made the Milky Way to span the sky, (51) Forever circling through the boundless heaven To brand the traitor hearts that dare forget The bond for which our fathers fought and bled? Then, back recoiling, shudders to receive (67) God save the Union! (46) Give the dawning year New States, with starry emblems, one by one, (281) To take their place at last with those that tread And Time is dust upon his broken Lyre! Thrice raptured moment!-if all blessed like thee REMARK.-The incentives to gesticulation in this piece are numerous. "To roll in beauty through abysmal space," "And bade the arches of a Southern sphere," "Tossing wildly to and fro," "Come stealing through the Future's twilight dim," --are all fine lines for expressive action. The tone, starting with that of Reverence (44), advances to that of Admiration (51), then to Affirming (282), then to Pride (231), then to Anger (601), then to Condemning (362), and culminates in Aversion (67). This is a fine example of the climax. There then succeeds a contrast. In the cadence "God save the Union!" we have a plea, at once pitiful and dependent; then the repose of confident and assured result. IMMORTALITY OF TRUE GREATNESS. (2)—Edward Everett. To be cold and breathless,-to feel not and speak not,-this is not the end of existence to the men who have breathed their spirits into the institutions of their country, who have stamped their characters on the pillars of the age, who have poured their hearts' blood into the channels of the public prosperity. Tell me, GREAT MEN. 19 ye who tread the sods of yon sacred height, is Warren dead? Can you not still see him, not pale and prostrate, the blood of his gallant heart pouring out of his ghastly wound, but moving resplendent over the field of honor, with the rose of heaven upon his cheek, and the fire of liberty in his eye? Tell me, ye who make your pious pilgrimage to the shades of Vernon, is Washington indeed shut up in that cold and narrow house? That which made these men, and men like these, cannot die. The hand that traced the charter of Independence is, indeed, motionless; the eloquent lips that sustained it are hushed; but the lofty spirits that conceived, resolved, and maintained it, and which alone, to such men, "make it life to live," these cannot expire: "These shall resist the empire of decay, When time is o'er, and worlds have passed away; The death of Rufus Choate elicited from the Rev. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, an oration of singular beauty and power, recalling the eloquence which made the first years of our young Republic so notable. These extracts will be found quite acceptable for recitation. GREAT MEN ARE SPECIAL GIFTS. (33)—Rev. Dr. Adams. Great men are special gifts of God to a nation, and through it to the world. They are special efforts of that same divine benevolence which gives us Apennines, and Alps, and Lebanons, and Himalayas. These, the utilitarian and materialist will admonish us, are needful parts of the world's mechanism. None the less on that account a devout mind recognizes them as proofs of goodness in the Deity. The mechanism of human society, for all the practical purposes of life, might work well if there had been no Homer, no Shakspeare, no Milton; but the wisdom and goodness which ordained that the eye and mind should not be wearied with uniform dead levels, and therefore set up the corner-stones of the globe with a view to the benevolent effect upon the earth and its inhabitants of hills and mountains, is pleased here and there to endow men with transcendent genius for the good of the race. They have an elevating effect upon mankind by raising the standard of excellence; they rebuke our grovelling thoughts, purify and ennoble our conceptions, shed a charm over things which otherwise would be tame and wearisome; they are the wine of life; they are angels on the ladder with God Almighty above it, filling even our dreams, as well as our waking hours, with assurances that there is something better in reserve for all who seek it than they have reached. But these gifts of God, these men of genius, are capable of perversion by us, like all his gifts. Occasional large crops may excite impatience and discontent in the young man, through his desire for a region where profuse vegetation is the general rule. Those special seasons in which God is pleased to turn the attention of men in great numbers to the subject of religion, tempt some to neglect Christian effort, and to look continually after phenomenal events in the religious world. Thus the fame of genius awakens in some the desire to shine in the view of men, to the neglect of slow, patient industry, as providential success in business tempts others to make adventures at the risk of their regular calling and their integrity. But these abuses do not stay the ordinances of heaven. In every department of life, God bestows upon some men certain things which, however cultivated and improved by effort, are, in a special sense, native endowments; they are born in these men, and, with their features and structure, are written in God's book. THE SAME. (37) (44) A man of genius is a proper occasion of special praise to God, for his sovereign power and goodness. Men seldom think of this. They worship and serve the creature more than the Creator, who is over all, God blessed forever. They should rather feel disposed to address great men in these words, and for mutual admonition : "And what hast thou that thou didst not receive? For who maketh thee to differ from another? Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?" Gifts of genius are as really the special gifts of God as the miraculous gifts which led the two Apostles at the beautiful gate of the Temple to say, "Ye men of Israel, why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk? A wonderful mind is merely an uncommon efflorescence in one of a number of plants of the same species, whose structure is ordained by the all-wise God; and we are to receive the rare product, like every creature of God, with thanksgiving. It is a new illustration of that divine benevolence which, even in this world of sin and deserved misery, strives to teach us that God is love. But we do not find it to be a common thing for those who read the great poets and prose writers, and look upon works of art, and listen to eloquence and music, and reverence statesmanship, and great military talent, and medical sagacity, and surgical skill, and the fruits of mechanical genius, to praise and bless him who made heaven, earth, and seas and the fountains of waters. Yet the same hearts, many of them, are led to think of God by viewing the firmament. Now, when we see the bright hosts which adorn the intellectual RESPONSIBILITIES OF YOUNG MEN. 21 and moral firmament, we should give thanks to him that made great lights in the moral as well as the natural world. To show his power, God is pleased to adorn the world of mind, now and then, with galaxies, clusters; but we say, The age produced them; the times made them. Who made the age? Our times-are they not in His hand? One great man in a century might have sufficed; but lo! that same divine wisdom and love of excellence, which everywhere else at times rejoices to overflow all their banks, makes one land after another the object of affluent goodness in the bestowment of great men in companies; so that the constellations themselves are not more classified and marshalled than these great lights of their respective lands and times. "Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness and for his wonderful works to the children of men." In the realms of thought, where God, who is a Spirit, should specially be recognized and adored, shall we set up idols? As one of the curses upon idolaters, it is said, "Then God gave them up to worship the hosts of heaven." It was a sublime and fascinating kind of idolatry; in the intellectual world it has not ceased. Let men turn their thoughts to God as often as they contemplate a great mind among their fellows. Their worship is due to him who made Arcturus, Orion, and the chambers of the South; to him who made great lights; for his mercy endureth forever. To Bishop Clark, of Rhode Island, we are indebted for the following. The spirit and sentiment of the extracts will enlist the pupil's best delivery to command the hearers' applause. Let the recitation be made without haste. Better, by far, be too slow than too rapid of speech. THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF YOUNG MEN. (45) (46)—Bishop Clark. Society has entered upon another of its transitional stages. The generation which is coming on to the field of action will live in stirring times. During their time, probably, there will be wrought out a more general and vital change in the condition of society than has been accomplished in any one epoch since the night when the bright star flashed over Jerusalem. A work of preparation has been going on for the last fifty years in theoretical science, in practical arts, in commerce, in travel, in the circulation of intelligence, in political principles, in criticism, and in philosophy, the results of which remain for them to elaborate. The rays may possibly converge to a focus during the lifetime of those whom I address. |