SWORD CHANT. 97 ble measure, and are rhymed or unrhymed in their line's final word; and the frequency with which this measure is used shows how essential its form is to certain effects. A composite or mixed form of verse, for instance, in would have been absurd. All equable but grave sentiments are "at home" only in this form. But, when the passion embodied is diverse, and the emotions excited are variable, then a variable form of verse is not only consistent, but comes naturally to the lips. Thus, in the poem here quoted, the first five lines are, in measure, recitative, but are followed by a decided lyric form, as the emotion intensifies, and the climax in the closing line is a culmination of this intensity, most beautifully typified in the terse, thrilling— "Joy Giver! I kiss thee." The action requisite is varied. We have first, Delight (7); second, Courage (21) and Authority (25); third, Affirming (28); fourth, Dependence (43), and Veneration (44), &c., is indicated. These the student must strive to adopt or express with such force as the poet's language seems to imply. SWORD CHANT.-William Motherwell. 'Tis not the gray hawk's flight o'er mountain and mere; (7) That can their broad marches and numbers define. Dull builders of houses, base tillers of earth, (21) Gaping, ask me what lordships I owned at my birth; But the pale fools wax mute when I point with my sword East, west, north, and south, shouting, "There, am I LORD!" (25) Trembling, bow to my sway, In the fierce battle fray, When the star that rules fate is this falchion's red gleam. MIGHT GIVER! I kiss thee. I've heard great harps sounding in brave bower and hall; (28) I've drunk the sweet music that bright lips let fall; I've hunted in greenwood, and heard small birds sing; But away with this idle and cold jargoning! The music I love is the shout of the brave, (61) The yell of the dying, The scream of the flying, When this arm wields death's sickle, and garners the grave. JOY GIVER! I kiss thee. Far isles of the ocean thy lightning hath known, (43) Keen cleaver of gay crests, Sharp piercer of broad breasts, Grim slayer of heroes, and scourge of the strong! In a love more abiding than that the heart knows (471) And noble blood springing, And cloven yarn helmet, stout hauberk, and shield. The smile of a maiden's eye soon may depart; (152) Changeful as light clouds, and wayward as wind, Thy love will not slumber; But, starlike, burns fiercer the darker the night. My kindred have perished by war or by wave; And scalds shall be singing With this example we close our annotations. If the student has followed us in the suggestions embodied in the several kinds or styles of reci tations here introduced, he will not fail to have discerned what are their chief or elemental distinctions, in an elocutionary view. Too much detail of suggestion must have confused; and, as in the good romance, the wise writer leaves much to be inferred by the intelligent reader, so in the natural system of elocution-if system, indeed, it should be called-the reader and student is asked to exercise his own views, and give his own construction, to a great degree, to the works and thoughts of others. We now append a choice selection of pieces (old and new) well fitted for stage or floor recitation, leaving the learner himself to apply the suggestions and elucidations which it has been our wish to offer in this Self Aid to the Orator's "Art." NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE. 99 PIECES FOR DECLAMATION OR RECITATION.-SECOND SECTION. NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE.-Everett. How well said Washington,-who said all things, as he did all things, well," that in proportion as governments rest on public opinion, that opinion must be enlightened." There must then be intelligence at the foundation. But what intelligence? Not that which puffeth up, I fancy; not flippancy, not smartness, not sciolism, whose fruits, whose expression, are vanity, restlessness, insubordination, hate, irreverence, unbelief, incapacity to combine ideas, and great capacity to overwork a single one. Not quite this. This is that little intelligence and little learning which are dangerous. These are the characteristics, I have read, which pave the way for the downfall of States; not those on which a long glory and a long strength have towered. These, more than the General of Macedon, gave the poison to Demosthenes in the Island Temple. These, not the triumvirate alone, closed the eloquent lips of Cicero. These, before the populous North had done it, spread beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands in the downward age; these, not Christianity, not Goth, not Lombard, nor Norman, rent that fair one, Italy, asunder, and turned the garden and the mistress of the earth into a school, into a hiding-place of assassins of spies from Austria, of spies from France, with gold to buy and ears to catch and punish the dreams of liberty whispered in sleep, and shamed the memories and hopes of Machiavel and Mazzini, and gave for that joy and that beauty, mourning and heaviness. This is not the intelligence our Constitution means, Washington meant, our country needs. It is intelligence which, however it begins, ends with belief, with humility, with obedience, with veneration, with admiration, with truth; which recognizes and then learns and then teaches the duties of a comprehensive citizenship; which hopes for a future on earth and beyond earth, but turns habitually, reverently, thoughtfully to the old paths, the great men, the hallowed graves of the fathers; which binds in one bundle of love the kindred and mighty legend of revolution and liberty, the life of Christ in the Evangelists, and the Constitution in its plain text; which can read, with Lord Chatham, Thucydides and the stories of master states of antiquity; yet holds with him that the papers of the Congress of 1776 were better; whose patriotism grows warm at Marathon, but warmer at Monmouth, at Yorktown, at Bunker Hill, at Saratoga; which reforms by preserving, serves by standing and waiting, fears God and honors America. OUR FLAG.-Rev. Alfred P. Putnam. What precious associations cluster around our flag! Not alone have our fathers set up this banner in the name of God over the well-won battle-fields of the Revolution, and over the cities and towns which they rescued from despotic rule; but think where also their descendants have carried it, and raised it in conquest or protection! Through what clouds of dust and smoke has it passed--what storms of shot or shell-what scenes of fire and blood! Not alone at Saratoga, at Monmouth, and at Yorktown, but at Lundy's Lane and New Orleans, at Buena Vista and Chapultepec. It is the same glorious old flag which, inscribed with the dying words of Lawrence-" Don't give up the ship!"'—was hoisted on Lake Erie by Commodore Perry just on the eve of his great naval victory-the same old flag which our great chieftain bore in triumph to the proud city of the Aztecs, and planted upon the heights of her national palace. Brave hands raised it above the eternal regions of ice in the Arctic seas, and have set it up on the summits of the lofty mountains in the distant West. Where has it not gone, the pride of its friends and the terror of its foes? What countries and what seas has it not visited? Where has not the American citizen been able to stand beneath its guardian folds and defy the world? With what joy and exultation seamen and tourists have gazed upon its stars and stripes, read in it the history of their nation's glory, received from it the full sense of security, and drawn from it the inspirations of patriotism! By it, how many have sworn fealty to their country! What burst of magnificent eloquence it has called forth from Webster and from Everett! What lyric strains of poetry from Drake and Holmes! How many heroes its folds have covered in death! How many have lived for it, and how many have died for it! Wherever that flag has gone, it has been a herald of a better dayit has been the pledge of freedom, of justice, of order, of civilization, and of Christianity. Tyrants only have hated it, and the enemies of mankind alone have trampled it to the earth. All who sigh for the triumph of truth and righteousness love and salute it. THE SAME.-Hon. Galusha A. Grow. In God is our trust, and the "Star-Spangled Banner forever shall wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." Those who regard it as mere cloth bunting fail to appreciate its symbolical power. Wherever civilization dwells, or the name of Washington is known, it bears on its folds the concentrated power of armies and navies, and surrounds its votaries with a defence more impregnable than a battlement of wall or tower. THE TRUE HEROES. 101 Wherever, on the earth's surface, an American citizen may wander, called by pleasure, business, or caprice, it is a shield to secure him against wrong and outrage, save on the soil of the land of his birth. As the guardians of the rights and liberties of the people, your paramount duty is to make it honored at home as it is respected abroad. A government that cannot command the loyalty of its own citizens is unworthy the respect of the world; and a government that will not protect its own loyal citizens deserves the contempt of the world. He who would tear down this grandest temple of constitutional liberty, thus blasting forever the hopes of crushed humanity, because its freemen, in the mode presented by the Constitution, select a chief magistrate not acceptable to him, is a parricide to his race, and should be regarded as a common enemy of mankind. The Union, once destroyed, is a shattered vase that no human power can reconstruct in its original symmetry. Coarse stones when they are broken may be cemented again; precious ones, never. If the Republic is to be dismembered, and the sun of its liberty must go out in endless night, let it set amid the roar of cannon and the din of battle, when there is no longer an arm to strike or a heart to bleed in its cause, so that coming generations may not reproach the present with being too imbecile to preserve the priceless legacy bequeathed by our fathers, so as to transmit it unimpaired to future times. THE TRUE HEROES.-Choate. The great contest which resulted in national independence, was a contest between power and principle-authority and liberty. England and America were not alone interested in its results. It concerned universal man, and upon the character of the contest mankind has pronounced its irreversible verdict for the cause of America. British ministers and hereditary statesmen, smiled upon by the king and applauded by the people, flushed with the arrogance of assured power, regarded with disdainful contempt the humble leaders of popular liberty in America, whose names were hardly known to the haughty chiefs that wielded the mighty power, and commanded for the purposes of conquest and subjugation the vast resources of the British Empire. But with each revolving year the names of these arrogant British chiefs are passing from the recollection of mankind, and their fame is growing more dim and obscure ;-with each passing year the fame of the leaders of the cause of popular liberty in America is steadily brightening. The leaders who shaped the policy of America received, while living, the grateful homage of an admiring country, and a grateful people called them into positions of trust and honor under the government they had founded ;-the ministers and |