see the rest of mankind" painfully struggling to comprehend obvious truths-glance themselves through the most remote consequences like lightning" through a path that cannot be traced They see the beauties of nature with light and warmth and paint them forcibly without effort as the morning sun does the scenes he rises upon and in several instances communicate to objects a morning freshness and unaccountable lustre that is not seen in the creations of nature- The poet the statuary the painter have produced images that left nature far behind | 2. INFLECTION. The human voice is to be considered as a musical instrument—an organ; constructed by the hand of the Great Master of all Harmony. It has its bellows, its pipe, its mouth-piece; and when we know the "stops" "it will discourse most eloquent music." It has its gamut, or scale of ascent and descent; it has its keys, or pitch,-its tones,—its semi-tones, its bass, its tenor, its alt-its melody, its cadence. It can speak as gently as the lute, "like the sweet south upon a bed of violets," or as shrilly as the trumpet; it can tune the "silver-sweet" note of love, and "the iron throat of war;" in fine, it may be modulated by art to any sound of softness or of strength, of gentleness or harshness, of harmony or discord. And the art that wins this music from the strings is ELOCUTION. The niceties and refinements of this art are to be acquired, step by step, by well-directed practice. At present, let us learn a simple ascent, (or rise,) and descent, (or fall,) of the voice; of the range of— say one tone in music, upwards or downwards. This ascent or descent of the voice is called by Elocutionists, INFLECTION,* and they have two SIMPLE INFLECTIONS. The rising inflection, marked with the acute accent thus on the inflected word. The falling inflection, marked with the grave accent, thus * The correct term for this slide of the voice, or change of The student may always, at will, strike these inflections with certainty by asking himself the following question, (which can hardly be spoken without making the inflections distinctly, as they are marked :) Did I rise or fall? EXAMPLE. In which the rising inflection occurs on the word rise, and the falling inflection on the word fall. It can therefore never be forgotten, and may serve as a mnemonic or key to these two simple inflections. This and similar questions run on an ascending and descending scale of the voice, which may be thus marked: In which the voice descends on " Do I"-ascends on "rise," the pitch being at the highest on "or," when the voice immediately descends on "fall." pitch from low to high, is doubtless accent. We derive the grave and acute accents from the Greeks, who, it is supposed, used them to denote the slides of the voice from grave to sharp, or low to high; so that, it is believed that the speeches of their orators were marked, almost as minutely as a musical score, for the direction of the voice. But the term accent has, by custom, now grown to be so constantly applied to stress upon a syllable, that I prefer to adopt the less technically correct, but equally intelligible term, inflection, to denote the slides of the voice; and to use the term accent in its present popularly received sense. This ascent of the voice, or rising inflection, varies in its range from one tone to three. The pitch increases as the force of the speaker increases. In ordinary speech, where no particular force is given,—in a perfectly indifferent question, for example,—the rise would not be more than of one tone: as, "Will my brother come? asked quite indifferently, would receive an ascent of one tone asked with interest, would receive an ascent of three tones; asked eagerly, would rise five tones; and asked with a passionate expression, or of surprise, would rise even an octave; but, in reading or speaking with any degree of force, the simple rising inflection is usually over an interval of three tones, (a third); and the descent of the falling inflection is over the same interval. And the change of pitch is discrete; that is, the voice leaps directly and abruptly from tone to tone; whereas, in the greater ascent of a fifth, and an octave, it is concrete; that is, it slides over the interval, slurring the intermediate tones: this distinction will be more fully explained under the head of compound inflections. To facilitate and familiarise to the pupil's ear and voice the distinction between the rising and falling inflection, let him practise the tonic sounds, upon the following plan, of rising and falling on each. |