purpose, is set out of its usual or grammatical order. When carried forward, the pause is made before the word; when brought back, it is made after. The same is true of inverted phrases. The following are examples : 1. His coward lips did from their color-fly. 2. Through glades and gloom the mingled measure stole, Or o'er some haunted stream with fond delay, Round a holy calm diffusing. 3. Of all crimes-ingratitude is the most shameful. Besides the foregoing uses of this element of Time, Pause is the most important factor in "Rhetorical Analysis," and in "Rhythmus and Melody of Speech." Pauses furnish resting places for the voice in reading and speaking, and afford the only and requisite opportunities for taking breath. RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OR GROUPING. GROUPING of thought is a vocal analysis that holds about the same relation to spoken language as grammatical analysis does to written. The elements with which Rhetorical Analysis is chiefly concerned are Pitch, Pause, Time, and Stress. By means of these, the leading and subordinate ideas of the sentence may be given their relative value. The principal thought or statement should be placed, as it were, in the foreground of the rhetorical perspective; the less important in the more remote or middle-ground; and the least important or "parenthetic" ideas in the background of the rhetorical perspective. To show the value of this principle, and the importance of "rhetorical analysis" to correct reading and speaking, read the following sentence, first, with uniform emphasis, pitch, and time, and without pause, and note the confusion of ideas. Then read it with the required emphasis, pause, etc., as indicated. It was the owl that shrieked the fatal bell-man IT WAS THE OWL THAT SHRIEKED, the fatal bell-man, Macbeth, Act II., Sc. 2. Shakespeare. Practice the following examples until every shade in the expression of the thought and feeling is clearly brought out. 4. Elegy. 5. But knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Yet, by your gracious patience, Gray. Othello, Act I., Sc. 3. 6. Yet this is Rome, Shakespeare. That sat on her seven hills, and, from her throne Rienzi. Mitford. 7. The atrocious crime of being a young man, which, with so much spirit and decency, the honorable gentleman has charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny. Pitt. 8. Forth march'd the chief, and, distant from the crowd, High on the rampart raised his voice aloud. As the loud trumpet's brazen mouth from far, So high his dreadful voice the hero rear'd; * Hosts dropp'd their arms, and trembled as they heard. From the Iliad. Pope's Tr. 9. She never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Twelfth Night, Act II., Sc. 4. 10. Nature to each allots his proper sphere, Shakespeare. But that forsaken, we like comets err; broke, And all our boasted fire is lost in smoke. 11. And, Douglas, more I tell thee here, Here, in thy hold, thy vassals near And lay your hand upon your sword), I tell thee, thou'rt defied ! Marmion, Canto VI. Congreve. Scott. 12. In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of creation, Shakespeare has introduced two murderers; and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably discriminated; but though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feeling caught chiefly by contagion from her-yet, as both are finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. Essay on Shakespeare, De Quincey. 13. Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt; And every laugh so merry draws one out. Expostulatory Odes. John Wolcott. 14. Go, preach to the coward, thou death-telling seer, Campbell. In "simile," the thing compared is more important than that to which it is likened. Hence, the latter must always be made subordinate to the former. The eighth and ninth exercises above contain good examples of the simile. |