All are but parts of one harmonious whole

Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.-POPE.

The effect of these long quantities, or indefinites, and due quantity on the mutables, is to give dignity and largeness to the expression.

So in the celebrated passage from the 'Paradise Lost,' the indefinites, to be marked with long quantity, very much aid the grandeur of the description, when read aloud.

High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus or of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East, with richest hand,
Showers on her kings barbaric pearls and gold,
Satan exalted sat.

In fine, Time, or Quantity, is one main constituent of the Orotund which is the appropriate voice and method for the reading of the Scriptures, Milton, Shakspeare, and all that is grand, impressive, and sublime in prose and poetry.

Time or Quantity, then, is the first accident of speech that you are required to understand and master. Do so.

Now give me your attention.

PHRASING.

Speech is vocalised breath; breath made into voice by the action of the vocal organs.

I need not stop to define how the voice is formed; that is nature's affair, not ours. Our business is to use it on a good system of art.

This is clear, that we cannot speak without breathing, is it not?

The voice is our organ; the lungs are its bellows. If the bellows do not work freely, easily, and regularly, the power and action of the organ will be, to the extent of the impediment, marred or diminished.

The first step, then, towards good and effective speech or reading aloud, is to acquire a just economy and regulation of the lung-power, the orderly and, let us call it, rhythmical action of the bellows.

This is effected by a just system of phrasing, as I call it; a system which, by regulated rests, as in music, gives us breathing-places; that is, places for taking breath momentarily, without making a breach in the continuity or progress of the sense.

This system is essential to the economy of breath in speech. It enables us to supply respiration by in-spiration; that is, to recover by breathing in what we have expended in breathing out, and so keeping our lung-power constantly at full tide.

At the same time that by these regulated rests, or suspensions of utterance, differing in

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time or duration, we help ourselves, we help also the mind of our hearers to keep pace, pari passu, with ourselves, with the gradual growth of the sense and its progress towards completion at the end of the sentence.

Now, is that desirable, or is it not? Is it not almost the first great postulate to an intelligent reading aloud? Is it not one on which most readers aloud fail, and hopelessly entangle themselves and their hearers?

Take such a sentence as the following, and read it aloud without rests of any kind, as it is printed according to the rules of grammatical pausing, or printers' punctuation, as I call it. READ aloud:

Nothing can be more prejudicial to the great interests of a nation than an unsettled and varying policy which cannot be calculated on from day to day.

Now, if you have succeeded (which is hardly probable) in reading this sentence aloud, as it is printed, without any pause or rest at all, you will have done two bad things, viz.: you will have hurried yourself, and befogged your hearers.

If they have understood you it has been by an effort, and a painful one; for it is painful to follow such a rush of ill-ordered speech.

This shows the necessity of some pause in such a sentence. Grammatical law, the law of printers' punctuation, requires none. Elocution

ary law-that is, the law of speaking with ease to oneself and clearness to one's hearers— requires several.

To make this clear I shall use, at present, two musical marks for the necessary rests or breathing-places, for the ease of the reader and the intelligence of the hearer.

1. The Rest; for a pause equal in duration to a crotchet-rest in a bar of common time in music.

2. The Half-rest; equal in time to only half the rest.

Now get well into your mind the value, in time or intermission, of these two suspensions of voice; the rest, and the half-rest.

And now, observing these signs and their value, READ the same sentence aloud, thus:

Nothing is so prejudicial to the great interests of a nation as an unsettled and varying policy which cannot be calculated on from day to day.

Now remark how logical this division of the sentence is, how easy these rests make the delivery, and how easy to the hearer to follow it— the two points we are aiming at.

Now go back, and once more go through aloud the sentence given for phrasing, with the rests marked.

Next say out aloud, in a natural and easy manner, and in ordinary time, not too quickly,

just as you would quote any proverbial saying:

Out of the frying pan into the fire.

This sentence consists of two phrases, to be divided by a very slight rest, only one half the time in duration of the half-rest, which we will call and mark thus, the quarter-rest .

READ aloud, making this very, very slight intermission:

Out of the frying pan into the fire.

Thus you see what you have been accustomed, and justly, to call a proverbial phrase, consists really for elocutionary purposes of two phrases, logically divided (viz. the act, and its consequence); divided by the quarter-rest, almost inappreciable in time, yet sufficient to mark by intermission the logical division.

A PHRASE, then, in our terminology, is one of the joints of a sentence. Supposing the sentence to be a limb, and the whole essay, speech, sermon, or discourse, to be the entire body, then the phrases are the joints of the sentences as syllables are the joints of the words. Now remember this formula:

Syllables words :: phrases: sentences.

In uttering a word you do not, in articulating its joints, make them apparent by sepa