8. Is it anybody's business if a gentleman should choose

To wait upon a lady, if the lady don't refuse?

9. For the kingdom of God is not in words, but in power. 10. Does Napoleon deserve praise or censure?

11. Are you guilty or not guilty?

12. Would you do a handsome thing without a return? Do it, then, for an infant that is not sensible of the obligation. Would you do it for the public good? Do it, then, for an honest artificer. 13. Did he pitch his voice high or low? He pitched it very high, not low.

Remarks. The general rules relating to the inflections may be understood, and the power possessed in a remarkable degree to exemplify them, but without a clear understanding and a right appreciation of each passage, it can not be rendered correctly.

Concentrate the vocal force in each of the preceding examples chiefly on the emphatic words, but render the whole passage as if expressing your own thoughts and sentiments. When a passage is given with great force and energy, be careful not to let the voice recoil on the emphatic words, but so use the voice as to fulfill all the conditions of a perfect slide-namely, a full opening, a gradual decline, and a delicate vanish.

PITCH.

Pitch signifies the place in the musical scale on which a sound is uttered, or it may refer to the pervading pitch of voice in reading or speaking. The following distinctions may be made in pitch: Very low, low, middle or conversational, high, and very high.

The pitch of a sound is entirely different, both from its force and its quantity. The variations in pitch of which the human voice is capable are very great. Melody and expression depend mainly on the variations in pitch.

To acquire the power of changing the pitch or key at pleasure, exercise your voice with the utmost force consistent with purity of tone, in all the keys in which you can control it, from the lowest to the highest, on the elementary sounds, on several successive short or long words, and upon short passages.

Many of the keys on which you practice would neither be proper nor pleasant in speaking, but the exercise of the voice in this way will rapidly increase its compass. Having practiced this and other exercises in pitch until you can speak with ease in different keys, then deliver a variety of passages, each of which requires to be given in a different key. In reading or speaking to a small audience, or in a small room, the pitch of the voice should be that which we employ in ordinary conversation. This pitch being the most natural, will render the delivery more easy to the speaker and more pleasant to the hearers. In addressing a large audience, the speaker should commence in his conversational tone, but as he proceeds and becomes more animated, the force of voice will naturally increase, and the voice will unconsciously glide into a higher tone. When a speaker becomes intensely in earnest, vehement, and impassioned, his key-note will be elevated several notes above the one on which he commenced.

HIGH AND VERY HIGH PITCH.

EXAMPLES.

1. Fire! Fire! Fire!

2. Boat ahoy! Boat ahoy!

3. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

4. Up drawbridge, grooms! what, warder, ho!

Let the portcullis fall.

5. A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse.

6. Bursts the storm on Phocis' walls!

Rise! or Greece forever falls.

7. To arms! To arms! To arms! a thousand voices cried.

8. "Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!" he said.

9. Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable! 10. Ho! sound the tocsin from the tower,

11.

And fire the culverin!

Bid each retainer arm with speed!

Call every vassal in!

Rouse, ye Romans! rouse, ye slaves!

Have ye brave sons? Look in the next fierce brawl
To see them die. Have ye fair daughters? Look
To see them live, torn from your arms, distained,
Dishonored; and if ye dare call for justice,

Be answered by the lash!

Most of the examples in Repetition are appropriate for practice in high pitch. In giving passages with great force in a high pitch, be sure to drop the jaw so as to keep the mouth and throat well open, and when the voice breaks into a falsetto or into an impure tone of any kind, stop immediately, rest a short time, and then begin again more carefully.

Low PITCH.

The best way to obtain a good control of the voice in a low key is to practice such exercises as those given under Repetition and High Pitch, until somewhat fatigued with the exertion, then, after resting the lungs and vocal organs for two or three hours, practice in the lowest and deepest tone you can command, upon passages which require the lowest and most prolonged tones.

If it be found very laborious and difficult to sustain a full, clear, and resonant tone in a low key, rest a short time occasionally, and then "try again."

Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'Tis the Divinity that stirs within us;

'Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, And intimates eternity to man.

Eternity!-thou pleasing, dreadful thought!
Through what variety of untried being,

Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!
The wide, th' unbounded prospect lies before me;
But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it.

2. Night, sable goddess, from her ebon throne,
In rayless majesty, now stretches forth

3.

Her leaden scepter o'er a slumbering world.
Silence, how deep! and darkness, how profound!
Nor eye, nor listening ear, an object finds;
Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the general pulse
Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause,
An awful pause, prophetic of her end.

Now o'er the one half world
Nature seems dead; and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep; now witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings; and withered Murder,
Alarmed by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl's his watch, thus, with his stealthy pace,
Toward his design

Moves like a ghost.--Thou sure and firm-set earth!
Hear not my steps, which they walk; for fear

The very stones prate of my whereabout,

And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it.

4. Dark is the night! how dark! no light! no fire!
Cold on the hearth the last faint sparks expire!
Hark! how the sign-board creaks! the blast howls by!
Moan! moan! a dirge swells through the clouded sky.

5. They're gone! they're gone! the glimmering spark hath fled! The wife and child are numbered with the dead!

On the cold hearth outstretched, in solemn rest,

The child lies frozen on its mother's breast!

The gambler came at last, but all was o'er ;

Dead silence reigned around. The clock struck four.

6. Of comfort no man speak:

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let's choose executors and talk of wills;
And yet not so--for what can we bequeath,
Save our deposed bodies, to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all, are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death,
And that small model of our barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
7. Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes, to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost-a killing frost;
And when he thinks, good easy man! full surely
His greatness is a-ripening-nips the root,

And then he falls, as I do.

8. Yes, my friends, Death has been among us! He has not entered the humble cottage of some unknown, ignoble peasant; he has knocked audibly at the palace of a nation! His footstep has been heard in the halls of state! He has cloven down his victim in the midst of the councils of a people. He has borne in triumph from among you the gravest, wisest, most reverend head. Ah! he has taken him as a trophy who was once chief over many statesmen, adorned with virtue and learning and truth; he has borne at his chariot-wheels a renowned one of the earth.

9. To be or not to be-that is the question:-
Whether 't is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? To die-to sleep-
No more:-and, by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to 't is a consummation
Devoutly to be wished.

MIDDLE PITCH.

EXAMPLES.

1. "A certain amount of opposition," says John Neal, “is a great help to a man." Kites rise against and not with the wind. Even a head-wind is better than none. No man ever worked his passage