efore they can serve effectively to
interpret a literary product.

Many great poets have written subtly organic verse, who could not
vocally realize its potentialities, they not having their organs of
speech sufficiently under control. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is an
example. 'Amongst Coleridge's accomplishments,' says De Quincey,
alluding, in his 'Literary Reminiscences' to Coleridge's lectures on
Poetry and the Fine Arts, at the Royal Institution, 'good reading was
not one; he had neither voice, nor management of voice.' But he must
imaginatively have heard the wonderful verse of Christabel and Kubla
Khan, as an organic, inseparable part of the poetical expression. Mere
literary skill could not have produced such verse. It was a texture
woven by the spirit, which he could not adequately exhibit to the
physical ear, as he was not master of the physical means for so doing.

To read naturally is a common and a very vague phrase. The question is,
what _is_ nature? It is the object of the science and art of reading, to
realize as fully as possible the imperfectly realized instincts of the
voice. 'There is a power in science which searches, discovers,
amplifies, and completes, and which all the strength of spontaneous
effort can never reach.'

When people speak of the natural in expression, they generally mean
nature on the plane on which they are best acquainted with it--the plane
of common speech. But the language of the higher poetry, or of tragedy,
or even of impassioned prose, is, more or less, an idealized language,
for the expression of which a corresponding idealization of voice is
demanded. To read, for example, Milton's apostrophe to Light, at the
beginning of the third book of Paradise Lost, after the manner of common
speech, would be somewhat absurd. The idealization of voice demanded for
the reading of such language, is not, however, a departure from nature,
but is nature on a higher plane.

'Enter into the _spirit_ of what you read, read _naturally_, and you
will read well,' is about the sum and substance of what Archbishop
Whateley teaches on the subject, in his 'Elements of Rhetoric.' Similar
advice might with equal propriety be given to a clumsy, stiff-jointed
clodhopper in regard to dancing: 'Enter into the spirit of the dance,
dance naturally, and you will dance well.' The more he might enter into
the spirit of the dance, the more he might emphasize his
stiff-jointedness and his clodhopperishness.

Of