their feet
They felt the timbers crack.

Here we imitate spontaneously the movement expressive of sudden fear.
Our action is prompted by our own fears for their safety.

Sometimes the feeling is still more complex. In reading the following
we spontaneously reproduce Sextus' alternate hate and fear which,
moreover, we tinge with our own contempt:

Thrice looked he at the city;
Thrice looked he at the dead;
And thrice came on in fury,
And thrice turned back in dread:
And, white with fear and hatred,
Scowled at the narrow way
Where, wallowing in a pool of blood,
The bravest Tuscans lay.

In reading the little poem from _The Princess_, (page 107) note how we
are influenced by the tense emotion of the attendants who speak. We do
not try to imitate them; but having made the scene stand out before
us, we speak as we in imagination hear them, in an aspirated tone of
voice:

She must weep or she will die.

In the last line it would savour of melodrama to try to impersonate
the lady as she says:

Sweet my child, I live for thee.

The important point is to show intelligent sympathy with her speech,
not to imitate her manner of uttering it.

On the other hand we must not make the mistake of supposing that if we
get the thought and the emotion, the true vocal expression will
follow. One who has a fine appreciation of a piece of literature may,
notwithstanding, read it very indifferently. Even in conversation
where we are interpreting vocally our own thoughts and feelings, we
sometimes misplace emphasis or employ the wrong inflection. How much
more likely we are to fall into such errors when we attempt to
interpret vocally from a book the thoughts of another.

=Elements Of Vocal Expression=

In order to criticise ourselves or understand intelligent criticism,
we must have a knowledge of the laws that govern speech--that is, we
must know what properties of tone or what acts of the voice correspond
to certain mental and emotional states. For example, the amount and
character of thinking done while we read determines the rate of
utterance; the purpose or motive of the thought and its completeness
or incompleteness are indicated by an upward or downward slide of the
voice; the nervous tension expresses itself in a certain key; the
physical and mental energy, in a certain power or volume of the voice;
and the character of the emotion is reflected in the quality. These
principles of vocal expressi