upon it silently as you read. Now read it
aloud and let your voice do this commenting. But wait a moment. Let me
quote for you the paragraph following this statement.

The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the
laws of nature and morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty
benefit to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit
in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters
must ripen.

This is Emerson's paraphrase of his original statement. How much of it
did your mental commentary include? How did your silent paraphrase
resemble this? Read the original passage again to yourself in the light
of this paraphrase. I shall ask you now to repeat the first sentence
from memory, for you will find, after this concentrated contemplation of
a thought, that its form is fixed fast in your mind. That is a
delightful accompaniment of this kind of reading. The form of the
thought, if it be apposite (which it must be to be literature, and we
are considering only literature), the form of a thought so approached
stays with us in all its beauty.

Let us then repeat the original statement, having read the passage in
which Emerson has elaborated it. Now, what you must demand of your voice
is this: that it shall so handle the single introductory sentence as to
suggest the rest of the paragraph. In other words, your voice must do
the paraphrasing, by means of its changes in pitch, its inflections, and
its variations in tone-color; by means, in short, of its _vocal
vocabulary_.

I

STUDY IN PAUSE AND CHANGE OF PITCH

It is asserted that, "the last word has not been said on any subject."
Mr. Hamilton Mabie seemed to me to achieve a _last word_ on the subject
of _pause_ when he casually remarked: "Emerson was a master of pause; he
would pause, and into the pool of expectancy created by that pause drop
just the right word." There seems little to be added to complete the
exposition of that single sentence. It surely leaves no doubt in our
minds as to the effect to be desired from the use of this element of our
vocabulary. How to use it to gain that effect is our problem. First of
all, we must cease to be afraid to pause. We hurry on over splendid
opportunities to elucidate our text through a just use of this form of
emphasis, beset by two fears: fear that we shall seem to have forgotten
the text; fear that we shall actually forget it if we stop to think.
Th