3. THE ANCIENT MARINER.

Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on the wide, wide sea;

And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie!

And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on-and so did I.

I closed my lids and kept them close,
Till the balls like pulses beat ;

For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky

Lay like a load on my weary eye,

And the dead were at my feet.

4. THE HOUR OF DEATH.

Leaves have their time to fall,

COLERIDGE.

And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set-but all,

Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!

5. TO A WATERFOWL.

Whither, midst falling dew,

MRS. HEMANS.

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye

Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,

Thy figure floats along.

V. VERY SLOW MOVEMENT.

BRYANT.

Very slow movement prevails in the expression of deep emotions, such as awe, reverence, horror, melancholy, and grief.

In this movement the rhetorical and grammatical pauses are very long, and the vowel and liquid sounds are dwelt upon and prolonged.

The prevailing inflection in this movement is the

monotone.

EXAMPLES.

1. Air, earth, and sea resound his praise abroad. 2. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll. 3. Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.

4. Childless and crownless in her voiceless woe. 5. It thunders! Sons of dust, in reverence bow.

6. Unto Thee I lift up mine eyes, O Thou that dwellest in the heavens.

7. Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!

8. Now o'er the one half world

Nature seems dead; and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleeper.

Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my steps which way they walk, for fear
The very stones prate of my whereabouts,

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

9. CARDINAL WOLSEY.

Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness.
This is the state of man; to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope, 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 his root,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory—

But far beyond my depth; my high-blown pride
At length broke under me; and now has left me,
Weary, and old with service, to the mercy

Of a rude stream, that must forever hide me.

10. DREAM OF DARKNESS.

SHAKESPEARE.

The crowd was famished by degrees. But two
Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies. They met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place,

Where had been heaped a mass of holy things

For an unholy usage. They raked up,

And, shivering, scraped with their cold, skeleton hands,
The feeble ashes; and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame,
Which was a mockery. Then they lifted

Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other's aspects-saw, and shrieked, and died;
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was, upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend.

11. HIAWATHA.

O the long and dreary Winter!
O the cold and cruel Winter!
Ever thicker, thicker, thicker

Froze the ice on lake and river;
Ever deeper, deeper, deeper

Fell the snow o'er all the landscape,
Fell the covering snow, and drifted
Through the forest, round the village.

BYRON

LONGFELLOW.

EXAMPLES OF MOVEMENT.

VERY SLOW.

Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness.

SLOW.

Alone, alone, all, all alone.

MODERATE.

There was a sound of revelry by night.

FAST.

Come and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe.

VERY FAST.

Hurry! hurry to the field!

Require each pupil to make out and read in the class a similar set of quoted illustrations.

1. Pitch, or key, denotes the highness or lowness of the voice in tone. The range of the voice from the lowest to the highest tone is called its compass.

2. The compass of the voice among readers corresponds, in some degree, to the tenor, soprano, contralto, and bass, among singers; but every voice has its own relatively low, middle, and high tones.

3. For every one, the middle pitch is that tone to which the voice inclines in conversation, or in unimpassioned reading.

4. The three main divisions of pitch are the low, the middle, and the high; but these, for convenience, are subdivided into very low, low, middle, high, and very high.

5. The general key in which a selection should be read is determined by the general sentiment or character of the piece.

6. In order to avoid monotony, there should be some slight variation of pitch at the beginning of each successive paragraph that marks a new topic of discourse, or a change of idea.

7. Low pitch is the tone expressive of serious thought, of awe, of reverence, of adoration, of horror, and of despair.

8. Middle pitch is the tone of conversation, and of unimpassioned narrative or descriptive reading.