Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

business interests destroyed, its commercial intercourse with us cut off, its people starved, degraded and enslaved. It may be the naked legal right of the United States to stand thus idly by. I have the legal right to pass along the street and see a helpless dog stamped into the earth under the heels of a ruffian. I can pass by and say, that is not my dog. I can sit in my comfortable parlor, and through my plate-glass window see a fiend outraging a helpless woman near by, and I can legally say, this is no affair of mineit is not happening on my premises. But if I do, I am a coward and a cur, unfit to live, and, God knows, unfit to die.

And yet I cannot protect the dog nor save the woman without the exercise of force. We cannot intervene and save Cuba without the exercise of force, and force means war; war means blood. The lowly Nazarene on the shores of Galilee preached the divine doctrine of love, "Peace on earth, good will toward men." Not peace on earth at the expense of liberty and humanity. Not good will toward men who despoil, enslave, degrade and starve to death their fellow-men. I believe in the doctrine of Christ. I believe in the doctrine of peace; but men must have liberty before there can come abiding peace. When has a battle for humanity and liberty ever been won except by force? What barricade of wrong, injustice, and oppression has ever been carried except by force?

Force compelled the signature of unwilling royalty to the great Magna Charta; force put life into the Declaration of Independence and made effective the Emancipation Proclamation; force waved the flag of revolution over Bunker Hill and marked the snows of Valley Forge with blood-stained feet; force held the broken line of Shiloh, climbed the flameswept hill at Chattanooga, and stormed the clouds on Lookout Heights; force marched with Sherman to the sea, rode with Sheridan in the Valley of the Shenandoah, and gave

Grant victory at Appomattox; force saved the Union, kept the stars in the flag, made "niggars" men. The time for God's force has come again. Let the impassioned lips of American patriots once more take up the song:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigured you and me. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, For God is marching on.

Others may hesitate, others may procrastinate, others may plead for further diplomatic negotiation, which means delay, but for me, I am ready to act now, and for my action I am ready to answer to my conscience, my country, and my God.

GROUP PROMINENCE.

[Frequently prominence is demanded for a group of words. This occurs when each word of the group forms an essential part of the idea, as, "The usurpation of authority is unwise." Here it is not "'usurpation," not "authority," but usurpation of authority" that is unwise, and, that, therefore, demands prominence.] ·

The Sources of Poetry.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

That there is something in whatever is unknown and inscrutable which strongly excites the imagination and awes the heart, particularly when connected with things of unusual vastness and grandeur, is not to be denied. But I deny that much of this mystery is apparent to an ignorant age, and I maintain that no small degree of inquiry and illumination is necessary to enable the mind to perceive it. He who takes all things to be as they appear, who supposes the earth to be a great plane, the sun a moving ball of fire, the heavens a vault of sapphire, and the stars a multitude of little flames lighted up in its arches-what does he think of mysteries or care for them? But enlighten him a little further. Teach

him that the earth is an immense sphere; that the wide land whose bounds he knows so imperfectly is an isle in the great oceans that flow all over it; talk to him of the boundlessness of the skies, and the army of worlds that move through them, and by means of the knowledge that you communicate, you have opened to him a vast field of the unknown and the wonderful. Thus it ever was and ever will be with the human mind; everything which it knows introduces to its observation a greater multitude of things which it does not know; the clearing up of one mystery conducts it to another; all its discoveries are bounded by a circle of doubt and ignorance which is wide in proportion to the knowledge it enfolds. It is a pledge of the immortal destinies of the human intellect that it is forever drawn by a strong attraction to the darker edge of this circle, and forever attempting to penetrate the obscurities beyond. The old world, then, is welcome to its mysteries; we need not envy it on that account; for, in addition to our superior knowledge and as a consequence of it, we have even more of them than it, and they are loftier, deeper and more spiritual.

But the mythologies of antiquity! I cannot but think that human beings, placed among the things of this earth, with their affections and sympathies, their joys and sorrows, and the accident of fortune to which they are liable, are infinitely a better subject for poetry than any imaginary race of creatures whatever. Let the fountain tell me of the flocks that have drank at it; of the village girls that have gathered spring flowers on its margin; the traveler that has slaked his thirst there in the hot noon, and blessed its waters; the schoolboy that has pulled the nuts from the hazels that hang over it as it leaps and sparkles in its cool basin; let it speak of youth and health and purity and gladness, and I care not for the naiad that pours it out. If it must have a religious association, let it murmur of the invisible goodness that fills

and feeds its reservoirs in the darkness of the earth. The admirers of poetry, then, may give up the ancient mythology without a sigh. Its departure has left us what is better than all it has taken away; it has left us men and women; it has left us the creatures and the things of God's universe to the simple charm of which the cold splendor of that system blinded men's eyes, and to the magnificence of which the rapid progress of science is every day adding new wonders and glories. It has left us also a more sublime and affecting religion, whose truths are broader, higher, nobler, than any outlook to which its random conjectures ever attained.

PROMINENCE OF PARTS TO WHOLE.

[Besides the prominence of words and groups in relation to the separate ideas, there is also their prominence in relation to the whole composition. Thus, in the line, "Then they rode back' (Charge of the Light Brigade), the "then" requires prominence, not only because of its relation to that group but because it helps to emphasize the story of the whole poem. "Then,'' that is, after the soldiers had done their duty and not till then, "they rode back." Also (as shown under Pause and Leading Statement), those ideas which are the leading ones of the theme should be given prominence, in order to make clear their relative importance.]

Hamlet's Advice to the Players.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the

groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod; pray you, avoid it.

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor; suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

O, reform it altogether. And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.

The Relative Importance of Activities.

HERBERT SPENCER.

Our first step must obviously be to classify, in the order of their importance, the leading kinds of activity which con

« VorigeDoorgaan »