permanently against you by certain persons who have deliberately planned to do you injury. Now bring this circumstance home by imagining it as having actually occurred in the case of your very best friend. Think of all that friendship has meant to you in the past and what it now means to have it broken. Try to feel very strongly in regard to it. Give yourself to the emotion as it comes and as it continues to grow. Then let your emotion begin to find expression in words. Perhaps you will express yourself, with a great deal of feeling, something after the following manner: "That friendship, which has meant everything in the world to me, has been broken and can never be renewed." Observe the quality of your voice as you express this. Note carefully how it changes color in response to the emotion. Repeat your words again and again, intensifying the emotion and heightening the vocal color. Then express yourself in different ways, changing your language as the feeling becomes more intense. Continue thinking, feeling, and expressing in this way until the vocal responses become very marked and spontaneous. By continued practice of this kind one will soon find the voice becoming more and more responsive, until at length it will reflect to the minutest shade and color the emotions that prompt from within. Cultivating vocal color through expressive literature. Another valuable means of developing expression through vocal quality is by the use of colorful passages of literature. Here again it is necessary to experience strong emotions through the exercise of the imagination, but in a somewhat different way from that followed in the former instance. There you were experiencing imaginatively what might easily take place in your relations with your best friend; here you are to put yourself in the place of some character of literature, and experience in imagination what must have been that individual's emotions under certain circumstances. Suppose you take some very familiar incident in literature, such as the Famine in "Hiawatha." First make a careful study of all the circumstances connected with this incident. Learn how the Indians of the tribe to which Hiawatha belonged were suffering from an unusually severe winter; how they were unable to get game of any kind for food; and how along with the cold and the famine came the terrible, blasting fever. Think intently upon the suffering this must have entailed. Try to recreate in imagination this situation and to experience emotionally something of what Hiawatha must have felt when, after making one final and desperate attempt to get food for Minnehaha, he returns at nightfall unsuccessful and finds her dead. Read for the cultivation of emotional responses through voice quality the following passages from the poem : Oh the long and dreary Winter! Ever thicker, thicker, thicker Fell the snow o'er all the landscape, With his mittens and his snow-shoes Sought for bird or beast and found none, In the snow beheld no footprints, Fell, and could not rise from weakness, Oh the famine and the fever! Oh the wasting of the famine! Oh the blasting of the fever! Oh the wailing of the children! Oh the anguish of the women! All the earth was sick and famished; Hungry was the air around them, And the hungry stars in heaven "Gitche Manito, the Mighty!" ९९ Give your children food, O father! Homeward hurried Hiawatha, And he rushed into the wigwam, Saw the old Nokomis slowly Rocking to and fro and moaning, Lying dead and cold before him. "Farewell! said he, "Minnehaha ! To the Land of the Hereafter!" Cultivating vocal color through extempore speaking. A third means of cultivating vocal quality is by employing not imaginary situations, as in the former instances, but real ones. Take some problem for discussion that is very vital to you, something that comes directly within your own experience. Perhaps it is an injustice that you yourself have suffered or a wrong done to others that you feel very keenly; something that seems to you to demand definite and immediate action. Speak for ten minutes extempore upon this theme, allowing your feelings to have full sway. Make the most burning appeal of which you are capable for a change of conditions. Let your emotion color your voice as it will, until the vocal response is such that every shade of feeling which you are experiencing is made manifest in the quality of your voice. This is one of the most valuable exercises that the public speaker can use for the cultivation of expression through quality, and is particularly beneficial after a certain degree of freedom and responsiveness has been gained by the practice of the imaginary situations that we have suggested. EXERCISES FOR FURTHER CULTIVATION OF EXERCISE I. Imagine the full import of the different situations suggested by the following lines. Enter fully into the emotion arising from each situation and express it vocally many times. Observe the very marked changes that occur in the quality of the voice as each new emotion is experienced. 1. My brother came home discouraged. 2. My brother came home honored. 3. My brother came home dishonored. 4. My brother came home angry. EXERCISE II. Make a careful study of the different situations presented by each of the following passages. Enter into them sympathetically and note the contrasts between the emotions contained in each. Observe carefully the changes in quality that take place as the voice responds to the different emotions. Consider the fact that the first is indicative of very pleasurable emotion, |