The Franklin fifth reader - 1875 Author:George Stillman Hillard Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. PRINCIPLES AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE ELEMENTS OF VOCAL EXPRESSION. FORCE. As in our analysis of the spirit and sense of each passage, we have always ... more »two quite different questions to ask, viz., What is the general spirit, and what the relative importance of the individual ideas ? so in our analysis of each one of the elements of vocal expression, we have the same general and individual inquiries to make: — 1. What general degree of force will best express the ' general spirit' of the piece ? 2. Taking.this general force as our ' standard' degree of loudness or softness to be given to the unemphatic words, how much additional force must we give to the empf/atic words, in order to bring out, in our reading, the .relative importance of the different ideas? PRINCIPLE FOR STANDARD FORCE. Determine the ' standard force ' for the unemphatic words by the ' kind' or ' general spirit' of the piece. If the kind is ' unemotional,' the standard force is ' moderate.'' If the kind is ' bold,' the standard force is ' loud.' If the kind is ' pathetic or subdued/ the standard force is ' soft.' PRINCIPLE FOR RELATIVE OR EMPHATIC FORCE. Taking the ' standard force' for the unemphatic words, give additional force to the emphatic ideas, according to their relative importance. "Learning is better than wealth; Culture is better than learning; Wisdom is better than culture." ANALYSIS. The ' general spirit' or ' kind' is ' unemotional.' The 'standard force'' is, therefore, 'moderate? The words " better " and " wealth " in the first line must have just enough additional force to distinguish them from the un- emphatic words "is" and "than." "Learning" is more important than " wealth," and must have enough more force than " wealth" to express its relative import...« less