The Academical Speaker: A Selection of Extracts in Prose and Verse, from Ancient and Modern Authors, Adapted for Exercises in Elocution

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Benjamin Dudley Emerson
Richardson, Lord, and Holbrook, 1831 - Elocution - 338 pages

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Page 322 - The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery ! Our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable, and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come! It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry peace! peace!
Page 278 - When a band of exiles moored their bark On the wild New England shore. Not as the conqueror comes, They, the true-hearted, came; Not with the roll of the stirring drums, And the trumpet that sings of fame. Not as the flying come, In silence and in fear: — They shook the depths of the desert gloom With their hymns of lofty cheer.
Page 150 - Sir, before God, I believe the hour is come. My judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is in it. All that I have, and all that I am, and all that I hope, in this life, I am now ready here to stake upon it; and I leave off as I began, that live or die, survive or perish, I am for the Declaration. It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment, Independence now, and Independence forever.
Page 278 - Why had they come to wither there, Away from their childhood's land? There was woman's fearless eye, Lit by her deep love's truth; There was manhood's brow serenely high, And the fiery heart of youth. What sought they thus afar ? Bright jewels of the mine? The wealth of seas, the spoils of war ? They sought a faith's pure shrine. Ay, call it holy ground, The soil where first they trod; They have left unstained what there they found,— Freedom to worship God.
Page 213 - Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits ; whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting place...
Page 85 - When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!
Page 218 - But, I remember, when the fight was done, When I was dry with rage, and extreme toil, Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword, Came there a certain lord, neat, trimly dress'd, Fresh as a bridegroom...
Page 242 - Cataracts of declamation thunder here, There forests of no meaning spread the page In which all comprehension wanders lost ; While fields of pleasantry amuse us there, With merry descants on a nation's woes. The rest appears a wilderness of strange But gay confusion, roses for the cheeks And lilies for the brows of faded age, Teeth for the toothless, ringlets for the bald...
Page 79 - THE stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand! Amidst their tall ancestral trees, O'er all the pleasant land. The deer across their greensward bound, Through shade and sunny gleam, And the swan glides past them with the sound Of some rejoicing stream.
Page 84 - And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit.

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