A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Public Speaking

I >> Irvah Lester Winter >> Public Speaking







SHOWING THE PICTURE


MOUNT, THE DOGE OF VENICE!

From the play, "Foscari"

BY MARY RUSSELL MITFORD

_Doge_. What! didst thou never hear
Of the old prediction that was verified
When I became the Doge?

_Zeno_. An old prediction!

_Doge_. Some seventy years ago--it seems to me
As fresh as yesterday--being then a lad
No higher than my hand, idle as an heir,
And all made up of gay and truant sports,
I flew a kite, unmatched in shape or size,
Over the river--we were at our house
Upon the Brenta then; it soared aloft,
Driven by light vigorous breezes from the sea
Soared buoyantly, till the diminished toy
Grew smaller than the falcon when she stoops
To dart upon her prey. I sent for cord,
Servant on servant hurrying, till the kite
Shrank to the size of a beetle: still I called
For cord, and sent to summon father, mother,
My little sisters, my old halting nurse,--
I would have had the whole world to survey
Me and my wondrous kite. It still soared on,
And I stood bending back in ecstasy,
My eyes on that small point, clapping my hands,
And shouting, and half envying it the flight
That made it a companion of the stars,
When close beside me a deep voice exclaimed--
Aye, mount! mount! mount!--I started back, and saw
A tall and aged woman, one of the wild
Peculiar people whom wild Hungary sends
Roving through every land. She drew her cloak
About her, turned her black eyes up to Heaven,
And thus pursued: Aye, like his fortunes, mount,
The future Doge of Venice! And before
For very wonder any one could speak
She disappeared.

_Zeno_. Strange! Hast thou never seen
That woman since?

_Doge_. I never saw her more.


THE REVENGE

From "Tennyson's Poetical Works," published by Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.

BY ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

"Shall we fight or shall we fly?
Good Sir Richard, tell us now,
For to fight is but to die!
There'll be little of us left by the time this sun be set."
And Sir Richard said again: "We be all good Englishmen.
Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil,
For I never turned my back upon don or devil yet."
Sir Richard spoke and he laughed, and we roar'd a hurrah, and so
The little _Revenge_ ran on sheer into the heart of the foe,
With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below;
For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen.
And the little _Revenge_ ran on thro' the long sea lane between.

And while now the great _San Philip_ hung above us like a cloud
Whence the thunderbolt will fall
Long and loud,
Four galleons drew away
From the Spanish fleet that day,
And two upon the larboard and two upon the starboard lay,
And the battle-thunder broke from them all.

And the sun went down, and the stars came out, far over the summer sea,
But never a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty-three.
Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came,
Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle-thunder and
flame;
Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and her
shame,
For some were sunk, and many were shatter'd, and so could fight us no
more--
God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?

For he said: "Fight on! fight on!"
Tho' his vessel was all but a wreck;
And it chanced that, when half of the summer night was gone,
With a grisly wound to be dressed, he had left the deck,
But a bullet struck him that was dressing it suddenly dead,
And himself he was wounded again, in the side and the head,
And he said: "Fight on! Fight on!"

And the night went down, and the sun smiled out far over the summer
sea,
And the Spanish fleet with broken sides lay round us all in a ring;
But they dared not touch us again, for they feared that we still could
sting,
So they watched what the end would be.
And we had not fought them in vain,
But in perilous plight were we,
Seeing forty of our poor hundred were slain
and half of the rest of us maimed for life
In the crash of the cannonades and the desperate strife;
And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark and cold,
And the pikes were all broken and bent, and the powder was all of it
spent;
And the masts and the rigging were lying over the side;
But Sir Richard cried in his English pride,
"We have fought such a fight for a day and a night
As may never be fought again!
We have won great glory, my men!
And a day less or more
At sea or ashore,
We die--does it matter when?
Sink me the ship, Master Gunner--sink her, split her in twain!
Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!"


A VISION OF WAR

From a Memorial Day address, with the permission of C. P. Farrell, New
York, publisher and owner of the Ingersoll copyrighted books.

BY ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

The past rises before me like a dream. Again we are in the great
struggle for national life. We hear the sounds of preparation; the
music of boisterous drums; the silver voices of heroic bugles. We see
thousands of assemblages, and hear the appeals of orators. We see the
pale cheeks of women, and the flushed faces of men; and in those
assemblages we see all the dead whose dust we have covered with
flowers. We lose sight of them no more. We are with them when they
enlist in the great army of freedom. We see them part with those they
love. Some are walking for the last time in quiet, woody places with
the maidens they adore. We hear the whisperings and the sweet vows of
eternal love as they lingeringly part forever. Others are bending over
cradles, kissing babes that are asleep. Some are receiving the
blessings of old men. Some are parting with mothers who hold them and
press them to their hearts again and again and say nothing. Kisses and
tears, tears and kisses--divine mingling of agony and joy! And some are
talking with wives, and endeavoring with brave words, spoken in the old
tones, to drive from their hearts the awful fear. We see them part. We
see the wife standing in the door with the babe in her arms--standing
in the sunlight, sobbing. At the turn in the road a hand waves--she
answers by holding high in her loving arms the child. He is gone, and
forever.

We see them all as they march proudly away under the flaunting flags,
keeping time to the grand, wild music of war,--marching down the
streets of the great cities, through the towns and across the prairies,
down to the fields of glory, to do and to die for the eternal right.

A vision of the future rises:--

I see our country filled with happy homes, with firesides of content--
the foremost of all the earth.

I see a world where thrones have crumbled and kings are dust. The
aristocracy of idleness has perished from the earth.

I see a world without a slave. Man at last is free. Nature's forces
have by science been enslaved. Lightning and light, wind and wave,
frost and flame, and all the secret-subtle powers of earth and air are
the tireless toilers for the human race.

I see a world at peace, adorned with every form of art, with music's
myriad voices thrilled, while lips are rich with words of love and
truth; a world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns; a world on
which the gibbet's shadow does not fall; a world where labor reaps its
full reward, where work and worth go hand in hand, where the poor girl
trying to win bread with the needle--the needle that has been called
"the asp for the breast of the poor"--is not driven to the desperate
choice of crime or death, of suicide or shame.

I see a world without the beggar's outstretched palm, the miser's
heartless, stony stare, the piteous wail of want, the livid lips of
lies, the cruel eyes of scorn.

I see a race without disease of flesh or brain,--shapely and fair,--the
married harmony of form and function,--and, as I look, life lengthens,
joy deepens, love canopies the earth; and over all, in the great dome,
shines the eternal star of human hope.


SUNSET NEAR JERUSALEM

From an article in the _Century Magazine_, June, 1906, with the
Permission of the Century Company and of the author.

BY CORWIN KNAPP LINSON

To our Northern eyes the intense brilliancy of the tropical and semi-
tropical sky comes as a revelation. Sometimes at noon it is painfully
dazzling; but the evening is a vision of prismatic light holding
carnival in the air, wherein Milton's "twilight gray" has no part.
Unless the sky is held in the relentless grip of a winter storm, the
Orient holds no gray in its evening tones; these are translucent and
glowing from the setting of the sun until the stars appear. In Greece
we are dreamers in that subtle atmosphere, and in Egypt visionaries
under the spell of an ethereal loveliness where the filigree patterning
of white dome and minaret and interlacing palm and feathery pepper tree
leaves little wonder in the mind that the ornamentation of their
architecture is so ravishing in its tracery.

Outside the walls of Jerusalem on the north there is a point on a knoll
which commands the venerable city that David took for his own. From
here you can watch the variable glow of color spread over the whole
breadth of country, from the ground at one's feet to the distant purple
hilltops of Bethlehem. The fluid air seems to swim, as if laden with
incense. The rocks underfoot are of all tones of lavender in shadow,
and of tender, warm gleams in the light, casting vivid violet shadows
athwart the mottled orange of the ground.

Down in the little valley just below us a tiny vineyard nestles in the
half-light; the gray road trails outside; and beyond rise the walls,
serene and stately, catching on their highest towers the last rays of
the sun.

The pointed shaft of the German church lifts a gray-green finger tipped
with rose into the ambient air. The sable dome of the Holy Sepulcher
yields a little to the subtle influence, and shows a softer and more
becoming purple.

All the unlovely traits and the squalor of the city are lost, so
delicately tender is the mass of buildings painted against the
background of distance.

It had been one of those days in March when the clouds of "the latter
rains" had been blowing from the west. As the day drew near its close,
the heavy mists assembled in great masses of ominous gray and blue,
golden-edged against the turquoise sky. With such speed did they move
that they seemed suddenly to leap from the horizon, and the vast dome
of the heaven became filled with weird, flying monsters racing
overhead. The violence of the wind tore the blue into fragments, so
that what only a moment since was a colossal weight of cloud
threatening to ingulf the universe, was now like a great host marshaled
in splendid array, flying banners of crimson, whose ranks were ever
changing, until they scattered in disordered flight across the face of
the sky.

As the lowering sun neared the horizon, the color grew more and more
vivid, until the whole heaven was aflame with a whirlwind of scarlet
and gold and crimson, of violet and blue and emerald, flecked with
copper and bronze and shreds of smoky clouds in shadow, a tempestuous
riot of color so wild and extraordinary as to hold one spellbound.

Had not David beheld a similar sky when he wrote:--

O Lord my God, thou art very great;
Thou art clothed with honor and majesty.
Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment:
Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain:
Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters:
Who maketh the clouds his chariot:
Who walketh upon the wings of the wind:
Who maketh winds his messengers;
His ministers a flaming fire.


A RETURN IN TRIUMPH

From a speech before the New England Society of New York, December,
1886

BY T. DE WITT TALMAGE

I never so realized what this country was and is as on the day when I
first saw some of these gentlemen of the Army and Navy. It was when at
the close of the War our armies came back and marched in review before
the President's stand at Washington. I do not care whether a man was a
Republican or a Democrat, a Northern man or a Southern man, if he had
any emotion of nature, he could not look upon it without weeping. God
knew that the day was stupendous, and He cleared the heaven of cloud
and mist and chill, and sprung the blue sky as the triumphal arch for
the returning warriors to pass under. From Arlington Heights the spring
foliage shook out its welcome, as the hosts came over the hills, and
the sparkling waters of the Potomac tossed their gold to the feet of
the battalions as they came to the Long Bridge and in almost
interminable line passed over. The Capitol never seemed so majestic as
on that morning: snowy white, looking down upon the tides of men that
came surging down, billow after billow. Passing in silence, yet I heard
in every step the thunder of conflicts through which they had waded,
and seemed to see dripping from their smoke-blackened flags the blood
of our country's martyrs. For the best part of two days we stood and
watched the filing on of what seemed endless battalions, brigade after
brigade, division after division, host after host, rank beyond rank;
ever moving, ever passing; marching, marching; tramp, tramp, tramp--
thousands after thousands, battery front, arms shouldered, columns
solid, shoulder to shoulder, wheel to wheel, charger to charger,
nostril to nostril.

Commanders on horses with their manes entwined with roses, and necks
enchained with garlands, fractious at the shouts that ran along the
line, increasing from the clapping of children clothed in white,
standing on the steps of the Capitol, to the tumultuous vociferation of
hundreds of thousands of enraptured multitudes, crying "Huzza! Huzza!"
Gleaming muskets, thundering parks of artillery, rumbling pontoon
wagons, ambulances from whose wheels seemed to sound out the groans of
the crushed and the dying that they had carried. These men came from
balmy Minnesota, those from Illinois prairies. These were often hummed
to sleep by the pines of Oregon, those were New England lumbermen.
Those came out of the coal-shafts of Pennsylvania. Side by side in one
great cause, consecrated through fire and storm and darkness, brothers
in peril, on their way home from Chancellorsville and Kenesaw Mountain
and Fredericksburg, in lines that seemed infinite they passed on.

We gazed and wept and wondered, lifting up our heads to see if the end
had come, but no! Looking from one end of that long avenue to the
other, we saw them yet in solid column, battery front, host beyond
host, wheel to wheel, charger to charger, nostril to nostril, coming as
it were from under the Capitol. Forward! Forward! Their bayonets,
caught in the sun, glimmered and flashed and blazed, till they seemed
like one long river of silver, ever and anon changed into a river of
fire. No end of the procession, no rest for the eyes. We turned our
heads from the scene, unable longer to look. We felt disposed to stop
our ears, but still we heard it, marching, marching; tramp, tramp,
tramp. But hush,--uncover every head! Here they pass, the remnant of
ten men of a full regiment. Silence! Widowhood and orphanage look on
and wring their hands. But wheel into line, all ye people! North,
South, East, West--all decades, all centuries, all millenniums!
Forward, the whole line! Huzza! Huzza!


A RETURN IN DEFEAT

From "The New South," with the permission of Henry W. Grady, Junior

BY HENRY W. GRADY

Dr. Talmage has drawn for you, with a master hand, the picture of your
returning armies. He has told you how, in the pomp and circumstance of
war, they came back to you, marching with proud and victorious tread,
reading their glory in a nation's eyes! Will you bear with me while I
tell you of another army that sought its home at the close of the late
war? An army that marched home in defeat and not in victory--in pathos
and not in splendor, but in glory that equaled yours, and to hearts as
loving as ever welcomed heroes home. Let me picture to you the footsore
Confederate soldier, as, buttoning up in his faded gray jacket the
parole which was to bear testimony to his children of his fidelity and
faith, he turned his face southward from Appomattox in April, 1865.
Think of him, as ragged, half-starved, heavy-hearted, enfeebled by want
and wounds, having fought to exhaustion, he surrenders his gun, wrings
the hands of his comrades in silence, and, lifting his tear-stained and
pallid face for the last time to the graves that dot the old Virginia
hills, pulls his gray cap over his brow and begins the slow and painful
journey. What does he find?--let me ask you who went to your homes
eager to find, in the welcome you had justly earned, full payment for
four years' sacrifice--what does he find when, having followed the
battle-stained cross against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half
so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and
beautiful? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves
free, his stock killed, his barn empty, his trade destroyed, his money
worthless; his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away;
his people without law or legal status; his comrades slain, and the
burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very
traditions gone; without money, credit, employment, material training;
and besides all this, confronted with the gravest problem that ever met
human intelligence--the establishing of a status for the vast body of
his liberated slaves.

What does he do--this hero in gray, with a heart of gold? Does he sit
down in sullenness and despair? Not for a day. Surely God, who had
stripped him of his prosperity, inspired him in his adversity. As ruin
was never before so overwhelming, never was restoration swifter. The
soldier stepped from the trenches into the furrow; horses that had
charged Federal guns marched before the plow, and the fields that ran
red with human blood in April were green with the harvest in June;
women reared in luxury cut up their dresses and made breeches for their
husbands, and, with a patience and heroism that fit women always as a
garment, gave their hands to work. There was little bitterness in all
this. Cheerfulness and frankness prevailed. I want to say to General
Sherman--who is considered an able man in our parts, though some people
think he is kind of careless about fire--that from the ashes he left us
in 1864 we have raised a brave and beautiful city; that somehow or
other we have caught the sunshine in the bricks and mortar of our
homes, and have builded therein not one ignoble prejudice or memory.

But in all this what have we accomplished? What is the sum of our work?
We have found that in the general summary the free negro counts more
than he did as a slave. We have planted the schoolhouse on the hilltop
and made it free to white and black. We have sowed towns and cities in
the place of theories, and put business above politics.

Above all, we know that we have achieved in these "piping times of
peace" a fuller independence for the South than that which our fathers
sought to win in the forum by their eloquence, or compel on the field
by their swords.




EXPRESSION BY ACTION


IN OUR FOREFATHERS' DAY

From a speech before the New England Society of New York, December,
1886

BY T. DE WITT TALMAGE

I must not introduce a new habit into these New England dinners, and
confine myself to the one theme. For eighty-one years your speakers
have been accustomed to make the toast announced the point from which
they start, but to which they never return. So I shall not stick to my
text, but only be particular to have all I say my own, and not make the
mistake of a minister whose sermon was a patchwork from a variety of
authors, to whom he gave no credit. There was an intoxicated wag in the
audience who had read about everything, and he announced the authors as
the minister went on. The clergyman gave an extract without any credit
to the author, and the man in the audience cried out: "That's Jeremy
Taylor." The speaker went on and gave an extract from another author
without credit for it, and the man in the audience said: "That is John
Wesley." The minister gave an extract from another without credit for
it, and the man in the audience said: "That is George Whitefield." When
the minister lost his patience and cried out, "Shut up, you old fool!"
the man in the audience replied: "That is your own."

Well, what about this Forefathers' Day? In Brooklyn they say the
Landing of the Pilgrims was December the 21st; in New York you say it
was December the 22d. You are both right. Not through the specious and
artful reasoning you have sometimes indulged in, but by a little
historical incident that seems to have escaped your attention. You see,
the Forefathers landed in the morning of December the 21st, but about
noon that day a pack of hungry wolves swept down the bleak American
beach looking for a New England dinner and a band of savages out for a
tomahawk picnic hove in sight, and the Pilgrim Fathers thought it best
for safety and warmth to go on board the Mayflower and pass the night.
And during the night there came up a strong wind blowing off shore that
swept the Mayflower from its moorings clear out to sea, and there was a
prospect that our Forefathers, having escaped oppression in foreign
lands, would yet go down under an oceanic tempest. But the next day
they fortunately got control of their ship and steered her in, and the
second time the Forefathers stepped ashore.

Brooklyn celebrated the first landing; New York the second landing. So
I say Hail! Hail! to both celebrations, for one day, anyhow, could not
do justice to such a subject; and I only wish I could have kissed the
blarney stone of America, which is Plymouth Rock, so that I might have
done justice to this subject. Ah, gentlemen, that Mayflower was the ark
that floated the deluge of oppression, and Plymouth Rock was the Ararat
on which it landed.

But let me say that these Forefathers were of no more importance than
the Foremothers. As I understand it, there were eight of them--that is,
four fathers and four mothers--from whom all these illustrious New
Englanders descended.

Now I was not born in New England, but though not born in New England,
in my boyhood I had a New England schoolmaster, whom I shall never
forget. He taught us our A, B, C's. "What is that?" "I don't know,
sir." "That's A" (with a slap). "What is that?" "I don't know, sir."
(With a slap)--"That is B." I tell you, a boy that learned his letters
in that way never forgot them; and if the boy was particularly dull,
then this New England schoolmaster would take him over his knee, and
then the boy got his information from both directions.

But all these things aside, no one sitting at these tables has higher
admiration for the Pilgrim Fathers than I have--the men who believed
in two great doctrines, which are the foundation of every religion that
is worth anything: namely, the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of
Man--these men of backbone and endowed with that great and magnificent
attribute of stick-to-it-iveness.


CASSIUS AGAINST CÆSAR

From "Julius Cæsar"

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

I know that virtue to be in you, Brutus,
As well as I do know your outward favor.
Well, honor is the subject of my story.--
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but, for my single self,
I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.
I was born free as Cæsar; so were you:
We both have fed as well; and we can both
Endure the winter's cold as well as he:
For once, upon a raw and gusty day,
The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,
Cæsar said to me, "Dar'st thou, Cassius, now
Leap in with me into this angry flood,
And swim to yonder point?" Upon the word,
Accoutred as I was, I plunged in,
And bade him follow: so, indeed, he did.
The torrent roar'd, and we did buffet it
With lusty sinews, throwing it aside
And stemming it with hearts of controversy;
But ere we could arrive the point propos'd,
Cæsar cried, "Help me, Cassius, or I sink!"
I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber
Did I the tired Cæsar. And this man
Is now become a god; and Cassius is
A wretched creature, and must bend his body,
If Cæsar carelessly but nod on him.
He had a fever when he was in Spain,
And, when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake: 'tis true, this god did shake:
His coward lips did from their color fly;
And that same eye, whose bend doth awe the world,
Did lose his luster: I did hear him groan:
Ay, and that tongue of his, that bade the Romans
Mark him, and write his speeches in their books,
Alas, it cried, "Give me some drink, Titinius,"
As a sick girl. Ye gods, it doth amaze me
A man of such a feeble temper should
So get the start of the majestic world,
And bear the palm alone.

II

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates;
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus and Cæsar: what should be in that "Cæsar"?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with 'em,
Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Cæsar.
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Cæsar feed,
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was fam'd with more than with one man?
When could they say till now, that talked of Rome,
That her wide walls encompass'd but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.
O, you and I have heard our fathers say,
There was a Brutus once that would have brook'd
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.