In every change of passion, there are certain continuous elements. A transition is like the wave of the sea: it is the same wave that rises and falls: there can be no true normal transition without sustaining certain conditions. Good art accents one specific change or action, which in this stanza is from sympathy with the struggle of the battle to sympathy for the dying; but the battle-field is the same, the number of men the same, while the heroic and intense control increases rather than diminishes.

It is the manifestation of only one change, as in this illustration, which gives power to expression. If we give up the heroic element of the first, and give mere sadness in the second, the true character of the piece is spoiled.

There is some such danger in all transitions, but especially in changing to sorrow. Sorrow tends to depression, and lack of control; hence there must be a special care to sustain the breadth and the nobility of the situation, and to preserve the intensity. Sadness is the passive characteristic of one who gives up to moods or feelings, but sorrow implies heroic struggle to carry a heavy burden. The first belongs to a weak character only, the second to a noble one. Everywhere we can find two things which are nearly alike, but which on closer examination are found to be wide apart. Only an expert can tell the difference between melted lead and melted silver; brass may be so polished as to look for a moment like gold. The same is true with many emotions. The unthinking, unimaginative speaker or reader substitutes antagonism for earnestness, extravagance for spontaneity, pity for sympathy. Indignation is noble, anger ignoble. Love is the most exalted emotion of a human being, sentimentality one of the lowest.

It is very important in the development of dramatic expression or truthfulness of feeling to practise the noblest emotions in contrast with those which are apparently akin to them, but are really widely apart. It is easy enough to come down a mountain; the difficulty is in climbing to the top. It is the expression of the normal and the noble that calls for the struggle; the abnormal is easy. To bring the abnormal into direct opposition to the noblest experience is the work of an artist.

Cultivated taste or artistic appreciation carefully distinguishes emotions in tragedy from melodrama, comedy from farce or burlesque. Truthful expression of emotion demands a recognition of such distinctions on the part of the reader.

What is the predominant emotion in the following Ballad of the Fleet? Is it heroism, melodramatic extravagance, or farcical caricature? Would a public reader be justified in using tones or movements which belong only to low characters and farcical situations?

THE REVENGE.

AT Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,

And a pinnace, like a flutter'd bird, came flying from far away :
"Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted fifty-three!"
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: "'Fore God I am no coward;
But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear,
And the half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick.
We are six ships of the line; can we fight with fifty-three?"
Then spake Sir Richard Grenville: "I know you are no coward;
You fly them for a moment to fight with them again.

But I've ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore.

I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord Howard,
To these inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain."

So Lord Howard pass'd away with five ships of war that day,
Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven;

But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land

Very carefully and slow,

Men of Bideford in Devon,

And we laid them on the ballast down below;

For we brought them all aboard,

And they blest him in their pain, that they were not left to Spain,

To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord.

He had only a hundred seamen to work the ship and to fight,
And he sailed away from Flores till the Spaniard came in sight,
With his huge sea-castles heaving upon the weather bow.
"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 English men.
Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil,
For I never turn'd my back upon Don or devil yet."

Sir Richard spoke and he laugh'd, 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 her fleet to the right and half to the left were seen,
And the little Revenge ran on thro' the long sea-lane between.

Thousands of their soldiers look'd down from their decks and laugh'd,
Thousands of their seamen made mock at the mad little craft

Running on and on, till delay'd

By their mountain-like San Philip that, of fifteen hundred tons,
And up-shadowing high above us with her yawning tiers of guns,
Took the breath from our sails, and we stay'd.

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.

But anon the great San Philip, she bethought herself and went
Having that within her womb that had left her ill content;

And the rest they came aboard us, and they fought us hand to hand,
For a dozen times they came with their pikes and musqueteers,
And a dozen times we shook 'em off as a dog that shakes his ears
When he leaps from the water to the land.

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 short summer night was gone,

With a grisly wound to be drest 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 fear'd that we still could sting, So they watch'd 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 maim'd 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 or 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 !"

And the gunner said, “Ay, ay,” but the seamen made reply : "We have children, we have wives,

And the Lord hath spared our lives.

We will make the Spaniard promise, if we yield, to let us go;
We shall live to fight again, and to strike another blow."
And the lion lay there dying, and they yielded to the foe.

And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then,
Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard caught at last,
And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign grace;
But he rose upon their decks, and he cried :

"I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true;
I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do:
With a joyful spirit I Sir Richard Grenville die !"
And he fell upon their decks, and he died.

And they stared at the dead that had been so valiant and true,
And had holden the power and glory of Spain so cheap
That he dared her with one little ship and his English few;
Was he devil or man? He was devil for aught they knew,
But they sank his body with honour down into the deep,
And they mann'd the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew,
And away she sail'd with her loss and long'd for her own;
When a wind from the lands they had ruin'd awoke from sleep,
And the water began to heave and the weather to moan,
And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,

And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,

Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags, And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter'd navy of Spain, And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags

To be lost evermore in the main.

Tennyson.

The earnest student will struggle to define carefully in his vocal expression differences between the low and the high in emotion. Vocal expression is the direct language of emotion; and one reason why feeling is so little understood, so much despised in expression, is because its natural and direct expression is either so little or so carelessly studied.

THE PRIDE OF YOUTH.1

Proud Maisie is in the wood, walking so early;
Sweet Robin sits on the bush singing so rarely,
"Tell me, thou bonny bird, when shall I marry me?"
"When six braw gentlemen kirkward shall carry ye."
"Who makes the bridal bed, birdie, say truly?"

“The gray-headed sexton that delves the grave duly.
The glowworm o'er grave and stone shall light thee steady;
The owl from the steeple sing welcome, proud lady.'

Sir W. Scott.

The refinement and differentiation of the feelings is one of the highest characteristics of taste and culture in an individual, of advance in the civilization of a nation or a race; hence, it is the most marked indication of noble expression in the speaker, reader,

or actor.

The practice of emotion must always be connected with imaginative action. In expression, it is the imagination which chiefly acts as a stimulus to emotion. It is the power of the imagination

1 Scott has given us nothing more complete and lovely than this little song, which unites simplicity and dramatic power to a wild-wood music of the rarest quality. No moral is drawn, far less any conscious analysis of feeling attempted:

the pathetic meaning is left to be suggested by the mere presentment of the situation. A narrow criticism has often named this, which may be called the Homeric manner, superficial, from its apparent simple facility; but first rate excellence in it is in truth one of the least common triumphs of Poetry.This style should be compared with what is not less perfect in its way, the searching out of inner feeling, the expression of hidden meanings, the revelation of the heart of Nature and of the Soul within the Soul, the analytical method, in short, most completely represented by Wordsworth and by Shelley.

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Palgrave.