Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun

To give it my loving friends to keep !
Naught man could do, have I left undone:

And you see my harvest, what I reap
This very day, now a year is run.

There's nobody on the house-tops now

Just a palsied few at the windows set;
For the best of the sight is, all allow,

At the Shambles' Gate-or, better yet,
By the very scaffold's foot, I trow.

I go in the rain, and, more than needs,

A rope cuts both my wrists behind;
And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds,

For they fling, whoever has a mind,
Stones at me for my year's misdeeds.

Thus I entered, and thus I go!

In triumphs, people have dropped down dead. “Paid by the world, what dost thou owe

Me?”—God might question; now instead, 'Tis God shall repay: I am safer so.

TONE OF SOLEMN CONDEMNATION.

(See Tone Drill No. 48.) (The tone of Solemn Condemnation implies that the judgment has weighed and considered before passing sentence.]

Impeachment of Warren Hastings.

EDMUND BURKE. I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great

Britain, in Parliament assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has betrayed.

I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonored.

I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted, whose property he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.

I impeach him in the name, and by virtue, of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.

I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life.

Henry V's Sentence on the Conspirators.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

Hear your sentence.
You have conspired against our royal person,
Join'd with an enemy proclaim'd, and from his coffers
Received the golden earnest of our death;
Wherein you would have sold your king to slaughter,
His princes and his peers to servitude,
IIis subjects to oppression and contempt,
And his whole kingdom into desolation.
Touching our person seek we no revenge;
But we our kingdom's safety must so tender,
Whose ruin you have sought, that to her laws
We do deliver you. Get you therefore hence,
Poor miserable wretches, to your death:
The taste whereof, God of his mercy give
You patience to endure, and true repentance
Of all your dear offences ! Bear them hence.

-Henry V, ii., 2.

TONE OF MEDITATION.

(See Tone Drill No. 135.) [The tone of Meditation is always linked with some other (usually Argument) and indicates to the listener self-communion. The speaker is subjective. He is thinking aloud.]

Cato's Soliloquy.

JOSEPH ADDISON.

It must be so-Plato, thou reasonest well!
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality ?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror
Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction ?-
'Tis the Divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis Heaven itself that points out a hereafter,
And intimates Eternity to man.
Here will I hold. If there's a Power above us
(And that there is, all Nature cries aloud
Through all her works), He must delight in virtue:
And that which He delights in, must be happy.
Eternity !-thou pleasing, dreadful thought!
Through what variety of untried being,
Through what new scenes and changes must we pass ?
The wide, the unbounded prospect lies before me;
But shadows, clouds, and darkness, rest upon it.

Hamlet's Soliloquy on Life and Death.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die;—to sleep ;-
To sleep! perchance to dream! ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make .
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

-Hamlet iii., 1. TONE OF CONVICTION.

(See Tone Drill No. 55.) [The tone of Conviction aims not so much to prove as to proclaim what the speaker feels to be inevitable or absolute. In it, often, is the note of the seer. Assertion asserts aggressively, Conviction asserts calmly.)

The Human Race Progresses.

GEORGE BANCROFT.

The irresistible tendency of the human race is to advancement, for absolute power has never succeeded and can never succeed in suppressing a single truth. An idea once revealed may find its admission into every living breast and live there. Like God, it becomes immortal and omnipresent. The movement of the species is upward, irresistibly upward. The individual is often lost; Providence never disowns the race. No principle once promulgated has ever been forgotten. No “timely tramp”. of a despot's foot ever trod out one idea. The world cannot retrograde; the dark ages cannot return. Dynasties perish, states are buried, nations have been victims of error, martyrs for right; humanity has always been on the advance, gaining maturity, universality and power.

Yes, Truth is immortal; it cannot be destroyed; it is invincible; it cannot long be resisted. Not every great principle has yet been generated, but when once proclaimed and diffused, it lives without end in the safe custody of the race. States may pass away, every just principle of legislation which has been once established will endure. Philosophy has sometimes forgotten God, a great people never did. The skepticism of the last century could not uproot Christianity because it lived in the hearts of the millions. Do you think that infidelity is spreading? Christianity never lived in the hearts of so many millions as at this moment. The forms under which it is professed may decay, for they, like all that is the work of man's hands, are subject to changes and