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: Rule III. Poetic and beautiful description, ? whether in the form of verse or of prose, ?has the rising inflection. For examples see as above, and add the following: When the gay and smiling aspect of things has begun to leave the passages to a man's heart thus thoughtlessly unguarded; when kind and caressing looks of every object without, that can flatter his senses, have conspired with the enemy within to betray him, and put him off his defence; when music likewise hath lent her aid, and tried her power upon the passions; when the voice of singing men, and the voice of singing women, with the sound of the viol and the lute, have broke in upon his soul, and in some tender notes have touched the secret springs of rapture;?that moment, let us dissect and look into his heart: see how vain, how weak, how empty a thing it is.t See Note 1 to Rule IV. on the falling inflection. t The above example, it will be perceived, might be classed under the commencing series, and, if divested of poetic character, might be read with a prevailing downward slide. This circumstance may suggest the general rule of reading poetic series with the rising slide on every member except the penultimate of a commencing series, and the last of a concluding one; the fulling slide being required in the former as a preparation for a distinct and prominent rising slide on the last member, and in the latter for the cadence of the sentence. The reason why the prevalence of a rising slide should characterise poetic description, is to be found, perhaps, in the milder and softer character of that inflection, compared to the falling slide, which is always the expression of force. The calm and gentle emotions of poetic description, in general, will therefore be most appropiately given by the former. [See as a.