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vide criteria for judging the student's understanding and appreciation of what he reads, and his interest in communicating it to others; it will help the teacher to detect and to correct lax, careless, and faulty habits of thinking; it will make clear the intimate connection between thought, feeling, and voice; and it will/make obvious the truth that excellent reading is the result of excellent thinking, clear understanding, and the vigorous play and exercise of the imagination and the emotions.

PART I

CLEARNESS OF MEANING

CHAPTER I

THE RELATION OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH

There is no worse arrangement than for one to make pretensions to the spirit of a thing while the sense and letter of it are not clear to him. (GOETHE: Wilhelm Meister.)

1. What reading aloud involves

Our first duty in reading aloud is to get a clear understanding of the meaning of what we read. Whether we read the literature that instructs, or tells a story, or describes a scene, or portrays a character, we must give the meaning the author intended to convey in every phrase and sentence. There can be little delight in "the vision of the sky" when the lines

Slow fades the vision of the sky,
The golden water pales,

are read with such emphasis on "water" and dropping of the voice on "pales" as to suggest to the listener that the foreground of the picture is composed of water pails. Nor are the emotions of tenderness apt to be strongly aroused when we are told that "Silas Marner decided to keep the child (who was frozen one evening) outside his house in the snow." Thoughtless utterance of words often results in! such misstatement and misrepresentation of meaning. It never reveals the finer shades of thought nor contributes to words the significant variety of living speech.

Words are not the whole of speech, nor is the utterance of them all there is to reading. The meaning conveyed through them is determined by the way they are spoken. For example, so simple an expression as "It is a beautiful day" may be uttered as an assertion of the fact that the day

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