“A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness, but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of deep peace and health and quiet breathing.”
The first stanza of the first canto of Scott’s “Marmion” gives a picture of Norham castle that never leaves the memory. Milton’s greatest poem, “Paradise Lost,” a poem which fascinated the imagination of the great utopian, Robert Owen, at the age of seven, has nothing in all its sonorous music that lingers in the mind like its magnificent opening lines, and one searches in vain through the interminable length of Wordsworth’s “Excursion” for a passage equal to the first.
No lecturer who aims high should go upon a platform and confront an audience, except in cases of great emergency, without having worked out his opening sentences.
Floundering is fatal, but many an otherwise capable speaker “flounders around” and “hems” and “haws” for the first ten or fifteen minutes, as a matter of course.
If his auditors are strange, they get restless and disgusted, and some of them go out. If they know him, they smile at one another and the ceiling and wait with more or less patience until he “gets started.” If it is a meeting where others are to speak, by the time he “gets started” the chairman is anxiously looking at his watch and wondering if he will have as much trouble to “get done.”
A lecturer should remember that an audience resents having its time wasted by a long, floundering, meaningless preamble, and it is sure to get even. Next time it will come late to avoid that preliminary “catch as catch can” performance or—it will stay away.