As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is that nation that has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
Col. Roosevelt first compares the individual with the nation. He then employs an emphatic contradiction, following it with a short positive sentence. Then comes an effective contrast, separated to allow the use of a parenthetical phrase which amplifies the statement, and the end is a picture drawn with a few words—“because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
William H. Taft, speaking at the unveiling of Lincoln’s statue at Frankfort, Kentucky, on November 8, 1911, summed up the character of Abraham Lincoln in these well-chosen words:
With his love of truth, the supreme trait of his intellect, accompanied by a conscience that insisted on the right as he knew it, with a great heart full of tenderness, we have the combination that made Lincoln one of the two greatest Americans.
President Taft uses a commencing series and a parenthetical clause for conveying his thought. The series consists of three phrases: “With his love of truth,” “accompanied by a conscience that insisted on the right as he knew it,” and “with a great heart full of tenderness,” the sense being completed by “we have the combination that made Lincoln one of the two greatest Americans.” The phrase, “the supreme trait of his intellect,” is parenthetical.
Col. Henry Watterson, on the same occasion, spoke thus:
Called like one of old, within a handful of years he rose at a supreme moment to supreme command, fulfilled the law of his being, and passed from the scene an exhalation of the dawn of freedom. We may still hear his cheery voice bidding us to be of good heart, sure that “right makes might,” entreating us to pursue “with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”
Here we have the thought expressed by means of a concluding series of four members, and two positive statements reënforced by two quotations from Lincoln’s Cooper Union Speech.
word-pictures
Besides the use of inflection, emphasis, and the arrangement of words, orators use word-pictures for conveying their ideas; as,