And they were digging up the seed,
And shouting still—not now in scorn
But in delight—“Such corn, such corn!”
A Study of the Pause
When we pause we suspend our speech, but continue our thought. It is a resting place for us better to conceive of the importance either of the thought just expressed or of the one that follows. The mind is busy re-creating a new idea for the one who is listening. Pausing gives time for the speaker to get the new idea and it also gives time for the auditor to hear the new idea. It often occurs that we are more impressive during the interval of pausing than during the interval of speech. The majority of people in ordinary conversation do not use the pause enough. One result is that they are uninteresting and monotonous in speech.
In the following excerpt, taken from an address by Henry Ward Beecher, indicate the frequency of pauses and then tell fully, in your own words, what the successive ideas are upon which the mind is concentrating:
Now, a living force that brings to itself all the resources of the imagination, all the inspirations of feeling, all that is influential in body, in voice, in eye, in gesture, in posture, in the whole animated man, is in strict analogy with the divine thought and the divine arrangement; and there is no misconception more utterly untrue and fatal than this: that oratory is an artificial thing, which deals with baubles and trifles, for the sake of making bubbles of pleasure for transient effect on mercurial audiences. So far from that, it is the consecration of the whole man to the noblest purposes to which one can address himself—the education and inspiration of his fellow-men by all that there is in learning, by all that there is in thought, by all that there is in feeling, by all that there is in all of them, sent home through the channels of taste and beauty. And so regarded, oratory should take its place among the highest departments of education.
In reading the following of what value is pause? Does it indicate distance? Make selections from your own reading which illustrate the importance of the pause.
O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going;