STILL MORE BEAUTIFUL practice is to be had in the mixing of colors; for much of the work is left to the taste and discretion of the student, and that is always the source of the greatest progress in anything. The kind of coloring that enters the voice through the qulities, is always allied with the use of tone coloring, of which we have given thirty-two examples in a preceding lesson. We advise practicing them with these qualities, so that one set of values may be mixed with another set. Both are wholly natural; and both are the result of life activities from which art gets its instruction.

All artists mix their own colors.

You well remember the historic inquiry made of one great painter, by a novice who asked him what he mixed his colors with, and the great man said, "With brains."

You now have, or soon will have, thirteen basic qualities in your voice, and you have been taught how to increase the mental vitality of words by the use of glides; in addition to which you have practiced Tone Color until you are able to put your feelings into every utterance and to harmonize the feelings of the occasion and the value of the thoughts spoken.

You can see the great need of the modulating movements, for they compel your mind to wake up and summon all others to listen to you. You know the necessity of Tone Color, for a colorless voice is as dead as the sound of ft nail scraping on class. You do not want to present such a voice to your friends and acquaintances.

Color may exist without the aid of Timbres; but it will be weak and of poor material. Timbres are really the instruments through which you speak. If you had a voice like the reed notes of an organ, you would have beauty of tone, and this you could color; but how much better it is to have more stops to manipulate. You know how depressed the organist would feel if he found all the grand Timbres of the organ out of use some Sunday morning when the church was alive with interest in his work.

The great organ becomes a group of instruments when it employs all the Timbres which the stops bring into being. So your voice should be made into a group of instruments by the various Timbres which nature has given you for your development. Hide no talents under a bushel, for it is wrong to do so.

As soon as you have built up the Timbres and have mastered them in the Thirteen Qualities of the preceding lesson, then you have secured a group of instruments, each distinctly different from the others.

These are color-mixers.

Mixing your own colors is the grandest and the most fascinating of all work in this world. The human voice is the sublime gift of the Creator to humanity, and lifts the race to the very pinnacle of power and supremacy. But the work of building its many instruments is the most satisfying and the most useful of all developing agencies in this realm of high art

Because no one has done this to your knowledge, you are of the belief that it is not worth doing. But some few great men and women have accomplished these tasks, and have coined fortunes in so doing.

It is a great pleasure to mix your own colors.

You are left to your own judgment and tastes in this work. Look over the selections herein given, then take account of stock of what colors and Timbres you possess already in your voice, and produce the combinations which you please. Try different combinations on each selection.

The first offering is one that will admit of many variations in color and Timbre, but not of greatly marked degree Remember that the meaning of the Pure Timbre is Beauty, and that the first five Qualities of the lesson devoted to them, are made up of the Pure Timbre.

The mixing of the Bright and Dark Timbres with the Pure, doesnot take away any of the beauty of the voice effect, but changes the degree of brightness or vitality into a more solemn or gloomy form of beauty.

First Selection

"night"

"How beautiful this night! The balmiest sigh, Which vernal zephyrs breathe in evening's ear, Were discord to the speaking quietude That wraps this moveless scene. Heaven's ebon vaults Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world. Yon gentle hills, Robed in a garment of untrodden snow; Yon darksome rocks, whence icicles depend— So stainless, that their white and glittering spires Tinge not the moon's pure beam; yon castled steep, Whose banner hangeth o'er the time-worn tower So idly, that rapt fancy deemeth it a metaphor of peace."

Second Selection "music of the stars"

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank. Here we will sit and let the sound of music Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look how the heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims; Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

"GRAND MIXED COLORS"

The Pure Timbre prevailed in the preceding lesson. We now bring the Orotund into use. Its meaning is Grandeur. You are to mix the colors to suit your own tastes and feelings.

Third Selection

"mount blanc"

"Hast thou a charm to stay the morning star, In his steep course? So long he seems to pause On thy bald, awful head, 0 sovereign Blanc! The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful form, Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines How silently! Around thee and above Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black,— An ebon mass. Methinks thou piercest it, As with a wedge! But when I look again, It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, Thy habitation from eternity!

O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought.

Entranced in prayer

I worshipped the invisible alone."

Fourth Selection

"richelieu"

"Then wakes the power which is the age of iron Burst forth to curb the great and raise the low. Mark where she stands! Around her form I draw The awful circle of our solemn church! Set but a foot within that holy ground, And on thy head—yea—though it wore a crown— I'd launch the curse of Rome."

Fifth Selection

"webster's great peroration"

"When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious union; on state dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, with fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic now known and honored throughout the earth, still 'full high advanced;'—its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured;—bearing, for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first, and union afterwards,'—but everywhere spread all over, in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heaven, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—'Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable.'"

Sixth Selection

"shiel's great peroration"

"Whose were the arms that drove your bayonets at Vimeiro through the phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of war before? What desperate valor climbed the steeps and filled the moats at Badajos? All his victories should have rushed and crowded back upon his memory,—Vimeiro, Badajos, Salamanca, Albuera, Toulouse, and, last of all, the greatest—Tell me—for you were there. I appeal to the gallant soldier before me, from whose opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, a generous heart in an intrepid breast. Tell me, for you must needs remember, on that day, when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while death fell in showers; when the artillery of Prance was leveled with a precision of the most, deadly science; when her legions, incited by the voice, and inspired by the example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the onset;—Tell me if, for an instant, when to hesitate for an instant was to be lost, the 'aliens' blanched?"

"VITAL MIXED COLORS"

The Guttural Timbre depicts Vitality of feeling, as wellas hatred and kindred moods, all of which are really vital.

The Pectoral is a more aweful form of Guttural.

While these two Timbres originate in faulty uses of the voice the faults in some cases are inspired by sublime censure of the evils of life, and a purpose to expose them. Thus the Guttural and Pectoral so common in the famed Indian Orators whose eloquence has been of the highest order, are grand at times in their effect on the hearers. Louis Kossuth was as great an orator as he was a general; and the moving power of his speeches was in the Guttural and Pectoral tones, highly colored by a fine nervous intensity.

Seventh Selection

"victor Hugo's vital style"

"A cannon which breaks its moorings on board ship become abruptly some indescribable, supernatural beast. It is a machine which transforms itself into a monster.

"This mass runs on its wheels like billiard-balls, inclines with the rolling, plunges with the pitching, goes, comes, stops, seems to meditate, resumes its course, shoots from one end of the ship to the other like an arrow, whirls, steals away, evades, prances strikes, breaks, kills, exterminates."

Eighth Selection "shakespeare's vital style"

"Poison be their drink,

Gall, worse than gall, the daintiest meat they taste; Their sweetest shade a grove of cypress trees, Their sweetest prospect murdering basilisks, Their softest couch as smart as lizard's stings, Their music frightful as the serpent's hiss, And boding screech-owls make the concert full; All the foul terrors of dark-seated hell."

Ninth Slection "the Indian's hatred" Some strike for hope of booty; some to defend their all; I battle for the joy I have to see the white man fall. I love, among the wounded, to hear his dying moan, And catch, while chanting at his side, the music of his groan. You've trailed me through the forest; you've tracked me o'er the stream; And struggling through the everglades your bristling bayonets gleam. But I stand as should the warrior, with his rifle and his spear, The scalp of vengeance still is red, and warns you—come not here!"

Tenth Selection "the gladiator"

"If ye are beasts, then stand here like fat oxen waiting for the butcher's knife! If ye are men, follow me! Strike down yon guard, gain the mountain passes, and there do bloody work, as did your sires at old Thermopylae! Is Sparta dead? Is the old Grecian spirit frozen in your veins, that you do crouch and cower like a belabored hound beneath his master's lash? 0, comrades! warriors! Thracians! if we must fight, let us fight for ourselves, if we must slaughter, let us slaughter our oppressors! If we must die, let it be under the clear sky, by the bright waters, in noble, honorable battle!"

The world knows more of the habits of its famous men than it does of the manner of living of the thousands who have won success in the private walks of life. Thus it knows to a certainty, by reading the biographies of such men as came before the public in their efforts to shape the destinies of nations, that they one and all without exception build the fires of personal magnetism in themselves by the repeating aloud of the most, stirring thoughts they could find.

Patrick Henry developed his magnetism by practicing aloud in deserted or unused schoolhouses. Edward Everett was an incessant practicer before a mirror, using thrilling thoughts in potent words. In his life of Daniel Webster he tells of the hitter's practice in the deep woods where he was often overheard. Henry Clay admitted in Congress having done likewise.