TO TEACHERS. CONSIDERABLE experience as a teacher of Reading and Elocution has proved to us the necessity of employing a little less theory and vastly more practice in our endeavors to teach this difficult branch and to this end a compilation is offered in the following pages especially adapted to practical elocution. Machine orators and readers are infinitely worse than none at all;-and although we would not wish to be understood as totally averse to systems and rules, still, we repeat, we would have less of theme, and more of such selections as we here present. Selections-which, generally, must stir the very depths of the soul, call forth every emotion of the human heart, and, from the very nature of their quality and construction, invite and demand a proper and natural delivery. N. K. R. 100 CHOICE SELECTIONS. OH, WHY SHOULD THE SPIRIT OF MORTAL BE PROUD? Он, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade, And the young and the old, and the low and the high, The infant a mother attended and loved; The maid on whose cheek, on whose brow, in whose eye, The hand of the king that the sceptre hath borne; The peasant whose lot to sow and to reap; The herdsman, who climbed with his goats up the steep; The saint who enjoyed the communion of heaven, So the multitude goes, like the flowers or the weed So the multitude comes, even those we behold, For we are the same our fathers have been; The thoughts we are thinking our fathers would think; They loved, but the story we cannot unfold; They died, aye! they died; and we things that are now, Yea! hope and despondency, pleasure and pain, 'Tis the wink of an eye, 'tis the draught of a breath; THE AMERICAN FLAG.-By Joseph Rodman Drake, WHEN Freedom, from her mountain height, She tore the azure robe of night, |