"I love to gaze at fields white with corn," he said to me once. "They seem to breathe rich promises of that full fruition to which our own lives shall come if we live them well and uprightly."
At the last harvest thanksgiving service in the village church I was present for the sake of old times, and from my place behind Roger Pettingdale I saw him lost in meditation, with eyes fixed upon the chancel window. And when he stood up to sing he was still rapt in thought; but suddenly he joined in the sweet old hymn so lustily and with such a full heart that it did me good to hear him.
"The valleys stand so thick with corn That even they are singing."
Reading aloud is more commonly regarded as an accomplishment than an art. In truth, it is both. It is an art in that it cannot be left to its own guidance, but requires both an acquaintance with rules and familiarity with their practice to bring it to perfection. It is an accomplishment in that it is a means of completing our equipment for happy social life. Good reading yields not only profit but pleasure to others. It is one means of throwing brightness into home-life to gather the children together and read really well to them. And what a sweet delight it is in the ward of a hospital, or among the inmates of a workhouse, or by the bedside of some dearly loved invalid, to be able, by reading in soft, gentle, refreshing tones, to charm away the monotony and the weariness, perhaps for awhile to relieve even the pain, of the lonely and the suffering! We might shed sunshine into the darkness of many a life if, instead of spending our leisure hours in _ennui_ on ourselves, we devoted them to reading aloud to others.
Reading aloud is good for ourselves both physically and morally. It is good morally, for if we never read anything unfit for reading aloud we shall not be likely to read anything morally deteriorating. And physically, reading aloud is a benignant exercise. It widens the chest, opens the lungs, strengthens the throat, and does good to all the breathing organs. It is a mistake to suppose that using the voice weakens it. Abuse or misuse of the vocal organs, as of any other organs, injures them; but by proper use and exercise they are strengthened and improved. Speakers and preachers have bad throats not because they use their throat too much, but because they use it badly. They force and torment it, instead of training it to natural action and giving it free, full play. And who shall blame them? At school they were taught to spell and mind their stops; but how to breathe and manage the voice when reading, they probably were not taught a single rule. In many instances teachers themselves are wholly ignorant of the art and therefore incapable of teaching it. And so it comes to pass that, unless either outward circumstance or innate common-sense turn our attention in later life to the management of the vocal organs, we never learn to read aloud without weariness and with pleasure. It is mainly through lack of early training that, of all useful and delightful accomplishments, the art of reading aloud is one of the least practised and most rare.