8. Have you used reference books in word studies? If so, state with what result.
9. Find as many synonyms and antonyms as possible for each of the following words: Excess, Rare, Severe, Beautiful, Clear, Happy, Difference, Care, Skillful, Involve, Enmity, Profit, Absurd, Evident, Faint, Friendly, Harmony, Hatred, Honest, Inherent.
[Footnote 32: _How to Attract and Hold an Audience_, J. Berg Esenwein.]
[Footnote 33: A book of synonyms and antonyms is in preparation for this series, "The Writer's Library."]
[Footnote 34: _Composition and Rhetoric_, J.M. Hart.]
Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, Our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise! Each stamps its image as the other flies!
Hail, memory, hail! in thy exhaustless mine From age to age unnumber'd treasures shine! Thought and her shadowy brood thy call obey, And Place and Time are subject to thy sway!
Many an orator, like Thackeray, has made the best part of his speech to himself--on the way home from the lecture hall. Presence of mind--it remained for Mark Twain to observe--is greatly promoted by absence of body. A hole in the memory is no less a common complaint than a distressing one.
Henry Ward Beecher was able to deliver one of the world's greatest addresses at Liverpool because of his excellent memory. In speaking of the occasion Mr. Beecher said that all the events, arguments and appeals that he had ever heard or read or written seemed to pass before his mind as oratorical weapons, and standing there he had but to reach forth his hand and "seize the weapons as they went smoking by." Ben Jonson could repeat all he had written. Scaliger memorized the Iliad in three weeks. Locke says: "Without memory, man is a perpetual infant." Quintilian and Aristotle regarded it as a measure of genius.
Now all this is very good. We all agree that a reliable memory is an invaluable possession for the speaker. We never dissent for a moment when we are solemnly told that his memory should be a storehouse from which at pleasure he can draw facts, fancies, and illustrations. But can the memory be trained to act as the warder for all the truths that we have gained from thinking, reading, and experience? And if so, how? Let us see.