Inspiration is allowable:—­

  1.  After all words preceded or followed by an ellipse;
  2.  After words used in apostrophe, as Monsieur, Madame;
  3.  After conjunctions and interjections when there is silence;
  4.  After all transpositions; for example:  To live, one must work.  Here
     the preposition to takes the value of its natural antecedent,
     work; that is to say, six degrees, since by inversion it precedes
     it, and the gesture of the sentence bears wholly on the preposition;
  5.  Before and after incidental phrases;
  6.  Wherever we wish to indicate an emotion.

To facilitate respiration, stand on tip-toe and expand the chest.

Inspiration is a sign of grief; expiration is a sign of tenderness.  Sorrow is inspiratory; happiness, expiratory.

The inspiratory act expresses sorrow, dissimulation.

The expiratory act expresses love, expansion, sympathy.

The suspensory act expresses reticence and disquietude.  A child who has just been corrected deservedly, and who recognizes his fault, expires.  Another corrected unjustly, and who feels more grief than love, inspires.

Inspiration is usually regulated by the signs of punctuation, which have been invented solely to give more exactness to the variety of sounds.

Inflections.

Their importance.—­Sound, we have said, is the language of man in the sensitive state.  We call inflections the modifications which affect the voice in rendering the emotions of the senses.  The tones of the voice must vary with the sensations, each of which should have its note.  Of what use to man would be a phonetic apparatus always rendering the same sound?  Delivery is a sort of music whose excellence consists in a variety of tones which rise or fall according to the things they have to express.  Beautiful but uniform voices resemble fine bells whose tone is sweet and clear, full and agreeable, but which are, after all, bells, signifying nothing, devoid of harmony and consequently without variety.  To employ always the same action and the same tone of voice, is like giving the same remedy for all diseases. “Ennui was born one day from monotony,” says the fable.

Man has received from God the privilege of revealing the inmost affections of his being through the thousand inflections of his voice.  Man’s least impressions are conveyed by signs which reveal harmony, and which are not the products of chance.  A sovereign wisdom governs these signs.

With the infant in its cradle the signs of sensibility are broken cries.  Their acuteness, their ascending form, indicate the weakness, and physical sorrow of man.  When the child recognizes the tender cares of its mother, its voice becomes less shrill and broken; its tones have a less acute range, and are more poised and even.  The larynx, which is very impressionable and the thermometer of the sensitive life, becomes modified, and produces sounds and inflections in perfect unison with the sentiments they convey.