The High School Prize Speaker Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from The High School Prize Speaker This is a collection of literary selections which have taken prizes at the J. Murray Kay Prize-Speaking Contest held annually for the last quarter of a century at the Brookline High School, together with other selections of equal merit which on these occasions have either won honorable mention or been received with especial favor by the audience. The interest which Mr. Kay took in establishing and maintaining these contests set a high standard of excellence, and no pains were spared by the school to make the selections and their interpretation the best possible. The committee of the faculty which guided the contestants in the choice of suitable pieces insisted first that the selection must be from the work of a good author; for it held that the amount of time spent by teacher and student in preparation for prize-speaking could hardly be justified if the selections themselves possessed little or no literary merit. The best literature has most fully the latent power to move the hearer, and waits only for the speakers art to become kinetic. Indeed, this power to grip and hold the audience which is native to our great masterpieces may be felt even when the reading is from the silent page. But prose or poetry which makes no strong appeal to our imagination, convictions, or sympathies, but savors of shallow sentimentalism, is not good literature and fails when put to the test before an audience refined in taste and critical in judgment. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.