be uttered.  Concentrate all your mental energies on the present sentence.  Remember that the mind of your audience follows yours very closely, and if you withdraw your attention from what you are saying to what you are going to say, your audience will also withdraw theirs.  They may not do so consciously and deliberately, but they will surely cease to give importance to the things that you yourself slight.  It is fatal to either the actor or the speaker to cross his bridges too soon.

Of course, all this is not to say that in the natural pauses of your speech you are not to take swift forward surveys—­they are as important as the forward look in driving a motor car; the caution is of quite another sort:  while speaking one sentence do not think of the sentence to follow.  Let it come from its proper source—­within yourself.  You cannot deliver a broadside without concentrated force—­that is what produces the explosion.  In preparation you store and concentrate thought and feeling; in the pauses during delivery you swiftly look ahead and gather yourself for effective attack; during the moments of actual speech, SPEAK—­DON’T ANTICIPATE.  Divide your attention and you divide your power.

This matter of the effect of the inner man upon the outer needs a further word here, particularly as touching concentration.

“What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet replied, “Words.  Words.  Words.”  That is a world-old trouble.  The mechanical calling of words is not expression, by a long stretch.  Did you ever notice how hollow a memorized speech usually sounds?  You have listened to the ranting, mechanical cadence of inefficient actors, lawyers and preachers.  Their trouble is a mental one—­they are not concentratedly thinking thoughts that cause words to issue with sincerity and conviction, but are merely enunciating word-sounds mechanically.  Painful experience alike to audience and to speaker!  A parrot is equally eloquent.  Again let Shakespeare instruct us, this tune in the insincere prayer of the King, Hamlet’s uncle.  He laments thus pointedly: 

    My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: 
    Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

The truth is, that as a speaker your words must be born again every time they are spoken, then they will not suffer in their utterance, even though perforce committed to memory and repeated, like Dr. Russell Conwell’s lecture, “Acres of Diamonds,” five thousand times.  Such speeches lose nothing by repetition for the perfectly patent reason that they arise from concentrated thought and feeling and not a mere necessity for saying something—­which usually means anything, and that, in turn, is tantamount to nothing.  If the thought beneath your words is warm, fresh, spontaneous, a part of your self, your utterance will have breath and life.  Words are only a result.  Do not try to get the result without stimulating the cause.

Do you ask how to concentrate?  Think of the word itself, and of its philological brother, concentric.  Think of how a lens gathers and concenters the rays of light within a given circle.  It centers them by a process of withdrawal.  It may seem like a harsh saying, but the man who cannot concentrate is either weak of will, a nervous wreck, or has never learned what will-power is good for.