of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting.  Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day:  on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out!  Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal.  Speech too is great, but not the greatest.  As the Swiss Inscription says:  Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it:  Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.

“Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence:  neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy.  Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth!  Neither shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of ‘those secrets known to all.’  Is not Shame (Schaam) the soil of all Virtue, of all good manners and good morals?  Like other plants, Virtue will not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the eye of the sun.  Let the sun shine on it, nay do but look at it privily thyself, the root withers, and no flower will glad thee.  O my Friends, when we view the fair clustering flowers that overwreathe, for example, the Marriage-bower, and encircle man’s life with the fragrance and hues of Heaven, what hand will not smite the foul plunderer that grubs them up by the roots, and, with grinning, grunting satisfaction, shows us the dung they flourish in!  Men speak much of the Printing Press with its Newspapers:  du Himmel! what are these to Clothes and the Tailor’s Goose?

“Of kin to the so incalculable influences of Concealment, and connected with still greater things, is the wondrous agency of Symbols.  In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation; here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.  And if both the Speech be itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive will their union be!  Thus in many a painted Device, or simple Seal-emblem, the commonest Truth stands out to us proclaimed with quite new emphasis.

“For it is here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith.  In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there.  By Symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched:  He everywhere finds himself encompassed with Symbols, recognized as such or not recognized:  the Universe is but one vast Symbol of God; nay if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a Symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical; a revelation to Sense of the mystic god-given force that is in him; a ’Gospel of Freedom,’ which he, the ‘Messias of Nature,’ preaches, as he can, by act and word?  Not a Hut he builds but is the visible embodiment of a Thought; but bears visible record of invisible things; but is, in the transcendental sense, symbolical as well as real.”