“Then I answered him:  ’When I found myself upon the world I soon came under the sway of your words.  Progress tempted me; commerce promised me happiness.  I obeyed commandments and moral precepts, and eagerly swallowed rules of life.  I prostrated myself before the great high public idols, I bowed to the little household gods, and cherished dearly your little proverb-idols and maxim-idols.  The advice of Polonius to his son and such literature was to me the ancient wisdom.  I became an idolater, and my body a temple of idolatry.’

“‘How then did you escape?’ asked my companion.

“‘In this wise,’ I answered.  ’In my temple, as in ancient Athens, in the midst of the idols was an altar to the Unknown God, which altar from the first was present.  That altar was to the mystery and beauty of life.

“’By virtue of this altar I discovered my idolatry, and I recognised the forces of death to which I had bound myself.  I broke away and escaped, and in place of all my idols I substituted my aspiring human heart, and it beat like a sacred presence in the clear temple of my being.

“’Then words I degraded from their fame, and trampling them under my feet, I sang triumphantly to the limitless sky.’

“‘But still you use words,’ said the townsman, ‘you irreconcilables.’

“’Yes.  When we had degraded their fame and humbled them so that they came to us fawningly, asking to be used, we exalted them to be our servants.  Now we are masters over them, and not they over us.  They are content to be used, if but for a moment, and then forgotten for ever.  We use them to reproduce in other minds the thoughts that are in our own.  Woe if they ever get out of hand and become our masters again!  They are our exchange metals.  Woe if ever again we melt down those metals and recast them as idols!

“‘Come with me into the country,’ I urged; and the townsman, as if foreseeing release from the bondage of his soul, allowed my flowing life to float him away from the haunts of his idolatry.  Then as we passed from under the canopy of smoke and entered into the bright outside universe, I went on: 

“’Words are become but a small part of our language.  We converse in more ways and with more people than of yore.  All nature speaks to us; mountain and sea, river and plain, valley and forest; and we reveal our hearts to them, our longing, our hope, our happiness.  And yet never entirely reveal.  Not with words only do we converse, but with pictures, with music, with scent, with ... but words cannot name the sacred nameless mediums.  And man speaks to man without words; with his eyes, with his hands, with his love....”

“With that we walked some way together silently till at last the townsman put his arm in mine and said:  ’In my temple also is an altar with an effaced inscription, methinks to the Ever-Living God.  By your words you have revealed it to me.  Let me accompany you into the beauty of the world, and interpret thou to me the mystery of its beauty.’