Talk, too, is so definite, so limited.  The people we meet might seem so wonderful, might mean such quaint and charming meanings sometimes, if they would not talk.  Like some delightfully bound old volume in a foreign tongue, that looks like one of the Sibylline books, till a friend translates the title and explains that it is a sixteenth-century law dictionary:  so are the men and women we meet.  How interesting they might be if they would not persist in telling us what they are about!

That, indeed, is the abiding charm of Nature.  No sensible man can envy Asylas, to whom the language of birds was as familiar as French argot to our young decadents.  Think how terrible it would be if Nature could all of a sudden learn English!  That exquisite mirror of all our shifting moods would be broken for ever.  No longer might we coin the woodland into metaphors of our own joys and sorrows.  The birds would no longer flute to us of lost loves, but of found worms; we should realise how terribly selfish they are; we could never more quote ’Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings,’ or poetise with Mr. Patmore of ’the heavenly-minded thrush.’  And what awful voices some of those great red roses would have!  Yes, Nature is so sympathetic because she is so silent; because, when she does talk, she talks in a language which we cannot understand, but only guess at; and her silence allows us to hear her eternal meanings, which her gossiping would drown.

Happy monks of La Trappe!  One has heard the foolish chattering world take pity upon you.  An hour of talk to a year of silence!  O heavenly proportion!  And I can well imagine that when that hour has come, it seems but a trivial toy you have forgotten how to play with.  Were I a Trappist, I would use my hour to evangelise converts to silence, would break the long year’s quiet but to whisper, ‘How good is silence!’ Let us inaugurate a secular La Trappe, let us plot a conspiracy of silence, let us send the world to Coventry.  Or, if we must talk, let it be in Latin, or in the ‘Volapuek’ of myriad-meaning music; and let no man joke save in Greek—­that all may laugh.  But, best of all, let us leave off talking altogether, and listen to the morning stars.

LIFE IN INVERTED COMMAS

As I waited for an omnibus at the corner of Fleet Street the other day, I was the spectator of a curious occurrence.  Suddenly there was a scuffle hard by me, and, turning round, I saw a powerful gentlemanly man wrestling with two others in livery, who were evidently intent on arresting him.  These men, I at once perceived, belonged to the detective force of the Incorporated Society of Authors, and were engaged in the capture of a notorious plagiarist.  I knew the prisoner well.  He had, in fact, pillaged from my own writings; but I was none the less sorry for his plight, to which, I would assure the reader, I was no party.  Yet he was, I admit, an egregiously