But we forget the best. A blustering and brewing pervades nature when Spring comes over the land to conquer Winter. When we hear the conflict we cry: “Spring has come!” Not so. The true, genuine Spring-life, nascent underneath the fury, makes no noise at all, weaves away inaudibly, invisibly, in tiny seeds, and conceals in itself the noiseless new germs of life.
Thomas Carlyle, though a trifle noisy himself at times, could finely write: “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.” Wordsworth, not unmindful of
“No sound is uttered,—but a deep And solemn harmony pervades The hollow vale from steep to steep And penetrates the glades.”
“Hoeder, the blind old god Whose feet are shod with silence.”
But the chief study of mankind is still man, not nature and the gods. Man’s silences! Yes, amid the smoke of powder and clink of swords, peoples slash each other; and the men who make such uproar the people call great. But the might and work of a people are to be found in that quiet heroism, of which no one can discern anything outwardly—that quiet heroism to which no one can unveil monuments in our cities. It is the inaudible battles of the heart that this heroism fights; and the quieter it is, the more gloriously it shines. Men with big voices and mighty lungs we hear. Their words excite, move to tears, arouse boisterous and voluble antagonisms. These who assemble about them such billowy mobs, we are tempted to think that they are the leading spirits, that a vast power must live in them, since they are so able to move inert men. But another prophet, modern also, has said to these bawlers in market places: “Do you think that he who stirs up scandal moves the world?” Nothing easier than to start a scandal! Also, nothing jollier for numerous men, to say nothing of women. But scandal is a roaring in the ears. It does not reach the heart. It irritates, over-irritates the nerves. It creates no blessings, no life. A tiny word that sinks down into the deep of the soul, and quietly does its work there of germinating and sprouting—this means infinitely more for the world than the “alarum” of all the professional and unprofessional bawlers. Deep rivers make least din. Light cares speak; mighty griefs are dumb. A heart must be profane indeed, in which there is nothing sacred to silence and the solemn sea. Once more, to quote Carlyle: “Under all speech that is good for anything lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.”