SILENCE.
Unto Thee will I cry, O Lord, my rock; be not silent to me: lest if Thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down to the pit.—Psalm xxviii. 1.
The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him.—Habakkuk, ii. 20.
Be silent, O all flesh, before the Lord.—Zechariah, ii. 13.
The silence, often, of pure innocence,
Persuades when speaking fails.
Shakspere.
Sacred silence! thou that art
Floodgate of the deeper heart,
Offspring of a heavenly kind;
Frost o’ the mouth, and thaw o’ the mind,
Admiration’s readiest tongue,
Leave the desert shades, among
Reverend hermits’ hallow’d cells,
Where retired devotion dwells.
Flecknoe.
In silence mend what ills deform thy mind;
But all thy good impart to all thy kind.
John Sterling.
True prayer is not the noisy sound
That clamorous lips repeat,
But the deep silence of a soul
That clasps Jehovah’s feet.
Mrs. Sigourney.
When some beloved voice, that was to you
Both sound and sweetness, failed suddenly,
And silence against which you dare not cry,
Aches round you like a strong disease and new—
What hope, what help, what music will undo
That silence to your sense.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Ours is a world of words; Quiet we call
“Silence,” which is the merest word of all.
All nature speaks, and ev’n ideal things
Flap shadowy sounds from visionary wings—
But ah! not so when, thus in realms on high,
The eternal voice of God is passing by,
And the red winds are withering in the sky!
E. A. Poe.