As the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into silence. We go about to find Solitude and Silence, as though they dwelt only in distant glens and the depths of the forest, venturing out from these fastnesses at midnight. Silence was, say we, before ever the world was, as if creation had displaced her, and were not her visible framework and foil. It is only favorite dells that she deigns to frequent, and we dream not that she is then imported into them when we wend thither, as Selden's butcher busied himself with looking after his knife, when he had it in his mouth. For where man is, there is Silence.
Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself. If the soul attend for a moment to its own infinity, then and there is silence. She is audible to all men, at all times, in all places, and if we will we may always hearken to her admonitions.
Silence is ever less strange than noise, lurking amid the boughs of the hemlock or pine just in proportion as we find ourselves there. The nuthatch, tapping the upright trunks by our side, is only a partial spokesman for the solemn stillness.
She is always at hand with her wisdom, by roadsides and street corners; lurking in belfries, the cannon's mouth, and the wake of the earthquake; gathering up and fondling their puny din in her ample bosom.
Those divine sounds which are uttered to our inward ear—which are breathed in with the zephyr or reflected from the lake—come to us noiselessly, bathing the temples of the soul, as we stand motionless amid the rocks.
The halloo is the creature of walls and mason work; the whisper is fittest in the depths of the wood, or by the shore of the lake; but silence is best adapted to the acoustics of space.
All sounds are her servants and purveyors, proclaiming not only that their mistress is, but is a rare mistress, and earnestly to be sought after. Behind the most distinct and significant hovers always a more significant silence which floats it. The thunder is only our signal gun, that we may know what communion awaits us. Not its dull sound, but the infinite expansion of our being which ensues, we praise and unanimously name sublime.
All sound is nearly akin to Silence; it is a bubble on her surface which straightway bursts, an emblem of the strength and prolificness of the undercurrent. It is a faint utterance of Silence, and then only agreeable to our auditory nerves when it contrasts itself with the former. In proportion as it does this, and is a heightener and intensifier of the Silence, it is harmony and purest melody.
Every melodious sound is the ally of Silence,—a help and not a hindrance to abstraction.
Certain sounds more than others have found favor with the poets only as foils to silence.