timated purpose, expresses
character. If you act you show character; if you sit still, if you
sleep, you show it. You think because you have spoken nothing when
others spoke, and have given no opinion on the times, on the church, on
slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, on the college,
on parties and persons, that your verdict is still expected with
curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your silence answers very
loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned
that you cannot help them; for oracles speak. Doth not Wisdom cry and
Understanding put forth her voice?

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of dissimulation. Truth
tyrannizes over the unwilling members of the body. Faces never lie,
it is said. No man need be deceived who will study the changes of
expression. When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye
is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends and speaks falsely,
the eye is muddy and sometimes asquint.

I have heard an experienced counsellor say that he never feared the
effect upon a jury of a lawyer who does not believe in his heart that
his client ought to have a verdict. If he does not believe it his
unbelief will appear to the jury, despite all his protestations, and
will become their unbelief. This is that law whereby a work of art, of
whatever kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist was
when he made it. That which we do not believe we cannot adequately say,
though we may repeat the words never so often. It was this conviction
which Swedenborg expressed when he described a group of persons in the
spiritual world endeavoring in vain to articulate a proposition which
they did not believe; but they could not, though they twisted and folded
their lips even to indignation.

A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is all curiosity concerning
other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is
not less so. If a man know that he can do any thing,--that he can do it
better than any one else,--he has a pledge of the acknowledgment of that
fact by all persons. The world is full of judgment-days, and into every
assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged
and stamped. In every troop of boys that whoop and run in each yard and
square, a new-comer is as well and accurately weighed in the course of
a few days and stamped with his right number, as if he had undergone a
formal