ood activities; giving to your whole spiritual life a
ruddier health. When the time does come for speaking it, you will speak
it all the more concisely, the more expressively, appropriately; and
if such a time should never come, have you not already acted it, and
uttered it as no words can? Think of this, my young friend; for there is
nothing truer, nothing more forgotten in these shabby gold-laced days.
Incontinence is half of all the sins of man. And among the many kinds of
that base vice, I know none baser, or at present half so fell and fatal,
as that same Incontinence of Tongue. "Public speaking," "parliamentary
eloquence:" it is a Moloch, before whom young souls are made to pass
through the fire. They enter, weeping or rejoicing, fond parents
consecrating them to the red-hot Idol, as to the Highest God: and they
come out spiritually _dead_. Dead enough; to live thenceforth a galvanic
life of mere Stump-Oratory; screeching and gibbering, words without
wisdom, without veracity, without conviction more than skin-deep. A
divine gift, that? It is a thing admired by the vulgar, and rewarded
with seats in the Cabinet and other preciosities; but to the wise, it is
a thing not admirable, not adorable; unmelodious rather, and ghastly and
bodeful, as the speech of sheeted spectres in the streets at midnight!

Be not a Public Orator, thou brave young British man, thou that art
now growing to be something: not a Stump-Orator, if thou canst help
it. Appeal not to the vulgar, with its long ears and its seats in the
Cabinet; not by spoken words to the vulgar; _hate_ the profane vulgar,
and bid it begone. Appeal by silent work, by silent suffering if there
be no work, to the gods, who have nobler than seats in the Cabinet for
thee! Talent for Literature, thou hast such a talent? Believe it not, be
slow to believe it! To speak, or to write, Nature did not peremptorily
order thee; but to work she did. And know this: there never was a talent
even for real Literature, not to speak of talents lost and damned
in doing sham Literature, but was primarily a talent for something
infinitely better of the silent kind. Of Literature, in all ways, be
shy rather than otherwise, at present! There where thou art, work, work;
whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it,--with the hand of a man, not
of a phantasm; be that thy unnoticed blessedness and exceeding great
reward. Thy words, let them be few, and well-ordered. Love silence
rather than speech i