nor the person who understands you
best). He or she whose words are always about the place and moment, or
seem to suit it; whose remarks, like certain music, feel restful,
spacious, cool, airy--like silence. And here I have got back to the
praise of such persons as talk little, or (what is even better) _seem_
to talk little.

There is a deal of truth, and, as befits the subject, rather implied
than actually expressed, in Maeterlinck's essay on Silence. His fine
temper, veined and shot with colour, rich in harmonics like a well-toned
voice, enables him, even like the mystics whom he has edited, to guess
at those diffuse and mellow states of soul which often defy words. He
knows from experience how little we can really live, although we needs
must speak, in definite formulae, logical frameworks of verb and noun,
subject and predicate. Let alone the fact that all consummate feeling
(like the moment to which Faust cried _Stay_) abolishes the sense of
sequence--revolves, if I may say so, on its own axis, a _now,
forever_; baffling thereby all speech. And M. Maeterlinck perceives,
therefore, that real communion between fellow-creatures is interchange
of temperament, of rhythm of life; not exchange of remarks, views, and
opinions, of which ninety-nine in a hundred are merely current coin. To
what he has said I should like to add that if we are often silent with
those whom we love best, it is because we are sensitive to their whole
personality, face, gesture, texture of soul and body; that we are living
with them not only in the present, but enriched, modified by all they
have said before, by everything remaining in our memory as theirs. To
talk would never express a state of feeling so rich and living; and it
can serve, at most, only to give the heightening certainty of presence,
like a handclasp or asking, "Are you there?" and getting the answer,
"Yes; I am here, and so are you"--facts of no high logical importance!

As regards silent people, this characteristic may, of course, be mere
result of sloth and shyness, or lack of habit of the world, and they may
be gabbling volubly in their hearts. Such as these are no kind of
blessing, save perhaps negatively. Still less to be commended are those
others, cutting a better figure (or thinking so), who measure their
words from a dread of "giving themselves away"--of "making themselves
cheap," or otherwise (always thinking in terms of money, lawsuits, and
general overreaching) gett