as, and he was one.

Amid the jabbering crowd we chaff and chatter with, we meet occasionally
a man who never chaffs nor chatters,--a man who sees all things; perhaps
because of this, suffers all things, but says nothing at all. The
sphinxes are still extant. The old time ones were of stone and bronze;
the modern ones are of flesh and blood; that's all the difference. Nay,
not quite all; for the secrets that the ancients held smothered within
the folds of their stony silence were only such as nature revealed to
them from her desert posts,--the secrets of sunrises and starry nights
and simoons that swept the sandy plain and of civilizations, the murmurs
of whose rising and the crash of whose sudden overthrow, they needs must
hear. But the secrets that men hear today, and by hearing of which are
made silent, are the secrets of lives being lived, of hearts being
broken, of intentions so noble and failures so bitter as to make men
sceptical whether God keeps watch over the passing events on the earth.

Was he young? No. Was he old? No, again. How old was he? Forty, perhaps;
it may be fifty. The two men who stood looking at him never thought of
his age, neither then nor afterward; never thought whether he was old or
young. There are people who have no age to those who know them. Is it
because their bodies so little represent them? A friend has been
away--for years. He returns; enters your room; you shake his hand
heartily in welcome. And then you stand off and look at him. You look at
his hair and note the gray in it--at the wrinkles in his face--the dozen
and one marks that denote change--and say, "you've grown old, old boy;"
and so we judge most men, and so they should be judged. Why? Because
they are not great and strong and soul-large enough to dwarf their
bodies out of sight and dwindle them into insignificance.

But now and then you meet one whose mind represents him, whose soul is
so gloriously finished that, as in the case of a great painting, you do
not think of the frame around it, nor take notice of it at all. He is
so strong vitally; so great in living force--in vital energies--in
moving and persuading power--that he is to you like an immense, endless,
all-conquering Life, wholly independent of his embodiment, who might
exist in any form,--angel, archangel, spirit, winged or wingless,
supernal or infernal, and still, in all forms, in all places, in all
moral states would remain true to himself and be the same. T