ers like tones caught from angelic
harps. For truth and tenderness are not, after all, incompatible; but
whoever is falsely fond alone proves himself in the end harsh and rough.
The sympathetic lie is of all things most unsympathetic, smoothing and
stroking the surface to haunt and kill at the very centre and core. The
proclamation from the house-top of what is told in the ear in closets
will give more pain than if it were fairly published at first. There is
a distinction here to be noted. All truth, or rather all matter of fact,
does not, of course, belong to everybody. There are private and domestic
secrets, whose promulgation, by no law of duty required, would make the
streets of every city and village run with blood. There is a style of
speaking, miscalled sincerity, which in mere tattling and tale-bearing,
minding others' business, interfering with their relations,
impertinently meddling with cases we can neither settle nor understand,
and eating over again the forbidden fruit of that tree of knowledge of
good and evil planted in the Garden of Eden, whose seed has been
scattered through the earth, though having less to do with truth than
with the falsehood, to promulgate which artful and malicious combination
of facts is one of the Devil's most skilful means, while truth is always
no mere fact or circumstance, but a spirit. Sincerity consists in
dealing openly with every one in things that concern himself, reserving
concerns useless to him, and purely our neighbors' or our own. Husbands
and wives, parents and children, fellow-citizens and friends, or
strangers, owning but the bond of humanity, let such _discrete_
sentences--if we may use rhetorically a musical word--from your lips
afford a sweeter consonance than can vibrate and flow from all the pipes
and strings of orchestra or organ. So sympathy and verity shall be at
one: mercy and truth shall meet together, righteousness and peace shall
kiss each other.

Another form of sympathetic lying appears in a part of the social
machinery whose morality has somehow been more strangely and unhappily
overlooked,--we mean in _letters of introduction_. But the falsehood is
only by perversion. The letter of introduction is an affair of noble
design, to bring together parties really related, to give room for the
elective affinities of friendship, to furnish occasion for the
comparison of notes to the votaries of science, to extend the privilege
of all liberal arts, and promot