f my usefulness, it did not make
my company desirable, it drove me into morbid and depressing thoughts.
And yet--to make a long story short--I have gradually come to be, not a
"talker" certainly, but no longer afraid that I "can find nothing to
say," no longer trammelled by a false reserve, but presuming, on the
contrary, that with most persons whom I meet it will be quite possible
to engage in easy and fluent conversation,--a presumption, by the way,
always likely to justify itself by the event. I insist, therefore, from
my own experience, that conversation is an art as well as a gift; and
that where it is not a gift, the deficiency may be more surely
supplemented by art than almost any other. You will tell me, perhaps, in
common with others who are not talkers, that speech must be natural to
be attractive, and that all appearance of effort will spoil its charm.
Is not this rather the excuse of indolence than the valid objection of
reason? It has been finely argued, that even with children "work" must
precede "play." The proverb, too, says that "every beginning is hard." I
know that the _appearance_ of effort is not attractive; but after a
while there is no such appearance, not merely because "the province of
art is to conceal art," but because habit has become a second nature.
When you think what a trained and educated thing our life is in its
minutest particulars, and how not only the civilized, but the savage man
has to _learn_ the use of his senses, his muscles, and his brain, you
must admit that it is frivolous to urge against the charm or value of
conversation, that it must be studied. It is hardly too much to say,
that all the noblest things in the world are the result of study. Why
not also study the noble and most desirable art of framing our thoughts,
opinions, sentiments, tastes, into free, familiar, and appropriate
speech?

But here I fancy you may meet me with a question,--Is it, after all, so
desirable an art, and one well worth the learning? I have, it is true,
given you credit for coveting earnestly a greater facility of speech;
and yet you may have become more reconciled to your deficiency than you
like to acknowledge, through the influence of certain popular maxims and
fallacies. The one I wish especially to challenge now is expressed in
that German proverb which Mr. Carlyle has taken under his peculiar
patronage,--"Speech is silver, silence is gold." A great comfort, to be
sure, to one who is either