formity.

The ringlets of fair maids are chains for the feet of reason, and snares
for the bird of wisdom.

When you have anything to communicate that will distress the heart of
the person whom it concerns, be silent, in order that he may hear it
from some one else. O nightingale, bring thou the glad tidings of the
spring, and leave bad news to the owl!

It often happens that the imprudent is honoured and the wise despised.
The alchemist died of poverty and distress, while the blockhead found a
treasure under a ruin.

Covetousness sews up the eyes of cunning, and brings both bird and fish
into the net.

Although, in the estimation of the wise, silence is commendable, yet at
a proper season speech is preferable.[17]

[17] "Comprehensive talkers are apt to be tiresome when we
are not athirst for information; but, to be quite fair,
we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due
to the lack of matter. Speech is often barren, but
silence does not necessarily brood over a full nest.
Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all
the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and when it
takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that
addled delusion."--George Eliot's _Felix Holt_.

Two things indicate an obscure understanding: to be silent when we
should converse, and to speak when we should be silent.

Put not yourself so much in the power of your friend that, if he should
become your enemy, he may be able to injure you.

* * * * *

Our English poet Young has this observation in his _Night Thoughts_:

Thought, in the mine, may come forth gold or dross;
When coined in word, we know its real worth.

He had been thus anticipated by Saadi: "To what shall be likened the
tongue in a man's mouth? It is the key of the treasury of wisdom. When
the door is shut, who can discover whether he deals in jewels or
small-wares?"

The poet Thomson, in his _Seasons_, has these lines, which have long
been hackneyed:

Loveliness
Needs not the aid of foreign ornament,
But is when unadorned adorned the most.

Saadi had anticipated him also: "The face of the beloved," he says,
"requireth not the art of the tire-woman. The finger of a beautiful
woman and the tip of her ear are handsome without an ear-jewel or a
turquoise ring." But Saadi, in his turn, was forestalled b