the soul, pure and impartial enough, enough delivered from the masks
of egotism and accident, to be greatly competent for these effects.
Besides which, there are not a few that have closed their ears, lest
they should hear, not a few that are even filled with base astonishment
and terror, and out of this with base wrath, to find their deafness
assailed. And still further, it must be freely owned that our natures
have mysterious elections, and though one desire openness of soul as
much as folly fears it, yet may it happen that some tint of peculiarity
in the tone of a worthy voice shall render it to him opaque and
unintelligible.

Yet let us not fear that the product of any sacred and spiritual
sincerity will fail of sufficient uses. If a deep, cordial, and
clarified nature will but give us his heart in a pure and boundless
bravery of confession,--if, like autumn plants, that cast forth their
seeds, winged with down, to the four winds of heaven, or like the
blossoms of spring and early summer, that yield up their preciousness of
pollen to the forage of bees, and even by being so robbed attain to the
hearts of neighbor-blossoms, and accomplish that mystery of
fructification which is to make glad the maturer year,--if so this
inflorescence of eternity that we name a Noble Man will yield up the
golden pollen of his soul, even to those that in visiting him seek but
their own ends, and if so he will intrust winged words, words that are
indeed spiritual _seeds_, purest, ripest, and most vital products of his
being, to the winds of time,--he will be sure to reach some, and they to
reach others, and there is no telling how far the seminal effect may go;
there is no telling what harvests may yellow in the limitless fields of
the future, what terrestrial and celestial reapers may go home
rejoicing, bearing their sheaves with them, what immortal hungers may be
fed at the feasts of earth and heaven, in final consequence of that
lonely and faithful sowing. As in the still mornings of summer the
earliest awakened bird hesitates to utter, yet utters, his solitary
pipe, timidly rippling the silence, but is not long alone, for quickly
the melodious throb begins to beat in every tree-top, and soon the whole
rapturous grove gushes and palpitates into song,--even so, thus to
appearance alone and unsupported, begins that chant of belief which is
destined to heave and roll in billows of melodious confession over a
continent, over a world. Th