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sum-total of all Harmony; and Death, what mortals call Death, properly
the beginning of Life. Under such figures, since except in figures
there is no speaking of the Invisible, have men endeavoured to express
a great Truth;--a Truth, in our Times, as nearly as is perhaps
possible, forgotten by the most; which nevertheless continues forever
true, forever all-important, and will one day, under new figures, be
again brought home to the bosoms of all.

But indeed, in a far lower sense, the rudest mind has still some
intimation of the greatness there is in Mystery. If Silence was made a
god of by the Ancients, he still continues a government-clerk among us
Moderns. To all quacks, moreover, of what sort soever, the effect of
Mystery is well known: here and there some Cagliostro, even in latter
days, turns it to notable account: the blockhead also, who is
ambitious, and has no talent, finds sometimes in "the talent of
silence," a kind of succedaneum. Or again, looking on the opposite
side of the matter, do we not see, in the common understanding of
mankind, a certain distrust, a certain contempt of what is altogether
self-conscious and mechanical? As nothing that is wholly seen through
has other than a trivial character; so anything professing to be
great, and yet wholly to see through itself, is already known to be
false, and a failure. The evil repute your "theoretical men" stand in,
the acknowledged inefficiency of "paper constitutions," and all that
class of objects, are instances of this. Experience often repeated,
and perhaps a certain instinct of something far deeper that lies under
such experiences, has taught men so much. They know beforehand, that
the loud is generally the insignificant, the empty. Whatsoever can
proclaim itself from the house-tops may be fit for the hawker, and for
those multitudes that must needs buy of him; but for any deeper use,
might as well continue unproclaimed. Observe too, how the converse of
the proposition holds; how the insignificant, the empty, is usually
the loud; and, after the manner of a drum, is loud even because of its
emptiness. The uses of some Patent Dinner Calefactor can be bruited
abroad over the whole world in the course of the first winter; those
of the Printing Press are not so well seen into for the first three
centuries: the passing of the Select-Vestries Bill raises more noise
and hopeful expectancy among mankind than did the promulgation of the
Christian Religion. A