Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/354

 women,—that those for the most part are the greatest thinkers who are the least talkers; as frogs cease to croak when light is brought to the water edge. However, in fact, the disproportionate talking of women arises out of the sedentariness of their labors: sedentary artisans,—as tailors, shoemakers, weavers,—have this habit as well as hypochondriacal tendencies in common with women. Apes do not talk, as savages say, that they may not be set to work: but women often talk double their share—even because they work.

FORGIVENESS.

OTHING is more moving to man than the spectacle of reconciliation: our weaknesses are thus indemnified, and are not too costly—being the price we pay for the hour of forgiveness: and the archangel, who has never felt anger, has reason to envy the man who subdues it. When thou forgivest,—the man, who has pierced thy heart, stands to thee in the relation of the sea-worm that perforates the shell of the muscle, which straightway closes the wound with a pearl.

HE graves of the best of men, of the noblest martyrs, are like the graves of the Herrnhuters (the Moravian brethren)—level, and undistinguishable from the universal earth: and, if the earth could give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey laid flat. Ah! what a multitude of tears, what myriads of bloody drops have been shed in secrecy about the three corner-trees of earth,—the tree of life, the tree of knowledge,