passers-by to come and love us.  But this fellow has filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly coloured.  His house may be admired for its design, the crowd may pause before the stained windows, but meanwhile the poor proprietor must lie languishing within, uncomforted, unchangeably alone.

Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to refrain from open lies.  It is possible to avoid falsehood and yet not tell the truth.  It is not enough to answer formal questions.  To reach the truth by yea and nay communications implies a questioner with a share of inspiration, such as is often found in mutual love.  Yea and nay mean nothing; the meaning must have been related in the question.  Many words are often necessary to convey a very simple statement; for in this sort of exercise we never hit the gold; the most that we can hope is by many arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to indicate, in the course of time, for what target we are aiming, and after an hour’s talk, back and forward, to convey the purport of a single principle or a single thought.  And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses the point entirely, a wordy, prolegomenous babbler will often add three new offences in the process of excusing one.  It is really a most delicate affair.  The world was made before the English language, and seemingly upon a different design.  Suppose we held our converse not in words, but in music; those who have a bad ear would find themselves cut off from all near commerce, and no better than foreigners in this big world.  But we do not consider how many have “a bad ear” for words, nor how often the most eloquent find nothing to reply.  I hate questioners and questions; there are so few that can be spoken to without a lie.  “Do you forgive me?”  Madam and sweetheart, so far as I have gone in life I have never yet been able to discover what forgiveness means.  “Is it still the same between us?”  Why, how can it be?  It is eternally different; and yet you are still the friend of my heart.  “Do you understand me?”  God knows; I should think it highly improbable.

The cruellest lies are often told in silence.  A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.  And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?  And, again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed through a lie.  Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and part of the truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the foulest calumny.  A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie.  The whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate conversation.  You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true veracity.  To reconcile averted friends a Jesuitical discretion is often needful, not so much to gain a kind hearing as to communicate sober truth.  Women have an ill name in this connection; yet they live in as true relations; the lie of a good woman is the true index of her heart.