Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 February 1886 — The Power of Silence. [ARTICLE]

The Power of Silence.

•The defensive power of silence is perhaps the one we observe least carefully, because it is the subtlest. In the friction and passion and function of daily life, what a weapon is a mute tongue! Vou flncFfiblt with the coffee, the weather, the furnace, the baby. Your little jet of ill-nature splutters up into the surcharged air of a tired household, like a match on the edge of a gasoline tank. You expect—and deserve—an explosion. Suppose none follows? The spark flares, goes out with a sizzle, followed by a blankness which gives you the sense of having made asp intellectual fias -o. You are met by sweet or stinging silence, as case may be. Her eyes give you one blessed or bitter look; but her lips betray her not. Nobody “answers back.” You are left beating the air with an idle blade. Yon are humiliated, like a man whose challenge is unaccepted through scorn. Your mortification is her victory—divinely noble or humanly mean, as chances the spirit behind it. She is silent through gentleness or through spite. Either beats. In the one case you are ashamed of yourself; in the other you would not pauch mind being ashamed of her—hut in either she has struck you with a thrust which you cannot parry. You go down before the invisible third in the visible duel: the strong visible force which consists in not saying it. —Elizabeth Sluart Phelps.