Baltimore, MD.
Nov. 22, 1882.

My Very Dear Friend:
Your too short (my words are correct) letter reached me this morning. Letters like yours, I like to read. They are thoughtful. They represent the inner; they do not chatter about the outer. I contemn [sic] chatter, except in a child. And yet extremes meet; your letters, which are not chatter, are singularly child-like. Some hearts do not age with years; and it is a curious fact, not often observed, that such hearts are generally of mournful temperament. They never grow bitter.

It was our Lord's temperament. Had He lived to be an old man with grey hair, His heart would always have been child-like, and timid to express its feelings. He was timid in proclaiming His doctrines.

Little by little, one by one, He announced them. His last mystery-the love-mystery of the Eucharist-He hinted at a year before He died. He did it in a desert-a lonely place. Love is always lonely and lonesome. But it was only the night before He died ('twas night, and love is shadowy) He made His act of Eternal Love for us in the Eucharist-I say eternal. His act on Calvary, a visible act and fact, lasted only three hours.

Love invisible wears the eternities as dower.

The secret and silent last. The expressed dies and finds a grave in expression. It is a mystery, and yet an every-day fact.

Whenever a mystery puts off its veil, it loses its power. You see, child, I cannot but philosophize. You make me do so by a few phrases in your letter, in which you contrast the noise in the building of the convent with the silence enjoined in the building of God's first human-built temple.

All deep, great, beautiful things wear the royalties of silence! Silence is a queen- not a king; a beautiful, still passiveness-not a loud activity. The stillest thing on earth is a host cradled in a corporal. And it is the greatest Power on earth. Why? It is love. Love is still, be it human or divine. It is always half-afraid to speak all, lest in so doing it might lose all. In Nature it is the same. The stars and sun make no noise. Flowers and trees noiselessly grow. The growth of real life is like its root-love, -shy and still.

There are a thousand thoughts in this last sentence. Think them out.

You do not believe in my being a marble statue! Well, I am and I am not. As towards the world, I am; as towards my world in the world, I am not. Demonstrative I never was. Demonstration destroys. But the inner fidelity of a heart, even to a dream, much more to persons living, is my standard and criterion of anybody.
[--]