It were well to begin at home, and learn to evaluate experience aright in our own being. There are moments in our lives when everything that we encounter disconcerts us; nay, when our whole being seems to be off the hinges, out of joint. Pain plows up our innermost selves. We could shriek from heartbreak and woe. We stand there undone. And men who see us and hear us moaning so piteously, groaning so painfully, have the feeling: “No pain like this!” But how mistaken they are! For there is a cry of the soul, heard of no one, more painful than all that can be pitied or lamented. There are labors and battles of the soul wherein nothing is hammered and driven, and yet _something new_ is formed. It is never so still in a man as when he makes up his mind to have done inwardly with some experience. As long as there is foaming and blustering within, we accomplish nothing. True work tolerates no tempest. We must be still. And when old values are broken, when we must lead life to new goals, the quiet hour must come in which a divine child of the spirit is conceived by the holy spirit; and the brightest light which we can kindle within will burn so quietly and clearly that no cloud of smoke shall ascend therefrom, and there shall be no flickering to bear witness of contact with the restless world. “There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.” Behold, then, this Nietzsche, who flees all “alarum” and execrates all din as a falsification of the moral values of life; who lives preferably thousands of feet above the world there below, who lingers on the loftiest lands of life whither no whirring rattle of the day could rise! Could this Nietzsche find joy in men mauling and making a mess of each other? Could this Nietzsche preach a culture in which battalions in uniform should line up against those in blouse to see who knew best how to deal the deadly blow? Could he gloat over the field where the thunder of battle thundered the loudest? “Inventor” Krupp’s “new noise”—would that appeal to Nietzsche who wanted all silent save the dripping rain, and who worshipped sunshine alone? One might answer these questions in the light of one’s own experience. Let us suppose that we comprehend the meaning of the _stillsten Stunden_, the quietest hours, and the worth of those great happenings of which nothing reaches the newspapers, and which no _avant-coureur_ trumpets. Tell me, could we then detect even the slightest inclination to be our own heralds, and to sacrifice our quietest hours to the gaping and squabbling of men? Men—so the old gospels say—ought not to cast their pearls before swine, or give that which is holy to the dogs. But what is pearl, what is holy, if not what the Nietzschean still hour contains and produces? There is something so tender and beautiful in that hour that we shrink from expressing it, from translating it into thought, lest word and thought tincture its best perfume. Silence is sweeter than speech, more musical than song.