John Keats wrote of a tongueless nightingale (“The Eve of St. Agnes”). “As though a tongueless nightingale should swell Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.” I have often thought that this great figure of speech was a beautiful thing. The tongueless nightingale died of suffocation because it had so much song in it that it could not get it out. We are the other way around. We have such a tremendous tongue and such little use for it. We have a harp such as no other creature in God’s universe, but we play it so infrequently and so poorly.
