that singers are greatly to be pitied, since posterity can not hear
them. Nothing of them remains. And yet how many marvelous forces
underlie this apparent fragility! The thunder has its roar, the breeze
has its tenderness, but their power is transitory; they are sounds and
not voices. A voice is a living sound, it is the vibrant echo of a
soul. It is doubtless that most fragile thing, a breath, but joined to
that which is most durable, spirit. And it is for this reason that, if
the instant when it is born sees it die, centuries of centuries can
not destroy its effect. The truth which is in it confers immortality
upon it, and when this voice escapes from a human breast, he who
speaks, sings or weeps, feels indeed that eternity has concluded an
alliance with him. Peeling his fragile testimony confirmed by all that
endures and can not die, he says with Christ: "Heaven and earth shall
pass away, but my words shall not pass away!"

The holy labors entrusted to the voice can never be counted. Because
of the very fact that it lives and that it contains a soul, it is
the great awakener, the incomparable evoker. When, obscure still and
unknown, a thought distracts us and slumbers at the bottom of our
being, a voice is all that is needed to make it emerge into the light.
With maternal tenderness, the voice borrows all the energies of
incubation, to infuse with warmth, to fortify, the nascent germs of
spiritual life. In it lives and breaks forth what, in the evolving
soul, tends feebly and furtively toward the flowering. In short, the
voice, speech, the tongue, condenses in a single focus incalculable
quantities of rays.

Only think of the efforts that human thought must have made to reach
that clearness that enables it to become speech. Every word that you
utter without giving it a thought is a monument toward which centuries