and his voice came from him in a whisper,

One little leak becomes a lake,
Says the tiny voice in my earpiece

Find a voice in a whisper.

The still small voice is wanted.

He took his lute—his voice was low,
So lapsing waters softly flow
Amid the drooping flowers around,
As if they turned their sighs to sound.
Ah, magic! of a voice that seems
To haunt the soul with hopes and dreams;

The little boy I watched throwing pebbles into the empty fountain [...] You could tell that he had too much wisdom for his age. Probably he believed that he wasn't made for this world. I wanted to say to him: If not you, who?

The Voice began to echo at once. It was the same Voice of old. The difference was that when he was a child he thought he knew what it was, and that he understood it, and he gave it a name; but the older and wiser he became, the more difficult he found it to say what it was, or to understand it, except that he felt it called him away from other people and the responsibilities of life to the place where it alone reigned . . . Ah, sweet Voice, he said, and filled his lungs with the cool evening breeze of the north, but he did not dare open his arms to it for fear that people might think he was mad.

"No," he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king's voice... whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give.

"But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.

I don't know how to find our voice. It catches in my throat when I try to use it. If I do manage to get something out, its met with very vocal opposition from all kinds of surprising sources.

THE SERPENT: The voice in the garden is your own voice. ADAM: It is; and it is not. It is something greater than me: I am only a part of it. EVE: The Voice does not tell me not to kill you. Yet I do not want you to die before me. No voice is needed to make me feel that. ADAM [throwing his arm round her shoulder with an expression of anguish]: Oh no: that is plain without any voice. There is something that holds us together, something that has no word — THE SERPENT: Love. Love. Love. ADAM: That is too short a word for so long a thing.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say `When!'

And while he waited in the castle court,
The voice of Enid, Yniol's daughter, rang
Clear through the open casement of the hall,
Singing; and as the sweet voice of a bird,
Heard by the lander in a lonely isle,
Moves him to think what kind of bird it is
That sings so delicately clear, and make
Conjecture of the plumage and the form;
So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint;
And made him like a man abroad at morn
When first the liquid note beloved of men
Comes flying over many a windy wave
To Britain, and in April suddenly
Breaks from a coppice gemmed with green and red,
And he suspends his converse with a friend,
Or it may be the labour of his hands,
To think or say, 'There is the nightingale;'
So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said,
'Here, by God's grace, is the one voice for me.

"But he has nothing on at all," said a little child at last. "Good heavens! listen to the voice of an innocent child," said the father, and one whispered to the other what the child had said. "But he has nothing on at all," cried at last the whole people. That made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right; but he thought to himself, "Now I must bear up to the end." And the chamberlains walked with still greater dignity, as if they carried the train which did not exist.