Street, and the practical Administration of our
Affairs; clear out its accumulated mountains of pendantries and cobwebs;
bid the Pedants and the Dullards depart, bid the Gifted and the Seeing
enter and inhabit. So that henceforth there be Heavenly light there,
instead of Stygian dusk; that God's vivifying light instead of Satan's
deadening and killing dusk, may radiate therefrom, and visit with
healing all regions of this British Empire,--which now writhes through
every limb of it, in dire agony as if of death! The enterprise is great,
the enterprise may be called formidable and even awful; but there is
none nobler among the sublunary affairs of mankind just now. Nay tacitly
it is the enterprise of every man who undertakes to be British Premier
in these times;--and I cannot esteem him an enviable Premier who,
because the engagement is _tacit_, flatters himself that it does not
exist! "Show it me in the bond," he says. Your Lordship, it actually
exists: and I think you will see it yet, in another kind of "bond" than
that sheepskin one!

But truly, in any time, what a strange feeling, enough to alarm a very
big Lordship, this: that he, of the size he is, has got to the apex of
English affairs! Smallest wrens, we know, by training and the aid
of machinery, are capable of many things. For this world abounds in
miraculous combinations, far transcending anything they do at Drury Lane
in the melodramatic way. A world which, as solid as it looks, is made
all of aerial and even of spiritual stuff; permeated all by incalculable
sleeping forces and electricities; and liable to go off, at any
time, into the hugest developments, upon a scratch thoughtfully or
thoughtlessly given on the right point:--Nay, for every one of us, could
not the sputter of a poor pistol-shot shrivel the Immensities together
like a burnt scroll, and make the Heavens and the Earth pass away with a
great noise? Smallest wrens, and canary-birds of some dexterity, can be
trained to handle lucifer-matches; and have, before now, fired off
whole powder-magazines and parks of artillery. Perhaps without much
astonishment to the canary-bird. The canary-bird can hold only its own
quantity of astonishment; and may possibly enough retain its presence of
mind, were even Doomsday to come. It is on this principle that I explain
to myself the equanimity of some men and Premiers whom we have known.

This and the other Premier seems to take it with perfect coolness. And
y