a-moles, cotton-trades, railways, fleets
and cities, Indian Empires, Americas, New Hollands; legible throughout
the Solar System!

But the dumb Russians too, as I said, they, drilling all wild Asia and
wild Europe into military rank and file, a terrible yet hitherto a
prospering enterprise, are still dumber. The old Romans also could not
_speak_, for many centuries:--not till the world was theirs; and so
many speaking Greekdoms, their logic-arrows all spent, had been
absorbed and abolished. The logic-arrows, how they glanced futile from
obdurate thick-skinned Facts; Facts to be wrestled down only by the
real vigour of Roman thews!--As for me, I honour, in these
loud-babbling days, all the Silent rather. A grand Silence that of
Romans;--nay the grandest of all, is it not that of the gods! Even
Triviality, Imbecility, that can sit silent, how respectable is it in
comparison! The 'talent of silence' is our fundamental one. Great
honour to him whose Epic is a melodious hexameter Iliad; not a
jingling Sham-Iliad, nothing true in it but the hexameters and forms
merely. But still greater honour, if his Epic be a mighty Empire
slowly built together, a mighty Series of Heroic Deeds,--a mighty
Conquest over Chaos; _which_ Epic the 'Eternal Melodies' have, and
must have, informed and dwelt in, as it sung itself! There is no
mistaking that latter Epic. Deeds are greater than Words. Deeds have
such a life, mute but undeniable, and grow as living trees and
fruit-trees do; they people the vacuity of Time, and make it green and
worthy. Why should the oak prove logically that it ought to grow, and
will grow? Plant it, try it; what gifts of diligent judicious
assimilation and secretion it has, of progress and resistance, of
_force_ to grow, will then declare themselves. My much-honoured,
illustrious, extremely inarticulate Mr. Bull!--

Ask Bull his spoken opinion of any matter,--oftentimes the force of
dullness can no farther go. You stand silent, incredulous, as over a
platitude that borders on the Infinite. The man's Churchisms,
Dissenterisms, Puseyisms, Benthamisms, College Philosophies,
Fashionable Literatures, are unexampled in this world. Fate's prophecy
is fulfilled; you call the man an ox and an ass. But set him once to
work,--respectable man! His spoken sense is next to nothing,
nine-tenths of it palpable _non_sense: but his unspoken sense, his
inner silent feeling of what is true, what does agree with fact, what
is doable an