, infernal. Hurd and
Warburton are sunk into the sere and yellow leaf; no considerable body
of true-seeing men looks thitherward for healing: the Paine-and-Hume
Atheistic theory, of 'things well let alone,' with Liberty, Equality
and the like, is also in these days declaring itself nought, unable to
keep the world from taking fire.

The theories and speculations of both these parties, and, we may say,
of all intermediate parties and persons, prove to be things which the
Eternal Veracity did not accept; things superficial, ephemeral, which
already a near Posterity, finding them already dead and brown-leafed,
is about to suppress and forget. The Spiritualism of England, for
those godless years, is, as it were, all forgettable. Much has been
written: but the perennial Scriptures of Mankind have had small
accession: from all English Books, in rhyme or prose, in leather
binding or in paper wrappage, how many verses have been added to
these? Our most melodious Singers have sung as from the throat
outwards: from the inner Heart of Man, from the great Heart of Nature,
through no Pope or Philips, has there come any tone. The Oracles have
been dumb. In brief, the Spoken Word of England has not been true. The
Spoken Word of England turns out to have been trivial; of short
endurance; not valuable, not available as a Word, except for the
passing day. It has been accordant with transitory Semblance;
discordant with eternal Fact. It has been unfortunately not a Word,
but a Cant; a helpless involuntary Cant, nay too often a cunning
voluntary one: either way, a very mournful Cant; the Voice not of
Nature and Fact, but of something other than these.

With all its miserable shortcomings, with its wars, controversies,
with its trades-unions, famine-insurrections,--it is her Practical
Material Work alone that England has to show for herself! This, and
hitherto almost nothing more; yet actually this. The grim inarticulate
veracity of the English People, unable to speak its meaning in words,
has turned itself silently on things; and the dark powers of Material
Nature have answered, "Yes, this at least is true, this is not false!"
So answers Nature. "Waste desert-shrubs of the Tropical swamps have
become Cotton-trees; and here, under my furtherance, are verily woven
shirts,--hanging unsold, undistributed, but capable to be distributed,
capable to cover the bare backs of my children of men. Mountains, old
as the Creation, I have permitted to