The better cause."
]

No. 133. [ADDISON.

From _Saturday, Feb. 11_, to _Tuesday, Feb. 14, 1709-10_.

Dum tacent, clamant.--TULL.

* * * * *

_Sheer Lane, February 13._

Silence is sometimes more significant and sublime than the most noble
and most expressive eloquence, and is on many occasions the indication
of a great mind. Several authors have treated of silence as a part of
duty and discretion, but none of them have considered it in this light.
Homer compares the noise and clamour of the Trojans advancing towards
the enemy, to the cackling of cranes when they invade an army of
pigmies.[89] On the contrary, he makes his countrymen and favourites,
the Greeks, move forward in a regular determined march, and in the depth
of silence. I find in the accounts which are given us of some of the
more Eastern nations, where the inhabitants are disposed by their
constitutions and climates to higher strains of thought, and more
elevated raptures than what we feel in the northern regions of the
world, that silence is a religious exercise among them. For when their
public devotions are in the greatest fervour, and their hearts lifted up
as high as words can raise them, there are certain suspensions of sound
and motion for a time, in which the mind is left to itself, and supposed
to swell with such secret conceptions as are too big for utterance. I
have myself been wonderfully delighted with a masterpiece of music, when
in the very tumult and ferment of their harmony, all the voices and
instruments have stopped short on a sudden, and after a little pause
recovered themselves again as it were, and renewed the concert in all
its parts. Methought this short interval of silence has had more music
in it than any the same space of time before or after it. There are two
instances of silence in the two greatest poets that ever wrote, which
have something in them as sublime as any of the speeches in their whole
works. The first is that of Ajax, in the eleventh book of the
Odyssey.[90] Ulysses, who had been the rival of this great man in his
life, as well as the occasion of his death, upon meeting his shade in
the region of departed heroes, makes his submission to him with a
humility next to adoration, which the other passes over with dumb sullen
majesty, and such a silence, as (to use the words of Longinus) had more
greatness in it than anyth