hich mode of trial for a Worker, is it not
precisely, of all the trials you could set him upon, the falsest and
unfairest?

Nay, I doubt much you are not likely ever to meet the fittest material
for a Statesman, or Chief of Workers, in such an element as that. Your
Potential Chief of Workers, will he come there at all, to try whether he
can talk? Your poor tenpound franchisers and electoral world generally,
in love with eloquent talk, are they the likeliest to discern what man
it is that has worlds of silent work in him? No. Or is such a man, even
if born in the due rank for it, the likeliest to present himself, and
court their most sweet voices? Again, no.

The Age that admires talk so much can have little discernment for
inarticulate work, or for anything that is deep and genuine. Nobody, or
hardly anybody, having in himself an earnest sense for truth, how can
anybody recognize an inarticulate Veracity, or Nature-fact of any
kind; a Human _Doer_ especially, who is the most complex, profound, and
inarticulate of all Nature's Facts? Nobody can recognize him: till once
he is patented, get some public stamp of authenticity, and has been
articulately proclaimed, and asserted to be a Doer. To the worshipper of
talk, such a one is a sealed book. An excellent human soul, direct from
Heaven,--how shall any excellence of man become recognizable to
this unfortunate? Not except by announcing and placarding itself as
excellent,--which, I reckon, it above other things will probably be in
no great haste to do.

Wisdom, the divine message which every soul of man brings into this
world; the divine prophecy of what the new man has got the new and
peculiar capability to do, is intrinsically of silent nature. It cannot
at once, or completely at all, be read off in words; for it is written
in abstruse facts, of endowment, position, desire, opportunity, granted
to the man;--interprets itself in presentiments, vague struggles,
passionate endeavors and is only legible in whole when his work is
_done_. Not by the noble monitions of Nature, but by the ignoble, is a
man much tempted to publish the secret of his soul in words. Words, if
he have a secret, will be forever inadequate to it. Words do but disturb
the real answer of fact which could be given to it; disturb, obstruct,
and will in the end abolish, and render impossible, said answer. No
grand Doer in this world can be a copious speaker about his doings.
William the Silent spoke himsel