us forevermore! Brief
brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns
tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting Night, with her
star-diadems, with her silences and her veracities, is come!
What hast thou done, and how? Happiness, unhappiness: all that
was but the _wages_ thou hadst; thou hast spent all that, in
sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin of it remains with
thee, it is all spent, eaten: and now thy work, where is thy
work? Swift, out with it, let us see thy work!

Of a truth, if man were not a poor hungry dastard, and even
much of a blockhead withal, he would cease criticising his
victuals to such extent; and criticise himself rather, what
he does with his victuals!

Chapter V

The English

And yet, with all thy theoretic platitudes, what a depth of
practical sense in thee, great England! A depth of sense, of
justice, and courage; in which, under all emergencies and world-
bewilderments, and under this most complex of emergencies we now
live in, there is still hope, there is still assurance!

The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not
describe them. Like the old Romans, and some few others, _their_
Epic Poem is written on the Earth's surface: England her Mark!
It is complained that they have no artists: one Shakspeare
indeed; but for Raphael only a Reynolds; for Mozart nothing but
a Mr. Bishop: not a picture, not a song. And yet they did
produce one Shakspeare: consider how the element of Shakspearean
melody does lie imprisoned in their nature; reduced to unfold
itself in mere Cotton-mills, Constitutional Governments, and such
like;--all the more interesting when it does become visible, as
even in such unexpected shapes it succeeds in doing! Goethe
spoke of the Horse, how impressive, almost affecting it was that
an animal of such qualities should stand obstructed so; its
speech nothing but an inarticulate neighing, its handiness mere
_hoof_iness, the fingers all constricted, tied together, the
fingernails coagulated into a mere hoof, shod with iron. The
more significant, thinks he, are those eye-flashings of the
generous noble quadruped; those prancings, curvings of the neck
clothed with thunder.

A Dog of Knowledge has _free_ utterance; but the Warhorse is
almost mute, very far from free! It is even so. Truly, your
freest utterances are not by any means always the best: they are
the worst rather; the feeblest, trivia