a waiting and longing for some unspoken word, which sometimes seems
awful in the bounty of its promise. I know men educated to speak, with
the burden of a speaker's vocation on their hearts, but now these many
years remaining heroically silent; the fountains of a fresh
consciousness sweet within them, but not yet flowing into speech, and
they too earnest, too expectant, too sure of the future to say aught
beneath the strain. "Why do you not speak?" was inquired of one.
"Because I can keep silent," he said, "and the word I am to utter will
command me." No man assumes that attitude until he is already a party
to the deepest truth, is the silent side of a seer; and in a nation
where any numbers are passing this more than Pythagorean lustrum, a
speech is surely coming that will no more need to apologize for itself
than the speech of the forest or the ocean-shore. The region of the
trade-winds is skirted with calm. Sydney Smith said of Macaulay, that
his talk, to render it charming, "needed only a few brilliant flashes
of silence." We are talkative, but the flashes of silence are not
wanting, and there is prophecy in them as well as charm. Said one, of a
speaker,--"He was so rarely eloquent, that what he did not say was even
better than what he did." And here, not only are some wholly silent,
but in our best writings the impressive not-saying lends its higher
suggestion than that expressly put forth. What spaces between Emerson's
sentences! Each seems to float like a solitary summer-cloud in a whole
sky of silence.

Yes, the fact is already indubitable, a rich life, sure in due time of
its rich expression, is forming here. As out of the deeps of Destiny,
the Man for the Continent, head-craftsman, hand-craftsman, already puts
his foot to this shore. All hail, new-comer! Welcome to great tasks,
great toils, to mighty disciplines, to victories that shall not be too
cheaply purchased, to defeats that shall be better than victories! We