Now silence is golden only for those who do not know what to say. A change has come about, is coming about. Work has ceased to be holy.
“To labour is to pray.” “Do the duty which lies nearest to you, that which is doablest.” “Do noble things, not dream them, all day long ...” such was the message of Victorian literature. And yet in that literature there was a note of discord, and that was the voice of Browning, the first of the moderns, and he wrote:
Not on the vulgar mass
Called “work,” must sentence pass.
And again:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,