George F. Hoar: “The scene had been enacted in thought and the man had become rotten before the time of the outward act.”

This Treaty would make us a vulgar, common place empire, controlling subject races and vassal states, in which one class must forever rule and other classes forever obey.

We are here in the sweet silence of a summer morning, eighteen hundred years after such a scene, and able mentally to catch some glimpse of it; some echo of the storm that has left behind it so ineffaceable a mark.

The language Statius uses is more simple than mine; but this is substantially the picture he gives: and I know of nothing that so impresses on the imagination the thunder of the power of the Roman Empire as this creation in the wilderness…

We speak of a light that makes darkness visible; and similarly there are sounds that deepen the long intervals of silence with which they alternate.