Mute though his lips be, yet they still speak. Hushed is his voice, but its echoes of liberty are ringing through the world, and the sons of bondage listen with joy.

Simpson’s lines treat a dead or silenced figure as still powerfully “speaking” through the moral force of his example. The contrast between mute lips and worldwide “echoes” suggests that ideas—especially the idea of liberty—outlive the body and travel farther than the original voice ever could. By invoking “sons of bondage,” the passage frames the speaker’s legacy in explicitly emancipatory terms: the oppressed hear hope in the remembered words and deeds of the departed. The rhetoric is elegiac and political at once, turning mourning into a call to recognize how martyrdom or death can amplify a freedom message rather than extinguish it.