What Frost captures here isn't merely that some people are taciturn and others talkative—it's that these conditions are often *inverse* to actual merit. The truly thoughtful person may be paralyzed by awareness of complexity, while the confident fool speaks untroubled by doubt. You've likely sat in a meeting where the quietest person had the shrewdest observation, while someone else filled three minutes of silence with cheerful nonsense, and walked out convinced they'd contributed something.