human
This chapter began with imagery, and with imagery it shall end.
gpt
I have often stood on some mountain peak, some Cumbrian or Alpine hill, over which the dim mists rolled; and suddenly, through one mighty rent in that cloudy curtain, I have seen the blue heaven in all its beauty, and, far below my feet, the rivers and cities and cornfields of the plain sparkled in the heavenly sunlight.
human
He grew old in an age he condemned; He looked on the rushing decay Of the times which had sheltered his youth; Felt the dissolving throes Of a social order he loved.
gpt
would have rejoiced in the new order which it established for all Europe. But the younger poet knew the elder with an intimacy which defies contradiction; and one must, I suppose, number Wordsworth among those who, in each succeeding age, have shed tears of useless regret over the unreturning past. Talleyrand said that, to know what an enjoyable thing life was capable of being, one must have been a member of the _ancienne noblesse_ before the Revolution. It was the cynical and characteristic utterance of a nature singularly base; but even the divine Burke (though he had no personal or selfish interests in the matter) was convinced that the Revolution had not only destroyed political freedom, but also social welfare, and had
human
What, in the view of Burke and Talleyrand, the Revolution did for France, that, by a curious irony of fate, our attempt to defeat the Revolution did for England. Burke forced us into the Revolutionary War, and that war (as Gladstone once said in a letter to the present writer)