The Condition of England

Front Cover

From inside the book

Selected pages

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 39 - And, lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument: for they hear thy words, but they do them not.
Page 19 - The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.
Page 236 - The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man.
Page 30 - If England were swallowed up by the sea tomorrow, which of the two, a hundred years hence, would most excite the love, interest, and admiration of mankind, would most, therefore, show the evidences of having possessed greatness, the England of the last twenty years, or the England of Elizabeth, of a time of splendid spiritual effort, but when our coal, and our industrial operations depending on coal, were very little developed?
Page 202 - The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart...
Page v - If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities ; if we are alive, let us go about our business.
Page 218 - It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is, now at length, discovered to be fictitious.
Page 206 - I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy — blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship — to see a perfect human body unveiled causes a sense of worship. The ascetics are the only persons who are impure. Increase of physical beauty is attended by increase of soul beauty. The soul is the higher even by gazing on beauty. Let me be fleshly perfect.
Page 183 - Your middle class man thinks \ it the highest pitch of development and civilisation when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and if railway -trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks it is nothing that the trains only carry him from an illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at Camberwell ; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there.
Page 15 - Folly perpetually sliding into new shapes in a society possessed of wealth and leisure, with many whims, many strange ailments and strange doctors.

Bibliographic information