"Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines."
— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800-1859)
Work Title
Date
November 1824
Metaphor
"Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines."
Metaphor in Context
[...] Her power is indeed manifested at the bar, in the senate, in the field of battle, in the schools of philosophy. But these are not her glory. Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain,--wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,--there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens.
The dervise, in the Arabian tale, did not hesitate to abandon to his comrades the camels with their load of jewels and gold, while he retained the casket of that mysterious juice which enabled him to behold at one glance all the hidden riches of the universe. Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines. This is the gift of Athens to man. Her freedom and her power have, for more than twenty centuries, been annihilated; her people have degenerated into timid slaves, her language into a barbarous jargon; her temples have been given up to the successive depredations of Romans, Turks, and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable. And when those who have rivaled her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilization and knowledge shall have fixed their abodes in distant continents; when the scepter shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travelers from distant regions shall, in vain, labor to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the rained dome of our proudest temple, and shall see a naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts;--her influence and her glory will still survive,--fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin and over which they exercise their control.
(pp. 101-2)
The dervise, in the Arabian tale, did not hesitate to abandon to his comrades the camels with their load of jewels and gold, while he retained the casket of that mysterious juice which enabled him to behold at one glance all the hidden riches of the universe. Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines. This is the gift of Athens to man. Her freedom and her power have, for more than twenty centuries, been annihilated; her people have degenerated into timid slaves, her language into a barbarous jargon; her temples have been given up to the successive depredations of Romans, Turks, and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable. And when those who have rivaled her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilization and knowledge shall have fixed their abodes in distant continents; when the scepter shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travelers from distant regions shall, in vain, labor to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the rained dome of our proudest temple, and shall see a naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts;--her influence and her glory will still survive,--fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin and over which they exercise their control.
(pp. 101-2)
Provenance
Reading Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013), 77.
Citation
Text from The miscellaneous writings and speeches of Lord Macaulay (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889)
Date of Entry
08/14/2013
