Aging & Wisdom Quote by Goldwin Smith

London gets judged by its surfaces: soot, commerce, crowds, the disappearing pastoral “days of old” that tourists and traditionalists keep trying to resurrect. Goldwin Smith, a historian writing from inside the 19th century’s urban acceleration, flips that complaint into a consolation prize with teeth. If the city no longer supplies ready-made poetry “outside” - no picturesque lanes, no medieval romance, no reassuring sense of a slower moral order - then the burden of meaning migrates inward. The metropolis becomes less a landscape to admire than a pressure chamber that forces consciousness to deepen.

The line is doing cultural triage. Smith grants the elegy (modern London is less “poetic” on the street) while refusing the usual conclusion that modernity is therefore spiritually barren. His subtext is a defense of interiority as a modern virtue: the crowded, disenchanted city produces new kinds of reflection, skepticism, ambition, loneliness, sympathy. The “much deeper” poetry isn’t ornamental; it’s psychological and ethical, written in the private life behind the public ugliness.

As a historian, he’s also staging a subtle revision of nostalgia. “Days of old” offered an external aesthetic - pageantry, tradition, readable symbols. Modern London offers complexity: anonymous lives, class friction, new knowledge, a widened moral imagination. The sentence consoles, but it also instructs: stop demanding that the city perform charm for you. If you want poetry now, you have to earn it by looking harder at what modern life is doing to the human interior.