Life & Wisdom Quote by Alfred Noyes

Noyes is selling transcendence with the confidence of a man who believes history has an upward slope. The sentence moves like a Victorian staircase: "at a certain stage" suggests progress as a natural sequence, evolution not just biological but moral. Then comes the clincher - "man himself had been able to lay hold upon a higher order of things" - a gripping metaphor that turns faith into an act of grasping, almost tactile, as if the spiritual world is there to be seized by the worthy.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to modern flattening. By drawing a hard line between "man" and "the beasts that perish", Noyes isn’t simply praising humanity; he’s trying to rescue it from reductionism, from the idea that we are only appetite, only survival, only matter. The phrase "see, at least in the distance" is doing a lot of work: it admits doubt, delay, and human limitation. We don’t live in the City of God; we glimpse it. That distance makes the vision feel earned rather than automatic, aspiration rather than possession.

Context matters: Noyes writes in an era where Darwin’s aftershocks are still cultural weather, where industrial modernity is accelerating, and where Christian poetry often functions as counter-programming to cynicism. The "shining towers" is deliberately medieval and luminous, an image of order and sanctuary against a world newly organized by machines, markets, and war. It works because it promises meaning without pretending we can fully reach it - a spiritual skyline that keeps the present from becoming the whole story.