Aging & Wisdom Quote by Thomas de Quincey

De Quincey’s cow-love lands with the sly force of a confession you’re not supposed to make in polite company. He’s writing in an era that prized refinement and hierarchy, where “deep love” was reserved for God, family, or grand abstractions - not farm animals. The line works because it dares the reader to sneer, then preempts that sneer with a calm, almost combative dignity: “I am not ashamed.” That little refusal turns sentiment into argument.

His praise is strategically specific. “Gentlest of breathing creatures” sounds like pastoral decoration until he pivots to the harder image: the cow “deprived” of her young. De Quincey is not describing a quaint countryside tableau; he’s pointing at an everyday cruelty built into agriculture and commerce, one so normalized it barely registers as violence. The “passionate tenderness” is doing double duty: it humanizes the animal without saying “like us,” and it indicts the humans who separate calf from mother while congratulating themselves on being civilized.

There’s also a self-portrait here. De Quincey, a Romantic-era writer with a taste for heightened feeling and marginal subjects, uses the cow as a moral litmus test. If you can’t respect quiet creatures, what does your sophistication amount to? The sentence’s modesty - “quiet,” “breathing,” “not ashamed” - is the point: he frames empathy as a private virtue sturdy enough to withstand public mockery.