Life & Wisdom Quote by George Linnaeus Banks

A Victorian writer praying for an upgrade to human nature, Banks frames progress as a kind of coming season: inevitable, cyclical, and just out of reach. “I live to hail that season” is less a prediction than a vow of witness. He’s staking his life on the hope that the world will tip toward conscience and rational public life, and he casts that hope in almost messianic terms: “by gifted one foretold.” The phrase smuggles in authority - not just that change is desirable, but that it has been promised by visionaries (prophets, poets, reformers) who can see beyond the marketplace.

The rhyme and antithesis do the heavy lifting. “Reason” versus “gold” condenses a whole Victorian argument about modernity: industrial wealth surging ahead while moral and civic capacities lag behind. Banks isn’t merely anti-capital; he’s suspicious of a society that lets money become the only language powerful enough to settle disputes and set priorities. “Not alone by gold” is the key hedge. He knows economics won’t vanish. The ask is for a new hierarchy, where material prosperity stops being treated as proof of virtue or competence.

Context matters here: Banks wrote amid Chartist agitation, labor unrest, and the social aftershocks of industrialization. The line reads like reform-era optimism under pressure, a lyric attempt to keep faith when “progress” increasingly meant profits. It works because it’s both tender and accusatory: a toast to the future that doubles as a rebuke to the present.