Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Haynes Bayly

Social anxiety, dressed in lace cuffs and perfect meter. Bayly’s line drops us into a familiar drama: a meeting in public that feels privately perilous. “We met, ’twas in a crowd” sets a scene that should be safe, even anonymous, yet the speaker experiences it as a spotlight. The crowd is not comfort but cover for judgment, the place where reputations circulate faster than words.

The verb choice is the tell. “Shun” isn’t mere indifference; it’s active avoidance, social punishment. The speaker expects not just rejection but a kind of moral quarantine, implying a history between them or, just as damning, a history the crowd believes exists. That’s the subtext: in a status-conscious culture, especially in Bayly’s early-19th-century Britain, public encounters weren’t casual. They were tests. Who acknowledges whom, and how, becomes a language of allegiance and shame.

Bayly was a songwriter and poet of the drawing room, a specialist in tight emotional turns that could be sung without sounding scandalous. This line works because it compresses an entire backstory into a single anticipatory fear. The syntax tilts toward confession (“and I thought...”), letting us feel the speaker’s mind outrunning the event. It’s less about what the man actually does than about what the speaker has learned to expect from society: affection is fragile, but embarrassment is organized, waiting in the wings, already rehearsed by the crowd.