text:  For fifty years England was pronounced to have worn herself out by the prolific brilliancy of the half century before; like a precocious infant to have anticipated her powers and ensured their premature decay; like the Boeotians to have had her Pindaric period and thenceforward to have paid for its raptures and renown by perpetual darkness; or like the Israelites in Egypt to be condemned to drudgery for life sunk into an intellectual slave-caste;--when in the midst of the scoffing or the sorrow suddenly arrived a new epoch a new summons to the national genius a time of lofty interpositions "thunderings in the air and lightning running along the ground " an era of the marvellous things of mind; the chains fell off the hands and the generation went forth with a new sense of superiority into new scenes of knowledge discovery and empire