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Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force; But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?
Matthew Arnold -
We do not what we ought, What we ought not, we do, And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through.
Matthew Arnold
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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
Matthew Arnold -
Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
Matthew Arnold -
Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.
Matthew Arnold -
Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
Matthew Arnold -
Sanity - that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
Matthew Arnold -
The East bowed low before the blast, In patient deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again.
Matthew Arnold
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Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Matthew Arnold -
I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.
Matthew Arnold -
Only, from the long line of spray
Matthew Arnold -
Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings, By contemplation of diviner things.
Matthew Arnold -
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
Matthew Arnold -
Eutrapelia. 'A happy and gracious flexibility,' Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners.
Matthew Arnold
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Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye? When did music come this way? Children dear, was it yesterday?
Matthew Arnold -
Why faintest thou! I wander’d till I died. Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.
Matthew Arnold -
All are before me! I behold The House, the Brotherhood austere! - And what am I, that I am here? For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb?
Matthew Arnold -
Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither’d leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent;-hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!
Matthew Arnold -
The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
Matthew Arnold -
Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat.
Matthew Arnold
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Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel - below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.
Matthew Arnold -
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask - Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
Matthew Arnold -
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Matthew Arnold -
Thou hast no right to bliss.
Matthew Arnold