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Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
- And we forget because we must
And not because we will.‘Absence’ (1852) - The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.‘Dover Beach’ (1867) l. 21 - Ah, love, let us be true
To one another!‘Dover Beach’ (1867) l. 29 - And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.‘Dover Beach’ (1867) l. 35 - Is it so small a thing
To have enjoyed the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done.Empedocles on Etna (1852) act 1, sc. 2, l. 397 - Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.‘Faded Leaves’ (1855) no. 5 (first published, 1852, as ‘Longing’) - He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth.of Wordsworth‘Memorial Verses, April 1850’ (1852) - Eternal Passion!
Eternal Pain!of the nightingale‘Philomela’ (1853) l. 31 - Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he
Who finds himself, loses his misery.‘Self-Dependence’ (1852) l. 31 - Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge.‘Shakespeare’ (1849) - Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.‘Sohrab and Rustum’ (1853) l. 656
- Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ (1855) l. 85 - And that sweet City with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening.of Oxford‘Thyrsis’ (1866) l. 19 - Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.of Sophocles‘To a Friend’ (1849)
- The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light…He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.Culture and Anarchy (1869) ch. 1; see Swift
- The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.Culture and Anarchy (1869) ch. 1
- Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!…whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age…Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!of OxfordEssays in Criticism First Series (1865) preface
- In poetry, no less than in life, he is ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’.Essays in Criticism Second Series (1888) ‘Shelley’ (quoting from his own essay on Byron in the same work)
- Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.Essays in Criticism Second Series (1888) ‘Wordsworth’
- The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.Literature and Dogma (1873) ch. 1
- The main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavours, in all branches of knowledge—theology, philosophy, history, art, science—to see the object as in itself it really is.On Translating Homer (1861) Lecture 2
- People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.G. W. E. Russell Collections and Recollections (1898) ch. 13
