English poet & critic (1822-1888)
What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?--
Most men eddy about
Here and there--eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and, then they die--
Perish; and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
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Rugby Chapel
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"To a Friend"
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Culture and Anarchy
The word "God" is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness -- a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Literature and Dogma
Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Lines Written in Kensington Gardens"
The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Culture and Anarchy
But thou, my son, study to make prevail
One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Merope
Yes: in the sea of life enisl'd,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"To Marguerite, in Returning a Volume of the Letters of Ortis"
Fate gave, what Chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Resignation"