Matthew Arnold

He went; his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground; He could not wait their passing, he is dead!

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs, The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames.

Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days; Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression.

The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge — theology, philosophy, history, art, science — to see the …

What helps it now, that Byron bore, With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart, Through Europe to the Ætolian shore The pageant of his bleeding heart? That thousands counted every groan, And Europe made his woe her own?

Silent — the best are silent now.

Oh, hide me in your gloom profound, Ye solemn seats of holy pain! Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round, Till I possess my soul again; Till free my thoughts before me roll, Not chafed by hourly false control!

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.

For both were faiths, and both are gone.

Forgive me, masters of the mind! At whose behest I long ago So much unlearnt, so much resign'd — I come not here to be your foe!

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 …

Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, A foil’d circuitous wanderer:—till at last The long’d-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose …

he flow’d Right for the Polar Star, past Orgunjè, Brimming, and bright, and large

But the majestic River floated on, Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Into the frosty starlight

So, on the bloody sand, Sohrab lay dead. And the great Rustum drew his horseman’s cloak Down o’er his face, and sate by his dead son. As those black granite pillars, once high-rear’d By Jemshid in Persepolis, to bear His house, now, mid …

And youth and bloom, and this delightful world.

his head droop’d low, His limbs grew slack; motionless, white, he lay—

... the salt blue sea.

They follow’d me, my hope, my fame, my star.

for like the lightning to this field I came, and like the wind I go away — Sudden, and swift, and like a passing wind.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.