Matthew Arnold

Thou waitest for the spark from heaven!

The line of festal light in Christ-Church hall.

Rapt, twirling in thy hand a wither'd spray, And waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, Returning home on summer-nights, have met Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, As the punt’s rope chops round.

Tired of knocking at preferment's door.

All the live murmur of a summer's day.

Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill.

The day in his hotness, The strife with the palm; The night in her silence, The stars in their calm.

’Tis Apollo comes leading His choir, the Nine. —The leader is fairest, But all are divine.

Not here, O Apollo Are haunts meet for thee. But, where Helicon breaks down In cliff to the sea.

Because thou must not dream, thou needst not then despair!

Far, far from here, The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay Among the green Illyrian hills; ... And there, they say, two bright and aged snakes, Who once were Cadmus and Harmonia, Bask in the glens or on the warm sea-shore,

Is it so small a thing To have enjoy’d the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done; To have advanc’d true friends, and beat down baffling foes?

So, loath to suffer mute. We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear.

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

We do not what we ought, What we ought not, we do, And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through; But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers.

Thou hast no right to bliss.

The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint- nor sophist-led, but be a man.

Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.

If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.

What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

English civilization — the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society — that is what interests me.

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 …