Matthew Arnold

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, Still standing for some false, impossible shore.

And then he thinks he knows The Hills where his life rose, And the Sea where it goes.

A man becomes aware of his life's flow... And there arrives a lull in the hot race.

A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.

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.

I am past thirty, and three parts iced over.

How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again — thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!

Hark! ah, the nightingale — The tawny-throated! Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst! What triumph! hark! — what pain!

Her cabin’d, ample Spirit, It flutter’d and fail’d for breath. To-night it doth inherit The vasty Hall of Death.

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew. In quiet she reposes: Ah! would that I did too.

What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These …

Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?

To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.

I too have long'd for trenchant force, And will like a dividing spear; Have praised the keen, unscrupulous course Which knows no doubt, which feels no fear.

This heart, I know, To be long lov’d was never fram’d; For something in its depths doth glow Too strange, too restless, too untam’d.

And sigh that only one thing has been lent To youth and age in common — discontent.

Eyes too expressive to be blue, Too lovely to be grey.

We, in some unknown Power's employ, Move on a rigorous line; Can neither, when we will, enjoy, Nor, when we will, resign.

Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.

What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?

Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he Who finds himself, loses his misery.

And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original …

The same heart beats in every human breast!