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Matthew Arnold

Life dates: 1822 AD — 1888 AD

Listed in the author section of Bartlett’s ninth-edition anthology, in the linked 1905 printing. Dates reflect that historical edition and may differ from modern scholarship.

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Quotations and sayings

03c. 1855 AD
Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men Love lends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave. Dreams dawn and fly, friends smile and die Like spring flowers; Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves with bitter tears For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts and sick with fears, Count the hours. We count the hours! These dreams of ours, False and hollow, Do we go hence and find they are not dead? Joys we dimly apprehend, Faces that smiled and fled, Hopes born here, and born to end, Shall we follow?
Matthew Arnold / quote
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07c. 1855 AD
Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone. The islands feel the enclasping flow, And then their endless bounds they know. But when the moon their hollows lights, And they are swept by balms of spring, And in their glens, on starry nights, The nightingales divinely sing; And lovely notes, from shore to shore, Across the sounds and channels pour— Oh! then a longing like despair Is to their farthest caverns sent; For surely once, they feel, we were Parts of a single continent! Now round us spreads the watery plain— Oh might our marges meet again! Who ordered, that their longing’s fire Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled? Who renders vain their deep desire? A God, a God their severance ruled! And bade betwixt their shores to be The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
Matthew Arnold / quote
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14c. 1855 AD
Only--but this is rare--When a beloved hand is laid in ours,When, jaded with the rush and glareOf the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,When our world-deafen'd earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.A man becomes aware of his life's flow,And hears its winding murmur; and he seesThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
Matthew Arnold / quote
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22c. 1855 AD
, And you, ye stars,Who slowly begin to marshal,As of old, the fields of heaven,Your distant, melancholy lines!Have you, too, survived yourselves?Are you, too, what I fear to become?You, too, once lived;You, too, moved joyfullyAmong august companions,In an older world, peopled by Gods,In a mightier order,The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven.But now, ye kindleYour lonely, cold-shining lights,Unwilling lingerersIn the heavenly wilderness,For a younger, ignoble world;And renew, by necessity,Night after night your courses,In echoing, unneared silence,Above a race you know not—Uncaring and undelighted,Without friend and without home;Weary like us, though notWeary with our weariness.
Matthew Arnold / quote
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