Selections from the Prose Writings of Matthew Arnold

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Holt, 1897 - English essays - 348 pages
 

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Page 306 - Homer ruled as his demesne : Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken ; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He...
Page 216 - Lo, these are parts of his ways: but how little a portion is heard of him? but the thunder of his power who can understand?
Page 137 - Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic ! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines ! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties...
Page 306 - That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne ; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken...
Page 268 - Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.
Page lxx - And in poetry, no less than in life, he is * a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.
Page 190 - Let no man deceive you with vain words : for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.
Page 123 - God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it; yea farther; though a wise man think to know it, yet shall he not be able to find it.
Page 137 - And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?
Page 169 - ... position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own communications with the future.

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