237 quotes
All night long I lie
Tossing and wakeful, and I come.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
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.
Preface to Poems (1854)
And through the woods, another way,
Faint bugle-notes from far are borne,
Where hunters gather, staghounds bay,
Round some old forest-lodge at morn.
For Time, not Corydon, hath conquer'd thee!
Thyrsis (1866)
The kings of modern thought are dumb.
We cannot kindle when we will
The fire that in the heart resides,
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides; —
But tasks, in hours of insight willed,
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.
Introduction to Ward's English Poets (1880)
A man becomes aware of his life's flow...
And there arrives a lull in the hot race.
Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall.
New Poems (1867)
Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For so the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.
Silent — the best are silent now.
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men,
And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.
Poor Matthias (1867)
I must not say that she was true,
Yet let me say that she was fair;
And they, that lovely face who view,
They should not ask if truth be there.
Time may restore us in his course
Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force;
But where will Europe’s latter hour
Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?
Memorial Verses (1852)
However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.
Matthew Arnold's Notebooks (1902)
The will is free;
Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful;
The seeds of god-like power are in us still;
Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
It is — last stage of all —
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free, onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silver’d branches of the glade.
The Scholar-Gipsy (1853)
He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth.
Memorial Verses (1852)