"Matthew Arnold" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anything at all yet. We should all try to be bright in the home circle. We cannot all be witty, but-Ow! Rowsley, if you pull my hair I shall hit you in the—in the place where the Gauls fined their soldiers if they stuck out on parade. Oh, Val, that really isn't vulgar, I found it in Matthew Arnold! Their stomachs, you know. They wouldn't have fined you anyhow. You ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... others. Ithink that all who are interested in maintaining certain civilized usages even in the midst of war, ought to protest against such a return to primitive savagery, and I am glad to find that my friend, Mr. Matthew Arnold, one of the highest authorities on the rules of literary warfare, entertains the same opinion, and has quoted what I had quoted from Professor Steinthal's pamphlet, together with other specimens of theological rancor, as extreme ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... Buddha held up to his followers: "Self is the God of self; who else should be the God?" In this century Goethe, Wordsworth, beyond all others Wilhelm von Humboldt, have set forth this ideal. Less strongly intellectual natures, as Maine de Biran, De Senancourt, and Matthew Arnold, listen with admiration, but feel how unknown to the mass of human kind must remain the ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... done in Europe, the better sort of Americans will look thither,—just as Europe looks to us for corn and cotton, or mechanical appliances. We have done much, and much that it was well to do. We have, as Matthew Arnold says, solved the political and social problems better than any other people, though we ourselves perceive that the solution is by no means final. The conditions of our life are favorable to the many. It is easier for a man to assert himself here, than it is or has ever ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... people, to arouse their envy and jealousy by a similar performance. The point is rather that we should enjoy effort, and that our aim should be rather to improve our own performances than to surpass the performances of others. The right spirit is that which Matthew Arnold displays in one of his letters. He was writing at a time when his own literary fame was securely established, yet he said that the longer he lived the more grateful he was for his own success. He added that the more people he came to know, the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that nothing but the highest will satisfy you. God has given you singular powers of influence and of attracting others. He will demand an account {181} of those powers. You know Matthew Arnold's lines on his father. I believe the day will come when men will say like ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... illustrated by an engraving, by G.J. Stodart, of Thorwaldsen's statue of Lord Byron. The preface (pp. vii.-xxxi.) is by Matthew Arnold. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... generation, to Carlyle and Ruskin, and in a certain degree to Matthew Arnold. Each had his group of enthusiastic disciples who responded eagerly to their master's call. They renounced shams or machine-made articles or middle-class Philistinism as the case might be. They went in for sincerity, or Turner, or "sweetness and light," with ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... consciousness of power, that he takes on him to interpret and incarnate the celestial cooperation. There are people, and some of them even poets, whose consciousness is so smothered behind the senses, that they come short of belief in spiritual potency. They are what, with felicity of phrase, Mr. Matthew Arnold calls— ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... author of "The Light under the Altar," was a man who not only reasoned closely but indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air about his preaching and writing, and everything he said and did was saturated by the spirit of challenge. He did not so much imitate as exaggerate the style of Matthew Arnold. And whatever was done publicly against him would have to be done very publicly because his book had ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... commend us. But we do not talk like that now. The waters of the sullen Lethe, rolling doom, are sounding too loudly in our own ears. We would die at peace with all centuries. Mr. Frederic Harrison writes a formal Defence of the Eighteenth Century, Mr. Matthew Arnold reprints half a dozen of Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Mr. Leslie Stephen composes a history of thought during this objurgated period, and also edits, in sumptuously inconvenient volumes, the works of its two great novelists, Richardson and Fielding; and, finally, there ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... peculiarity of the universities that little flocks of men of unusual ability come up at intervals together, breaking the monotony of idlers, prize scholars, and honours men. Such a group appeared at Balliol in Matthew Arnold's time, and rather later, at various colleges, in the dawn of Pre-Raphaelitism. The Tennysons—Alfred, Frederick, and Charles—were members of such a set. There was Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, from Eton; there was Spedding, the editor and biographer of ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... mental desires were dead, but they sprouted during a long uninterrupted afternoon and grew so rapidly they intoxicated her. Masters had sent her in that first offering poets who had not become fashionable in Boston when she left it: Browning, Matthew Arnold and Swinburne; besides the Byron and Shelley and Keats of her girlhood. He sent her Letters and Essays and Memoirs and Biographies that she had never read and those that she had and was glad to read again. He sent her books on art and she re-lived her days in the galleries of Europe, understanding ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... that it is almost impossible for the same ear to seize music so widely differing as Milton's blank verse and Hugo's alexandrines, and it seems to me especially strange that critics varying in degree from Matthew Arnold to the obscure paragraphist, never seem even remotely to suspect, when they passionately declare that English blank verse is a more perfect and complete poetic instrument than French alexandrines, that the imperfections which ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... show that British self-complacency was not altogether justified. The warnings of those who looked below the surface were read and admired. Few writers were more popular than Carlyle, Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold. But all three held aloof from the current of public life which flowed in the traditional party channels. There was no effort to revive the conception of the nation as the organised state to which every ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... have accepted with alacrity the invitation that he and his dear comrades should prolong their visit, and to have prolonged it with them for a whole year, in the course of which Circe bore him a son, named Telegonus. As Matthew Arnold would ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... consume evil, gentle and strong to uplift weakness: Apollo, Hercules, Perseus, Achilles, Sigard, St. George, and many another." Balder has been a favorite subject for poetic treatment, perhaps to best effect in Matthew Arnold's ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... itself by discipline, and the cultivation of right choices, for the goal whose intimations it has heard? Nurture, if it has been wise, has been the forerunner of culture. Atmosphere and example have inspired lofty ideals, but those ideals, if they are to be realized, will require training. Matthew Arnold, quoting Bishop Wilson, has said that culture "is a study of perfection." In other words, it is the means which are used for the perfection of the soul. Shall we choose to leave ourselves to grow like trees in a forest, however they may, or shall we seek those conditions which will ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... have been at their best on the Riviera: from Cette, where Matthew Arnold painted one of the most brilliant little landscapes in our literature, along to Genoa, where Tennyson ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... hear children of fourteen and fifteen who have passed examinations in "English" recite line after line of, say, Matthew Arnold's The Forsaken Merman with a glib self-assured colourlessness due solely to the fact that no teacher has ever taught them respect for simple words. And what simpler words could there be than ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... actually attempting or would be justified in attempting to impose her culture on the rest of Europe; or whether England has good reasons for the limitation or suppression of German culture, is another side-issue. German culture (in Matthew Arnold's correct use of the word, meaning, that is, the average of intellectual and social civilisation), has not on a general inspection much to be proud of. The modern literature of Germany is largely a transcription of Russian, ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... adored son of Oxford. Thomas Hill Green, with the rugged face, and the deep brown eyes, and the look that made pretence and cowardice ashamed, was dead, leaving a thought and a teaching behind him that his Oxford will not let die. Matthew Arnold had yet some years to live and could occasionally be seen at Balliol or at All Souls; while Christ Church and Balliol still represented the rival centres of that great feud between Liberal and Orthodox which had convulsed the University a ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... France and the greatest and most dramatic picture of Richelieu now extant. De Vigny was a convinced Anglophile, well acquainted with the writings of Shakespeare and Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and Leopardi. He also married an English lady ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... His interest in the life of the twentieth century, a life so different from that of his own youth and early manhood, was strangely keen and insistent. Sometimes in talking of his great contemporaries, Tennyson, Meredith, Swinburne, Rossetti, Morris, Matthew Arnold, Borrow, there would creep into his voice a note of reminiscent sadness; but it always seemed poetic rather than personal. It may be said that he never really grew up, that his spirit never tired. His laugh was as youthful as the hearty “My dear fellow,” with which ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Matthew Arnold dared to say, in face of the general British approval of Mr. Bright, that there is, after all, something greater than the "assertion of personal liberty," than the freedom to "do as you like"; and he put forward ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Nixy was, no doubt, a later form of the old Norse water-god Nikke. You meet with him again, in another form, in Neckan, the soulless, of whom Matthew Arnold sings: ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... constitutes what we mean by Revelation. Let us have this as yet very imperfectly known quantity scientifically ascertained, without any attempt either to minimise or to exaggerate. I mean, let the field which Mr. Matthew Arnold has lately been traversing with much of his usual insight but in a light and popular manner, be seriously mapped out and explored. Pioneers have been at work, such as Dr. Kuenen, but not perhaps quite without a bias: let the same enquiry be taken ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... was in my fifty-third year! Many leading articles were rejected, but not one literary or social article. Generally these last appeared in both daily and weekly papers. I recollect the second original social article I wrote was on "Equality as an influence on society and manners," suggested by Matthew Arnold. The much-travelled Smythe, then, I think, touring with Charles Clark, wrote to Mr. Finlayson from Wallaroo thus:—"In this dead-alive place, where one might fire a mitrailleuse down the principal street without hurting anybody, I read this delightful article ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... whole cast of an author's mind, the habitual tone of his feeling on most important matters, is often largely decided by his environment. It is only a very inadequate appreciation, for example, of the work not only of Carlyle and Ruskin but of Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold, that is possible without some correct knowledge of the varying attitude of these men toward important movements in English thought, social, economic, religious, between 1830 and 1880. It must always be an important part of the duty of the college teacher of literature to provide ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... as William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, Mrs. S. F. Adams, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mrs. Charles, Frances Ridley Havergal, Anna Letitia Waring, Jean Ingelow, Adelaide Anne Procter, Mme. Guyon, Theodore Monod, Matthew Arnold, Edwin Arnold, William Shakespeare, John Milton, George Gordon Byron, Robert Burns, William Cowper, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Francis Quarles, Frederick W. Faber, John Keble, Charles Kingsley, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, John Gay, Edward ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... those who could not speak Greek, and ultimately synonymous with the uncivilised and people without culture, particularly literary; this is the sense in which Matthew Arnold ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... dialect even of his best friends and closest associates. And the readiness with which men fall into common form, the levity with which they settle the most complex and difficult issues, stirred in Turgot what Michelet calls ferocite, and Mr. Matthew Arnold calls soeva indignatio. 'Turgot was filled with an astonished, awful, oppressive sense of the immoral thoughtlessness of men; of the heedless, hazardous way in which they deal with things of the greatest moment to them; of the immense, incalculable misery which is due to this ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... immediately. 'And a man who marries his Deceased Wife's Sister,' he exclaimed pathetically to the air, 'may very soon end in the swamps of Rationalism!' Only Queen Mab and the Owl heard the words as they flew overhead. Next they met Mr. Matthew Arnold, smiling a happy smile, and concocting a 'childlike and bland' article for the 'Nineteenth Century' on the present crisis. So they flew on westward till, gaining a freer and fresher neighbourhood, they came upon a wide green lawn, and on the lawn three old acquaintances, ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... ignored or disliked. Mediocrity can not help disliking superiority; and as the old Northern sage declared, "the average of men is but moiety." Moiety does not mean necessarily mediocrity, but also that which is below mediocrity. What we call in England to-day, as Matthew Arnold called it, the Philistine element, continues to prove in our own time, to almost every superior man, the ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... notable of the foreign passengers was William T. Stead. Few names are more widely known to the world of contemporary literature and journalism than that of the brilliant editor of the Review of Reviews. Matthew Arnold called him "the inventor of the new journalism in England." He was on his way to America to take part in the Men and Religion Forward Movement and was to have delivered an address in Union Square on the Thursday after the disaster, with William Jennings Bryan ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... of the new proletarian morality; and one of the principal functions of the Socialist agitator and propagandist is to facilitate and further this growth. He is the teacher of a new morality and, if one accepted Matthew Arnold's definition of religion as "morality touched with emotion," he might be called the preacher of a new religion. Let who will call this sentimentalism, it is none the less hard fact. For, after all, this new proletarian ethic is nothing else than ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... saw him, in academic surroundings, sturdy and impassive, an incongruous element among the caps and gowns; but it was among such men that he won what is to my mind one of his greatest victories. What triumph of Grant's was greater than his subjugation of Matthew Arnold! I rode once on the railroad-train for some hours immediately behind Sheridan, and had a good chance to study the sinewy little man in his trim uniform which showed every movement of his muscles. Though the ride was ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... surprise how original and beautiful were many of his fancies and similes. I say I noted them with surprise, because he was evidently a modern Englishman, and yet unlike any other of his writing species. His name was not Alfred Tennyson, nor Edwin Arnold, nor Matthew Arnold, nor Austin Dobson, nor Martin Tupper. He was neither plagiarist nor translator—he was actually an original man. I do not give his name here, as I consider it the duty of his own country to find him out and acknowledge him, which, as it is so proud of its literary standing, of course ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... look, a homeliness that touches the heart like the sight of a pasture-field, with its broken bars, where our childhood ran with happy feet. Carlyle was against things because they were English; so was Matthew Arnold. These men were self-expatriated in spirit. I like not the attitude. Give us men who love native land beyond all other lands, and who, removed therefrom, turn homesick eyes toward its invisible boundaries. Irving, admirable in many ways, was in no way more to be ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... should have had to go clandestinely—en cachette, as they say here; and that is not my nature; I like to do everything frankly, freely, naivement, au grand jour. That is the great thing—to be free, to be frank, to be naif. Doesn't Matthew Arnold say that somewhere—or is it ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... some unfrequented route. They struggled over plains peopled only by tent-dwelling Tartars and their herds, until at last they reached the noble city of Bokhara. They must have followed the line of the Oxus River, and if we reverse the marvellous description which Matthew Arnold wrote of that river's course in Sohrab and Rustum, we shall have a picture of the ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... of certain phrases and thoughts, which mars the work of sacred poets generally, and which has led to an unjustly strong censure being laid on them by critics, so different from each other as Dr. Johnson and Mr. Matthew Arnold. As the alleged Paganism of some of Herrick's sacred poems exists only in the imagination of readers, so the alleged insincerity is equally hypothetical, and can only be supported by the argument (notoriously false to history and to human ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Matthew Arnold, the apostle of culture, found his idealism in the purely mental region. Rossetti was the idealist of the heart, with its whole world of emotions, and that subtle and far-reaching inter-play between soul and body for which Carlyle had ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... chose fifty authors, now alive or living till recently, and have carefully read three hundred pages of each. We have minutely noted and recorded what these men by habitual use declare to be good English. Among the fifty are such men as Ruskin, Froude, Hamerton, Matthew Arnold, Macaulay, De Quincey, Thackeray, Bagehot, John Morley, James Martineau, Cardinal Newman, J. R. Green, and Lecky in England; and Hawthorne, Curtis, Prof. W. D. Whitney, George P. Marsh, Prescott, Emerson, Motley, Prof. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... hoped, that to the authority of the world's best thinkers is added the picturesqueness of their fine writing. Plato, Spencer, Newton; Darwin, Haeckel, Virchow; AEschylus, Shelley, Ibsen; Burton, Mandeville, Loti; or Brandes, Matthew Arnold, and Demosthenes—from old and from modern times they yield ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... saints and reformers were criticized, so were those of the scholars. Matthew Arnold's definition of culture was that of a man of books. It was the knowledge of the best that had been said and known in the past. Emerson's lines entitled "Culture" begin with a characteristic question and end with an equally ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... morality assumes special and higher manifestations, and character a nobler form? Is the Christian merely an ordinary man who happens from birth to have been surrounded with a peculiar set of ideas? Is his religion merely that peculiar quality of the moral life defined by Mr. Matthew Arnold as "morality touched by emotion?" And does the possession of a high ideal, benevolent sympathies, a reverent spirit, and a favorable environment account for what ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... do away with Wordsworth, substituting, possibly, Swinburne. I have sometimes wondered if we weren't underestimating the potential strength of the Freshman's mind by feeding him on too much pap. By the same token I am inclined to think that I should drop Carlyle and Hawthorne for Matthew Arnold and, perhaps, Cardinal Newman." (Furbush was a High Churchman of a militant dye.) "What I should, of course, do would be to divide the present first term between Spenser and Milton, instead of giving it all to Shakespeare." This last was said directly to Dawson. It had been Mr. Dawson's ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... to the Church of Brou, near Lyons— exquisitely beautiful, and filled with monuments even more inspiring than the church itself. But it was entirely evident, from a look at the church and its surroundings, that Matthew Arnold had written his charming poem without ever visiting the place. Going thence to Nice, we stopped at Turin; and at the grave of Silvio Pellico there came back to me vivid memories of his little book, which had seemed to make life better ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... is a little disheartening and a justification of my pessimism that neither of these men has received anything like the same general recognition as our fluent Mr. Perchance, that interpreter of literature to the American bourgeoisie. I will slip in also a volume or two of Matthew Arnold, as a good touchstone to try them on. Now that you are becoming a professional weigher of books yourself, you ought to be ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... birth. Advowsons are the last offices to retain a proprietary character. The church of that day owed such a representative as Horne Tooke to the system which enabled his father to provide for him by buying a living. From the highest to the lowest ranks of clergy, the church was as Matthew Arnold could still call it, an 'appendage of the barbarians.' The clergy, that is, as a whole, were an integral but a subsidiary part of the aristocracy or the great landed interest. Their admirers urged that the system planted a cultivated gentleman in every ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... immortal by a single sonnet. Even I have written one too many! Every anthologist wants to anthologise it (The Odyssey); it never was a favourite of my own, though it had the honour to be kindly spoken of by Mr. Matthew Arnold. ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... that of Spenser in these two poems, the form is essentially different. The resemblance with Lycidas is closer, and closer still with the poems of Leopardi, though Patmore has not followed the Italian habit of mingling rhymed and non-rhymed verse, nor did he ever experiment, like Goethe, Heine, Matthew Arnold, and Henley, in wholly ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... writing of a man chagrined; but what could have chagrined Hawthorne there? The socially ambitious man may become chagrined, if he finds that doors are closed to him, and so may an unappreciated would-be genius. But Hawthorne's position as an author was already more firmly established than Matthew Arnold's ever could be; and as for social ambition, no writer since Shakespeare has been so free from it. It seems more probable that the difficulty with Hawthorne in this respect was due to his old position ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... connection, and he now proposed him, says Mr. Rogers,[73] as secretary to the commission. The commission began by sending out assistant-commissioners to the selected districts: it afterwards examined a number of experts in educational matters; it sent Mark Pattison and Matthew Arnold to report upon the systems in Germany, France, and Switzerland; it examined all the previous reports presented to the Committee of the Privy Council; it collected a quantity of information from the various societies, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... seen, and with extreme pleasure, Mr. Matthew Arnold's arrangement of Wordsworth's poems; and read with sincere interest his high estimate of them. But a great poet's work never needs arrangement by other hands; and though it is very proper that Silver How should clearly understand and brightly praise ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... bears him children, but, on recovering her garment, flies away and is no more heard of. Sometimes she superfluously imposes a tabu upon her husband, which he breaks and she disappears (Melusine variant; compare Lohengrin). This is the effective and affecting incident of which Matthew Arnold makes such good use in his Merman. It could obviously be used, as Mr. Hartland points out, in a quasi-mythological manner to account for supernatural ancestry, as in the cases of the physicians ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I will yield to the temptation of giving it here. After I had gone to Hartford in response to Clemens's telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in Boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at home to receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain. "Oh, but he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?" "He likes Mr. Clemens ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... women were constantly on the wing. Anna Dickinson, Olive Logan, Kate Field,—later, Mrs. Livermore and Mrs. Howe, Alcott, Phillips, Douglass, Tilton, Curtis, Beecher, and, several years later, General Kilpatrick, with Henry Vincent, Bradlaugh, and Matthew Arnold from England; these and many others were stars of the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... common in that day, and which is to be seen at its perfection in the English edition of Jacob Behmen. The frontispiece is a full-length likeness of the author of the Holy War, with his whole soul laid open and his hidden heart 'anatomised.' Why, asked Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold in our day has echoed the question—why does Homer still so live and rule without a rival in the world of letters? And they answer that it is because he always sang with his eye so fixed upon its object. 'Homer, to thee I turn.' And so it ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... beverages in a world all drab; when I think of model lodging-houses in St. James's Park, and trams running round and round St. James's Square—the mighty fallen, and the lowly swollen, and, in Elysium, the shade of Matthew Arnold shedding tears on the shoulder of a shade so different as George Brummell's—tears, idle tears, at sight of the Barbarians, whom he had mocked and loved, now annihilated by those others whom he had mocked and hated; when such previsions as these come surging up in me, I do deem myself well content ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... "and that is a difficulty that meets us at every turn. It is something that Matthew Arnold urged with great effect in his paper on that crank of a Tolstoy. He asked what would become of the people who need the work if we served and waited on ourselves, as Tolstoy ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr. Matthew Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge. The day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count "Moll Flanders," ay, or "The Country Wife," more wholesome and more pious diet than ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... book was twofold. His opening words are a translation of what Matthew Arnold calls "that buoyant and immortal sentence with which Aristotle begins his Metaphysics,"—"All mankind naturally desire knowledge." But few can attain to what is desired by all, and innumerable are ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and his face is thin and furrowed and pale, as though it had become spiritualized by the vicarious pain which he endured in bearing on himself all the calamities of his country." Truly it might be said of him, in the words of Matthew Arnold: ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... rules and exceptions; not as a system whereby the little children of the Ghetto, and the offspring of Pittsburgh millionaires, and the spectacled infant elect of Beacon Hill may all be raised to the point where they can write with acceptable fluency the chiseled phrases of Matthew Arnold, the cadenced Latinity of Sir Thomas Browne, the sonorous measures of Bolingbroke or the distinguished and resonant periods of the King James Bible. Such an aim as this will always result ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... is but a mode of thought," the most earnest Pantheist would hardly desire more. For the conception of the Universe involved must surely exclude the real being, or even the real existence, of anything but God. Matthew Arnold never committed himself to Pantheism, nor, indeed, to any other theory of the Universe. For his delicate humour and lambent satire always had in view simply the practical object of clearing a plain way for the good life through ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... they used to be called) of humorists. There is something very national in the very name of the old play of Every Man in His Humour. But the play more often acted in real life is 'Every Man Out of His Humour.' It is true, as Matthew Arnold said, that an Englishman wants to do as he likes; but it is not always true even that he likes what he likes. An Englishman can be friendly and yet not feel friendly. Or he can be friendly and yet not feel hospitable. Or he can feel hospitable and yet not welcome those whom he really loves. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... Matthew Arnold, explaining why those were his most popular poems which dealt with his canine pets, Geist, Kaiser, and Max, said that while comparatively few loved poetry, nearly everyone ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... watch is from father, the rug from mother, the hot water bottle from grandmother who is always worrying for fear I shall catch cold in this climate—and the yellow paper from my little brother Harry. My sister Isabel gave me the silk stockings, and Aunt Susan the Matthew Arnold poems; Uncle Harry (little Harry is named after him) gave me the dictionary. He wanted to send chocolates, ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... hold off the destroyer of our summer yet one more week, until the forenoon of September 7, and then falls the frost, and that unfaltering will renders its supreme submission to the adored will of God." His death before the open window was a realization of Matthew Arnold's wish with regard to dying: — Let me be, While all around in silence lies, Moved to the window near, and see Once more, before my dying eyes, — Bathed in the sacred dews of morn The wide aerial landscape spread, The ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... with the new breath of calamint, ground-ivy, and pimpernel, he and a friend were walking towards a certain camp of gryengroes well known to them both. They were bound upon a quaint expedition. Will the reader "be surprised to learn" that it was connected with Matthew Arnold and a race in which he took a good deal of interest, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... commercialism, he has not a trace; his only values are spiritual and ideal; his only standards are the essential and the enduring. What Matthew Arnold called the Anglo-Saxon contagion, the bourgeois spirit, the worldly and sordid ideal, is entirely corrected in Whitman by the ascendant of the ethic and the universal. His democracy ends in universal brotherhood, his patriotism in the solidarity of nations, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich. Some one wrote to me in trouble, 'When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.' How remote was the writer from what Matthew Arnold calls 'the Secret of Jesus.' Either would have taught him that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at night-time, and for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls of your house in letters for the sun to ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... another from one who will not be offended if I class him with this school—the finest of critics as one of the most finished of poets—Matthew Arnold. Only my reader must remember that of none of my poets am I free to choose that which is most characteristic: I have the scope of my ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... trend of the character must be given, if given at all, prior to university life, at the public school; and to him nothing less than the formation of high moral character seemed worth striving for. Fine scholarship and high mathematics are excellent, but after all, as the apostle of culture, Matthew Arnold, has told us, conduct, and not intellectual attainment, forms seven-tenths ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... rebels, but so long as he was more poetic than venerable he stood in perpetual rebellion against the motives, pursuits, and satisfactions of his time)—Wordsworth till he was forty-five, Byron all his short life, Newman, Carlyle, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin—among English writers those have proved themselves the dynamic people. There are many others, and many later; but we need recall only these few great names, far enough distant to be clearly visible. It was they who moved the country, shaking ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... knowledge than those of most European countries, or even than those of the three smaller countries north and west of England in which the Celtic element is stronger than it is in South Britain. A parallel charge has, ever since the days of Matthew Arnold, been brought against the English upper and middle classes. He declared that they care less for the "things of the mind" and show less respect to eminence in science, literature and art, than is the case elsewhere, as for instance in France, Germany, or Italy (to which one may add the ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... either to thirty-one or thirty-three years, though Irenaeus emphatically asserts that he lived to fifty years, we may most assuredly proclaim him a priest in the sense of elder, or leader of men. One whom schools of thought, represented by men so opposed as Mill, Renan, Matthew Arnold, Spinoza, Goethe, Napoleon and Rousseau, conspired to honour must have been indeed a "king of men". But this is not what is meant by the question. By priest we mean here what the ecclesiastic means, namely, one who is set apart ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... simplicity and innocence of her thoughts." He may turn to Plato's Phaedrus and read how every soul is divided into three parts (like Caesar's Gaul). He may turn to the finest critic of Victorian times, Matthew Arnold, and find in his essay on Maurice de Guerin the perfect key to what is there called the "magical power of poetry." ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... entered, and a half-mile away arose the spire of the village church. There were no neighbors, save a cheery old priest, and the simple villagers who made respectful obeisance as they passed. Here it was that Matthew Arnold came to pay his tribute to genius, also Liszt and the fair Countess d'Agoult, Delacroix, Renan, Lamennais, Lamartine, and so many others of the great and excellent. Chopin was enchanted with the place, and refused to go back ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... questionnaire, since we have 'interrogatory', but if we want it we can make shift with 'questionary'; and for concessionnaire we can put 'concessionary'. To balance 'employer' there is 'employee', better by far than employe, which insists on a French pronunciation. Matthew Arnold and Lowell, always apt and exact in their use of their own tongue, were careful to prefer the English 'technic' to the French technique, which is not in harmony with the adjectives 'technical' and polytechnic. So 'clinic' seems at last to have vanquished its French father ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... closely paralleled by those of Goethe, who considered that Byron had the greatest talent of any man of his century.[297] The opinions of continental critics in general were similar. Among English critics Matthew Arnold aroused many protests when he ranked Byron as one of the two greatest English poets of the nineteenth century, but his views seem perfectly rational now; and though he remarked upon the extravagance of Scott's phrases his own verdict was ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... old farmstead, with its huckleberry pasture and cowbells tankling homeward at sunset and a bright brown brook cascading down over ledges of rock into a swimming hole, then again your problem has possible solutions. Just go out to the farm, with a copy of Matthew Arnold's "Scholar Gipsy" (you remember the poem, in which he praises the guy who had sense enough to leave town and live in the suburbs where the Bolsheviki wouldn't bother him), and don't leave any forwarding address with the postoffice. But if, as I fear from ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... song, or the catchword of a buffoon, will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity. Some modem writers, admiring the easy power of the device, have indulged themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnold particularly, in his prose essays, falls to crying ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... last, it is sometimes urged, came out of Lambeth. Little of the theological bitterness, of the controversial narrowness of this age or the last, it may fairly be answered, has ever entered its gates. Of Lambeth we may say what Matthew Arnold says of Oxford, that many as are its faults it has never surrendered itself to ecclesiastical Philistines. In the calm, genial silence of its courts, its library, its galleries, in the presence of its venerable past, the virulence, the petty strife, the tumult of religious fanaticism ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... is essentially and eternally melancholy,—a belief which persisted down to the time of Matthew Arnold, also drew its strength from the poems of Ossian. Here again theory showed the way to practice. The melancholy of the Ossianic poems is not the melancholy of the Celt, but a melancholy compounded of many simples, ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... noticeable that we possess no recognised English set phrase, such as "to startle the Philistine" or "to ruffle the hair of the Philistine." Indeed, before Matthew Arnold imported the term Philistine from Germany, as equivalent in art matters to the French "le bourgeois" or the later expression "l'epicier," we really had nothing at all to correspond with these terms. For to shock "Mrs Grundy" is quite ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... have endorsed the opinion. Its author, Thomas Hughes, born at Uffington, Berkshire, England, Oct. 19, 1822, was himself, like his hero, both a Rugby boy under Dr. Arnold and the son of a Berkshire squire, but he denied that the story was in any real sense autobiographical. Matthew Arnold and Arthur H. Clough, the poet, were Hughes's friends at school, and in later life he became associated with Charles Kingsley and Frederick Denison Maurice on what was called the Christian Socialist movement. A barrister by profession, Thomas Hughes became a county court judge, and lived for ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... mystics were never mystical, runs through all our travels, so obstinately recurring in architecture, sculpture, legend, philosophy, religion, and poetry, that it becomes tiresome; and yet it is an idea that, in spite of Matthew Arnold and many other great critics, never has got lodgment in the English or German mind, and probably never will. Every one who loves travel will hope that it never may. If you are driven to notice it as the most distinctive mark of French art, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... hammock and resumed an open book. Its title was "Matthew Arnold—How to Know Him." She was getting up in Matthew Arnold for a paper. Winona at twenty was old before she should have been. She was small and dark, with a thin nose and pinched features. Her dark hair, wound close to her small head, was pretty enough, and her dark eyes were good, but ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... no longer adequate. People had tired of familiar "subjects"; it was the fashion to be interested in things that one hadn't always known about—natural selection, animal magnetism, sociology and comparative folk-lore; while, in literature, the demand had become equally difficult to meet, since Matthew Arnold had introduced the habit of studying the "influence" of one author on another. She had tried lecturing on influences, and had done very well as long as the public was satisfied with the tracing of such ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... friendliness. The smoke from the chimneys hung over it, a pale blue haze; and the tall roofs, the spires of the churches, gave it a pleasantly medieval air. There was a homeliness in it which warmed the heart. Hayward talked of Richard Feverel and Madame Bovary, of Verlaine, Dante, and Matthew Arnold. In those days Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam was known only to the elect, and Hayward repeated it to Philip. He was very fond of reciting poetry, his own and that of others, which he did in a monotonous sing-song. By the time they reached ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... keep his intellect undulled by the routine of his dreary work, Matthew Arnold was wont to write a few lines of poetry each day. Poetry, like music and song, is an effective dispeller of care; and those who find Omar Khayyam or "In Memoriam" incapable of removing the of burden of their woes, will no doubt appreciate the "Owl and the Pussy-cat," or ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... Matthew Arnold wrote me an interesting letter some years ago about these stanzas, from which I make ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... illustrated by Professor Perry that they do not call for any further discussion in this place. But perhaps something may be added concerning the different equipments that are required by authors of novels and authors of short-stories. Matthew Arnold, in a well-known sonnet, spoke of Sophocles as a man "who saw life steadily and saw it whole"; and if we judge the novelist and the writer of short-stories by their attitudes toward life, we may say that they divide this verse between them. Balzac, George Eliot, and Meredith ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... famously. We had put both war and Wellingsford behind us, and talked of books. I found to my dismay that this fair and fearless high product of modernity had far less acquaintance with Matthew Arnold than with the Evangelist of the same praenomen. She had never heard of "The Forsaken Merman," one of the most haunting romantic poems in the English language. I pointed to a bookcase and bade her fetch the volume. She brought it and settled down again by my chair, and, as a ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... William Makepeace Thackeray. George Eliot. Minor Novelists of the Victorian Age. Charles Reade. Anthony Trollope. Charlotte Bronte. Bulwer Lytton. Charles Kingsley. Mrs. Gaskell. Blackmore. Meredith. Hardy. Stevenson. Essayists of the Victorian Age. Macaulay. Carlyle. Ruskin. Matthew Arnold. Newman. The Spirit of Modern Literature. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... collects a number of weighty opinions confirming this judgment. Carlyle, who proclaimed the merits of silence in some thirty volumes, blames democracy for ignoring the 'noble, silent men' who could serve it best, and placing power in the hands of windbags. Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Sir James Stephen, Sir Henry Maine, and Lecky, all agree that 'the people have for the most part neither the will nor the power to find out the best men to lead them.' In France the denunciations ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... must demand of the very highest poetry first—the order is not material—a certain quality of expression, and secondly, a certain quality of subject. "What that quality of subject must be has been, as it seems to me, crudely and wrongly stated, but rightly indicated, in Mr. Matthew Arnold's formula of the "Criticism of Life." That is to say, in less debatable words, the greatest poet must show most knowledge of human nature. Now both these conditions are fulfilled in the sonnets of Shakespere with a completeness and intensity impossible to ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... invited. The outcroppings of a vulgar egotism might indicate a substratum necessary to be taken into account, but it would have been a clear loss of labor to follow the leadings of any eccentric vein. One might wonder at the absence of Mr. Matthew Arnold, the high priest of culture; but we have to remember that Mr. Arnold is solicitous to stand apart, that he holds up ideals which he is careful to inform us are not those of his time, and that he is fastidious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... who do not subscribe as the "unamiable." Few, we trust, would be so careful of their money and so careless of their reputation for moral beauty as to refuse to pay a guinea for a certificate of amiability countersigned by Mr. Matthew Arnold. Yet even the amiable might hesitate to take part in erecting a monument to the honour of Falkland, if it was at the same time to be a monument to the dishonour, of Luther, Gustavus, Walsingham, Sir John Eliot, Pym, Hampden, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... sketch of existing conditions to terms of literary criticism, the result is interesting. There are two great schools of criticism: the judicial and the impressionistic. The judicial critic—a Boileau, a Matthew Arnold—bases his criticism upon fundamental principles. The impressionistic critic follows the now hackneyed advice of Anatole France, to let his soul adventure among masterpieces, and seeks the reaction for good or bad of a given work upon his own finely strung mind. The first group must ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... more vital importance than the mere melodiousness of single lines, or a metre of unvarying sweetness bearing gently along in its placid course (as a stream the leaf or twig fallen into it from above) some tiny thought or finikin fragment of emotion. Matthew Arnold, who was both poet and critic, has told us with emphasis of "the necessity of accurate construction, and the subordinate character of expression."[5] His next words, though bearing a slightly different signification, may very legitimately ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... 1867; and Whitman: A Study, which appeared in 1896, is a more extended treatment of the man and his poetry and philosophy. Birds and Poets, too, contains a paper on Whitman, entitled The Flight of the Eagle, besides an essay on Emerson, whom he also treated incidentally in his paper, Matthew Arnold on Emerson and Carlyle, in Indoor Studies; and the latter volume contains his ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... distinguished guest, distinguished for the manner in which he has brought together all that is most modern in sentiment with all that is most scholastic in thought and language; permit me to say, Mr. Matthew Arnold. I appeal to him if I am not right when I say that it is by a language in common that all differences of origin sooner or later we are welded together—that Etruscans, and Sabines, and Oscans, and Romans, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... an excessive tribute to the Calvinism he had formally rejected, in so far as, according to him, it goes to form character—even national character, at all events, in its production of types; and he never in any really effective way glances at what Mr Matthew Arnold called "Scottish manners, Scottish drink" as elements in any way radically qualifying. It is not, of course, that I, as a Scotsman, well acquainted with rural life in some parts of England, as with rural life in many parts of Scotland in my youth, do not heartily agree with him—the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... to throw the responsibility upon the wicked Puritans who used their power to close the theatres. We entered the 'prison-house' of Puritanism says Matthew Arnold, I think, and stayed there for a couple of centuries. If so, the gaolers must have had some difficulty, for the Puritan (in the narrower sense, of course) has always been in a small and unpopular minority. ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... done, what room for a poet—for any spiritualist—in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue." It may be remembered that Mr. Matthew Arnold quoted the expression about America, which sounded more harshly as pronounced in a public lecture than as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... me give you a few prolegomena on this matter. You must study the plants of course, species by species. Take Watson's 'Cybele Britannica,' and Moore's 'Cybele Hibernica;' and let—as Mr. Matthew Arnold would say—"your thought play freely about them." Look carefully, too, in the case of each species, at the note on its distribution, which you will find appended in Bentham's 'Handbook,' and in Hooker's 'Student's Flora.' Get all the help you can, if you wish to work the subject out, from ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the present day they have much direct influence on the advancement of learning either by way of research or of publication. For example, the standard dictionaries of France, Germany and England are the work, not of academies, but of individual scholars, of Littre, Grimm and Murray. Matthew Arnold's plea for an English academy of letters to save his countrymen from the note of vulgarity and provinciality has met with no response. Academies have been supplanted, socially by the modern club, and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia |
