"Matthew Arnold" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 always made too little allowance. Mr. H.G. Wells and Mr. Bernard ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... phase of thought which called itself Positivism has not been great. But a school of thought which numbered among its adherents such men and women as John Stuart Mill, George Henry Lewes, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison, and Matthew Arnold, cannot be said to have been without significance. A book upon the translation of which Harriet Martinean worked with sustained enthusiasm cannot be dismissed as if it were merely a curiosity. Comte's work, Coura de Philosophie ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... course, if we are content to take a bill and write down Byron and Lamartine, Senancour and Jacopo Ortis (otherwise Ugo Foscolo), Musset, Matthew Arnold, and tutti quanti, as debtors to Rene, we give the tale or episode a historical value which cannot be denied; while its positive aesthetic quality, though it may vary very much in different estimates, cannot be regarded as merely worthless. Also, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... and art, at every conversational opportunity. The dismay set up by these sallies encourages him in his belief that he is helping to educate England. When he finds people chattering harmlessly about Anatole France and Nietzsche, he devastates them with Matthew Arnold, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, and even Macaulay; and as he is devoutly religious at bottom, he first leads the unwary, by humorous irreverences, to wave popular theology out of account in discussing moral questions with him, and then scatters them in confusion ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... a fine barbarian, quoting from Matthew Arnold. I never before understood how true that ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... part of my time, and our removal to Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, an agricultural village with a scattered population, increased my leisure. I read the works of Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Stanley, Greg, Matthew Arnold, Liddon, Mansel, and many another, and my scepticism grew deeper and deeper as I read. The Broad Church arguments appeared to me to be of the nature of special pleading, skilful evasions of difficulties rather than the real meeting and solving ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... opinions? Chiefly in humanizing them, in making the gospel story "palpitate with actuality" to quote the French phrase which Matthew Arnold loved to use. These people on the stage at Ober-Ammergau are not lay figures, mere abstract representations of the virtues or the opposite. They live, breathe and act just as if they were actors in a French or Russian novel. That is the great difference. ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... giggled. "You didn't take the course in nineteenth century essayists, I guess, Dottie. He's not in 'Sweetness and Light,' unless Richard Blake is an alibi of Matthew Arnold's." ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... out-door life and 25 prose passages, representing over 60 authors, including Fitzgerald, Shelley, Shakespeare, Kenneth Grahame, Stevenson, Whitman, Bliss Carman, Browning, William Watson, Alice Meynel, Keats, Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, William Morris, Maurice Hewlett, Izaak Walton, Wm. Barnes, Herrick, Gervase Markham, Dobson, Lamb, Milton, ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... 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, ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... its part in the reconstruction of a shattered world. The passing of the old order of dogmatic religion has left the modern world in a strange chaos, craving for something in which it can unfeignedly believe, and often following will-o'-the-wisps. Forty years ago, Matthew Arnold prophesied that it would be for poetry, "where it is worthy of its high destinies," to help to carry on the purer fire, and to express in new terms those eternal ideas which must ever be the only sure stay of the human race. It is not within the province of science ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... whom Matthew Arnold called the "clearest, largest, and most helpful thinker of modern times," was born August 28, 1749, at Frankfurt on the Main.[2] He was christened Johann Wolfgang. In his early years his familiar name was Wolfgang, or simply Wolf, never Johann. His family was of the middle class, the aristocratic ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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. Austin Phelps, Holmes, Edward Everett, Irving, and Lowell in America. When ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... passage encumbered the action at the moment of crisis. I liked 'The Shadow of the Glen' better than 'Riders to the Sea' that is, for all the nobility of its end, its mood of Greek tragedy, too passive in suffering; and had quoted from Matthew Arnold's introduction to 'Empedocles on Etna,' Synge answered, 'It is a curious thing that "The Riders to the Sea" succeeds with an English but not with an Irish audience, and "The Shadow of the Glen" which is not ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... of Bentonville, South Dakota—did it not seem as if she could know that the great American public has no interest in, no use for, "Thoughts on the Higher Life," a series of articles written for the county paper—foolish little articles revamped from Ruskin and Matthew Arnold? ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... Great Turk's Head, "next to the Mytre Tauerne" (not the modern pretender, be it observed!), which is in itself a feature of interest. A former possessor, from his notes, appears to have been largely preoccupied with that ignoble clinging to life which so exercised Matthew Arnold, for they relate chiefly to laxative simples for medicine; and he comforts himself, in April, 1695, by transcribing Bacon's reflection that "a Life led in Religion and in Holy Exercises" conduces ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... own, dominated medicine. All sorts of magical powers were attributed to Empedocles. The story of Pantheia whom he called back to life after a thirty days' trance has long clung in the imagination. You remember how Matthew Arnold describes him in the well-known poem, "Empedocles ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... those who acquire the distemper. Without becoming personal it is not easy to discuss purely social aspects, and we must seek chiefly in literature for manifestations of the phenomenon: in the prose of Matthew Arnold for instance—in the poems of Mr. Laurence Binyon, typical examples where every thought seems a mental reservation. Enemies rail at the voice, and the voice counts for something. Any one having the privilege of hearing Mr. Andrew Lang speak ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... always facts," he continued. "The deduction of right conclusions will follow—provided, as Matthew Arnold so tersely said, we have sufficient delicacy of perception, subtlety, wisdom, and tact. And, I may add, sufficient freedom from prejudice and mental bias—ah, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... 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 volume to ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... an English magazine having received a letter pointing out the erroneous nature of his views and style, and signed "Perfection," promptly wrote at the foot of the letter: "I don't agree with you," and mailed it to Matthew Arnold. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... 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
... these methods, see Dr. Herbert Adams on "Seminary Libraries and University Extension," J.H.U. Studies, V., xi.) With younger students the tendency is of course stronger. It is only through much exercise that the mind learns how to let itself—as Matthew Arnold used to say—"play freely about ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... everything. And when Sunday comes with its masses of reading matter proper to the Day of Rest one is appalled. One thing is certain— no American can find time to do justice both to his Sunday paper and his Maker. It is principally on Sunday that one realises that if Matthew Arnold's saying that every nation has the newspapers it deserves is true, America must have been very naughty. How the Sunday editions could be brought out while the paper-shortage was being discussed everywhere, as it was during my visit, was a problem that staggered me. But ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... 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 ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the whole century, during the better part of which Victoria reigned. The literature of this age is rich with the writings of Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, Edwin Arnold, Jean Ingelow, Owen Meredith, Arthur Hugh Clough, Adelaide Procter, and a host ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... the ruthlessness which characterize much of the author's work were plainly foreshadowed in this outspoken introduction; and he has grown more rather than less uncompromising during the quarter-century that has elapsed since they were spoken. Matthew Arnold would have applauded the envisagement of literature as "criticism of life," but would have deplored the sacrifice of sweetness to gain increased intensity of light. Brandes came back from contact with the European world full of enthusiasm for the new men and the new ideas,—for Comte ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... of Stubbs. The influence exercised on their contemporaries by recluses such as Newman or Darwin may be compared with the more worldly activities of Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce. Often we see equally diverse elements in following the course of a single life. In Matthew Arnold we wonder at the poet of 'The Strayed Reveller' coexisting with the zealous inspector of schools; in William Morris we find it hard to reconcile the creative craftsman with the fervent apostle of social discontent. Perhaps the most ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... readers 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the claims of pure learning, or of information, with the result, it is 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... thought, in connection with manners, hopes, aims, almost more dead than any of the classics. The literary misjudgment of them which was possible in quite recent times, to two such critics—very different, but each of the first class—as Mr Matthew Arnold and M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, is half excused by this curious feature in their own literary character. More than mummies or catacombs, more than Herculaneum and Pompeii, they bring us face to face with something ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... the point of asking so many times," Miss Madden interposed—"is Balder a family name, or is it after the Viking in Matthew Arnold's poem?" ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... Morison was a Positivist, and had many friends in that group, and his rich mind and genial temper endeared him to several of the leading literary men of his time, such as George Meredith, Mark Pattison and Matthew Arnold. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... of the book is the permanent charm of all literature, according to Matthew Arnold's admirable definition. Georgie is a singularly acute and humorous interpretation of the home life led by the American who is neither too rich to be aping the English nor too poor to avoid the other extreme of Europeanism in slum or hovel. The book ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... close of an interesting address lately delivered at the reopening of the Liverpool University College and School of Medicine, Mr. Matthew Arnold said if there was one word which he should like to plant in the memories of his audience, and to leave sticking there after he had gone, it was the word lucidity. If he had to fix upon the three great wants at this moment of the three principal nations of Europe, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... spelling. Indeed, his passion for improvement led him not only to try his hand upon an abridgment of the Book of Common Prayer, but to go even so far as to propose seriously a new rendering of the Lord's Prayer. His famous proposal for a new version of the Bible, however, which Matthew Arnold solemnly held up to reprobation, was only a joke which Matthew Arnold did not see-the new version of Job being, in fact, a clever bit of political satire against party leadership in England. Even more brilliant examples of his skill in political satire are his imaginary "Edict of the King ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... 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
... and the cluster of cottages round the Laird's lodge, like the clachan of Tully Veolan. But these plain remnants of the old Scotch towns are almost buried in a multitude of "smoky dwarf houses"—a living poet, Mr. Matthew Arnold, has found the fitting phrase for these dwellings, once for all. All over the Forest the waters are dirty and poisoned: I think they are filthiest below Hawick; but this may be mere local prejudice in a Selkirk man. To keep them clean costs money; and, though improvements are often promised, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... that he may have only a few months longer to live. This visit to the physician has changed the whole complexion of life for him. What will be the effect upon him? If he be a sane, strong, morally high-bred man, the effect will be ennobling; it will certainly not darken the face of nature for him. Matthew Arnold wished that when he died he might be placed at the open window, that he might see the sun shining on the landscape, and catch at evening the gleam of the rising star. Everything that is beautiful in the world will still be beautiful; ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... likes interfering with other people's children because she's got none of her own. (We're dreadfully afraid that she's going to lose the sight of one of her eyes, and I always feel that our physical ailments are so apt to turn into mental ailments. I think Matthew Arnold says something of the same kind about Lord Byron.) But that's neither ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... therefore, it was quite sufficient to stretch my legs. So I climbed the huge grassy cliff which shuts in the little bay on the right (as you lie on the beach, head upward), and gained the bleak white chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde, which a lady told me she was sure was the original of Matthew Arnold's "Little Gray Church on the Windy Hill." This is very likely; but the little church to-day was not gray; ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... paying 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 ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... dwell upon the vision of the suddenly valorous worm, the words express a higher form of courage than that denoted in Matthew Arnold's famous poem, "The Last Word;" and I have seen many a "worm" rise shouting from the altar rail under their inspired meaning. The sense of humor has, in my opinion, very little to do with poetry or salvation. It belongs entirely to the critical human faculties, and I have found it ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... 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 intellectually by societies devoted ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... reliquary; of "Sir John the Little with the Great Beard," who ruled in the Prior's stead; and there is the portrait, a votive tablet of penitence and remorse, "of that Lord Arundel Who struck in heat the child he loved so well" (see "A Picture at Newstead," by Matthew Arnold, Poetical Works, 1890, p. 177); but of portraits of judges or bishops, or of pictures by old masters, there is neither trace ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 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 ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... and their caddishness had to be explained away. The shocking intemperance of Burns was deplored in a paragraph, and passed over—as though Burns were not as essentially a drunkard as a poet! The vulgarity of Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne did not escape the nice censure of Matthew Arnold who could not be expected to see that a man incapable of writing such letters would not have written "The Eve of St. Agnes." In our day culture having failed to suppress Mr. Augustus John welcomes him with undiscriminating enthusiasm some ten years ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... them, captivating the attention of their senses and emotions. This is what a man of our times, possessed of rare receptivity and great range of comprehension, considered to be the pith of Jesus' teaching. Matthew Arnold gave much time and labour to trying to persuade men that this was what the religion they professed, or which was professed around them, most essentially meant. And he reminded us that the adequacy of such ideas for governing man's life depended not on the authority of a ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... that the Ancients did not know how to hold converse with nature, and that little or no sign of it can be found in their writings. Matthew Arnold has traced to a Celtic source the sympathy with, and deep communing with nature that first appeared among European poets. Under the patronage of Charlemagne the cloisters and brotherhoods became even more learned and cultivated than they had been before. Whatever the people knew of tilling the soil, ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... thread of that attention which is the material of memory, till no one has patience to spin from it a continuous thread of thought." We have the defects of our qualities. Nevertheless, I am struck with the likeness between a common attribute of the Greeks and Matthew Arnold's characterization of the Americans. Greek thought, it is said, goes straight to the mark, and penetrates like an arrow. The Americans, Arnold wrote, "think straight and see clear." Greek life was adapted to meditation. American quickness and habit of ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... whist. Among the eccentricities that make up the Average Man I find none more diverting than his complacent belief that he is, or has been, or will certainly some day be, in love. As a matter of fact, the capacity to love belongs to one man or woman in ten thousand. Listen to Matthew Arnold: ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... looked him in the eye, and said, "Are you sure? The dear old traditions,—they are indeed traditions. The sweet customs which have housed our spiritual and social life,—these are customs. Of what are you SURE?" Matthew Arnold has recently said well (we cannot quote the words) that the opening of the modern epoch consists in the discovery that institutions and habitudes of the earlier centuries, in which we have grown, are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... 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 men ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... Byron comes to us out of the mountain, fashioned by its force, intoxicated by the wine of its wild life. Mountain climbers meet with strange and unexpected bedfellows in the course of their wanderings. In his cry for the baptism of the wild winds of the mountain, Matthew Arnold approaches Byron closely— ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... 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 ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... kost-frei over merrie England. But I threw away the golden opportunity—ruthlessly rejected it—thereby incurring the scorn of all scientific philologists (none of whom, I trow, would have lost such a chance). It was for doing the same thing that Matthew Arnold immortalised a clerke of Oxenforde: though it may be that "since Elizabeth" such exploits have lost their prestige, as I knew of two students at the same university who a few years ago went off on a six weeks' lark with two Gipsy girls; ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... inspiration to the nation at large; and though the populace could not attain the moral height of those loftier souls, yet Yamato Damashii, the Soul of Japan, ultimately came to express the Volksgeist of the Island Realm. If religion is no more than "Morality touched by emotion," as Matthew Arnold defines it, few ethical systems are better entitled to the rank of religion than Bushido. Motoori has put the mute utterance of the nation into words when ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... seldom without a dash of playfulness or humour somewhere; a thing always fresh and spontaneous, unlike the calculated or laboured playfulness sometimes to be observed in the epistolary touch of literary folk. A capital example is a note to Matthew Arnold, at whose house he had left his umbrella. Arnold, it may be added, had recently been critically engaged upon the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... the corn, not of its price. It is he, if we do not hurry him out of his dream, who will sound the ideal note in our hurly-burly and bustle of affairs. He may never discover a town site, but he will create new worlds for us to live in, and in the course of a century the coming Matthew Arnold will not be minded to call us an unimaginative ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 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 ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... and even the most florid modern author, after polishing a paragraph, may tear it up when he has asked himself, "What would Addison have said about this eloquence of mine, or Sainte Beuve, or Mr. Matthew Arnold?" In this way what we call inspiration, that is the performance of the heated mind, perhaps working at its best, perhaps overstraining itself, and overstating its idea, might really be regulated. But they are few who ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... civilization; and, lastly, those few years of seclusion from the turmoil of life brought leisure to think out one's own thoughts, and to sift them from other peoples' ideas. Under such circumstances, it is hard if "the unregarded river of our life," as Matthew Arnold so finely call it be ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... some of the most fascinating of our literary guides have been philosophical egotists. Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Pater, Stendhal, Maurice Barres (in his earlier work), de Gourmont, D'Annunzio, Oscar Wilde—are all, in their widely different ways, masters of the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... made most of this distinction, assuming it as the basis for the final classification (abandoned, as we said, in the new edition) of his poetical writings. And nowhere is the distinction more realizable than in Wordsworth's own work. For though what may be called professed Wordsworthians, including Matthew Arnold, found a value in all that remains of him—could read anything he wrote, "even the 'Thanksgiving Ode,'—everything, I think, except 'Vaudracour and Julia,'"—yet still the decisiveness of such selections as those made by Arnold himself, ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... map conclude, with Mr. Matthew Arnold, who has applied his critical and appreciative mind to the study of the Celtic character, that "the Celtic genius has sentiment as its main basis, with love of beauty, charm, and spirituality for its excellence," but, he adds, "ineffectualness and self-will for its defects." On these ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... monument to the Duke of Wellington. The great temple looked rather bare and unsympathetic. Poor Dr. Johnson, sitting in semi-nude exposure, looked to me as unhappy as our own half-naked Washington at the national capital. The Judas of Matthew Arnold's poem would have cast his cloak over those marble shoulders, if he had found himself in St. Paul's, and have earned another respite. We brought away little, I fear, except the grand effect of the dome as we looked up at it. It gives us a greater ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... anything in this condemnation, then Chesterton is doomed to forgetfulness, and his critical works will be the first to slip into oblivion, such being the nature of critical works in general. But if this condemnation holds true, it includes also Macaulay, R. L. Stevenson, Matthew Arnold, and how many others! The journalistic touch, when it is good, means the preservation of a work. And Chesterton has that most essential part of a critic's mental equipment—what we call in an inadequately descriptive ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... is immense," declared Matthew Arnold, and there are few lovers of literature who doubt his triumphant assertion. But the past of poetry is immense also: impressive in its sheer bulk and in its immemorial duration. At a period earlier than any recorded history, poetry seems to have occupied the attention ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... self-protection, are as important for her as for him; that woman loves justice, equality, liberty, and wishes the right to give her consent to the Government under which she lives, as much as man does. Matthew Arnold says: "The first desire of every cultured mind is to take part in the great work of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... hung on to the 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 ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... 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 world which was ere ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... 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
... gloom and to adopt his free theories of life and conduct. At her mother's knee she had learned the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have none other gods but me"; and Joanna's god, though serving her sweet innocent soul all the reasonable purposes of a deity, was Matthew Arnold's gigantic clergyman in a white tie. In obedience to his maxims alone lay salvation: Joanna's conviction was unshakable. As a matter of course Paragot must walk the same path. There was ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... literary inquiry in this connection is: Should a shaper of such stuff as dreams are made on disregard considerations of what is customary and expected, and apply himself to the real function of poetry, the application of ideas to life (in Matthew Arnold's familiar phrase)? This bears more particularly on what has been called the "philosophy" of these poems—usually reproved as "queer." Whoever the author may be that undertakes such application of ideas in this "philosophic" direction—where it is specially ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... 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
... Send them down into a mission district. Lay a sense of responsibility upon them. Leave them to deal with this and that emergency themselves. Cease carrying them on your back, and lay weak and evil and self-willed people on their back. Let them feel that they are of some real use. As Matthew Arnold says, Let the critic but try practice, and you will make a new man of him. As Greatheart made of Feeble-mind by making him mount guard over the Celestial caravan while the fighting men were all up at ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two dollars out of a Boston editor who was running a magazine with a Matthew Arnold taste and a penny- dreadful purse. "The Peri and the Pearl," a clever skit of a poem of two hundred lines, just finished, white hot from his brain, won the heart of the editor of a San Francisco ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... for singing. English poetry is especially rich in meditative and devotional elements, and of no period has this been more true than of the nineteenth century. Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, on the other side of the sea, with Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Lanier, Sill and Gilder on this side—these and many others—have made most precious additions to our store of religious ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a more artistic {24} handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in his Idyls of the King, by Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others. There were innumerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, in Anglo-Norman and continental French dialects, in English, in German, and in other tongues. But the final form ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... in Matthew Arnold's poem, sigh for the silence and the hush, and rise at length in open rebellion against Iacchus and his maenads, who destroy all the quiet of life and who madden innocent blood with their riot. Johan Sebastian Welhaven (1807-73) was a student ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... nephew up and down with a cool kind of insolence as he passed, but did not make any salutation. Gaston went straight to the castle. He asked for his uncle, and was told that he had gone to Lady Belward. He wandered to the library: it was empty. He lit a cigar, took down a copy of Matthew Arnold's poems, opening at "Sohrab and Rustum," read it with a quick-beating heart, and then came to "Tristram and Iseult." He knew little of "that Arthur" and his knights of the Round Table, and Iseult of Brittany was a new figure of romance to him. In Tennyson, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... where the tales seemed to need them. In these I have not wearied or worried the reader with conventional tall talk about the Celtic genius and its manifestations in the folk-tale; on that topic one can only repeat Matthew Arnold when at his best, in his Celtic Literature. Nor have I attempted to deal with the more general aspects of the study of the Celtic folk-tale. For these I must refer to Mr. Nutt's series of papers in The Celtic Magazine, vol. xii., or, still better, ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... 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
... them at all; you practically decide that it is enough to possess them, and that the mere possession of them gives you a cachet. The truth is, you are a sham. And your soul is a sea of uneasy remorse. You reflect: "According to what Matthew Arnold says, I ought to be perfectly mad about Wordsworth's Prelude. And I am not. Why am I not? Have I got to be learned, to undertake a vast course of study, in order to be perfectly mad about Wordsworth's Prelude? Or am I born without the faculty of pure taste in literature, despite my vague ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... the more masterly did it become; because it was not so much the expression of a thought as the thought itself taking shape in a perfectly pure medium of language. Bunyan had the same gift; of later authors Ruskin had it very strongly, and Matthew Arnold in a lesser degree. There is another species of beautiful prose, the prose of Jeremy Taylor, of Pater, even of Stevenson; but this is a slow and elaborate construction, pinched and pulled this way and that; and it is like some gorgeous picture, of stately persons in seemly ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Mr. Matthew Arnold seems to think that Shakespeare has damaged English poetry. I wish he had! It is true he lifted Dryden above himself in "All for Love"; but it was Dryden who said of him, by instinctive conviction rather than judgment, that within his magic circle none dared tread but he. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... refuse utterly to share our faith concerning Him and the significance of His life and death, readily give to Him a place apart among the great teachers of mankind. I have already quoted the judgment of John Stuart Mill. "Jesus," says Matthew Arnold, "as He appears in the Gospels ... is in the jargon of modern philosophy an absolute"[5]—we cannot get beyond Him. Such, likewise, is the verdict of Goethe: "Let intellectual and spiritual culture ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... halt," he said "on the senseless haste of Christians to take up such pagans as Matthew Arnold, and raises a warning cry against surrender to the pagan ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... beating its wings against the cage of custom and circumstance and institutions. The external form of the plot, whatever is fantastic and wilful in its setting and its adventures, is due to the school of Ann Radcliffe. But the quality in Shelley and in George Sand which bewitched even the austere Matthew Arnold in his green and salad days is the poetising of that liberative eighteenth century philosophy into "beautiful idealisms" of a love emancipated from human limitations, a love exalted to the height of its gamut by the influences of ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... even funny as it seems to the American mind—to say that an English statesman is carrying on any sort of communication with the representatives of the Irish people is to bring against him, in English eyes, a very damaging accusation. When a man like Mr. Matthew Arnold writes to the Times to contend that Englishmen should find out what the Irish want solely for the purpose of not letting them have it, and a journal like the Spectator maintains that the sole excuse for extending the suffrage in Ireland, as it has lately been extended in England, ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... covered and so admirably 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 look at ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... 466. Matthew Arnold commenting on this line says; "The right sort of verse to choose from Wordsworth, if we are to seize his true and most characteristic form of expression, is a line like this from Michael: 'And never lifted up a single stone.' ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... which was one of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" in a sumptuous volume whose artistic beauty found a fitting setting to Mrs. Browning's immortal sonnets. Among other volumes were a collection of signed "Etchings" by Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema; presentation copies from Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Aubrey De Vere, Walter Savage Landor, and many another known to fame; and a copy, also, of a study of Mrs. Browning's poetry[4] by an ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... names, Mantua and Genoese, had a wonderful, faraway imaginative association for me, and still have. Matthew Arnold's magic of poetry, magical words and lines, explain all its charm for me. A feeling beyond the words or the sense is what I require in poetry. In vain did I try to express in rhyme what I felt. The lines halted ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... account of Coleridge's services to the cause of romanticism, his critical writings should not be overlooked. Matthew Arnold declared that there was something premature about the burst of creative activity in English literature at the opening of the nineteenth century, and regretted that the way had not been prepared, as in Germany, by a critical movement. It is true that the English romantics put forth no body of doctrine, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... possible to approach a clearer understanding of the proper meaning to attach to the generally ill-defined and hazy term miracle.[27] Matthew Arnold's fantastic illustration of the idea of miracle by supposing a pen changed to a pen-wiper may fit some miracles, especially those of the Catholic hagiology, but, if applied to those of Jesus, would be a caricature. ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... however, and, thanks to the wandering minstrels, it was translated into all the Continental idioms, and became the theme of many poets, even of later times. Since the days when Godfried of Strasburgh wrote his version of the story it has been versified by many others, among whom, in our days, are Matthew Arnold and Swinburne. While the general outline of these various versions remains the same, the legend has undergone many transformations, but Wagner has preserved many of the fundamental ideas of the myth, which is intended to illustrate the overpowering force of passion. ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... every democrat. But suppose they are not political sentiments! Suppose they are merely a record of observed fact. John Stuart Mill told our British workmen that they were mostly liars. Carlyle told us all that we are mostly fools. Matthew Arnold and Ruskin were more circumstantial and more abusive. Everybody, including the workers themselves, know that they are dirty, drunken, foul-mouthed, ignorant, gluttonous, prejudiced: in short, heirs to the peculiar ills of poverty and ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... know a chapter in Mr William Canton's book "The Invisible Playmate" in which, as Carlyle dealt in "Sartor Resartus" with an imaginary treatise by an imaginary Herr Teufelsdroeckh, as Matthew Arnold in "Friendship's Garland" with the imaginary letters of an imaginary Arminius (Germany in long-past happier days lent the world these playful philosophical spirits), so the later author invents an old village grandpapa, with the grandpapa-name of Altegans and a prose-poem printed in scarecrow duodecimo ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... certain great writers,—as it were, a bottle of philosophical phosphates against seasons of spiritual cowardice or debility. There one opened and read: "Sudden the worst turns best to the brave" or Thoreau's "I have yet to hear a single word of wisdom spoken to me by my elders," or again Matthew Arnold's ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... 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 ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... banquet, I was quite unaccustomed to public speaking. A friend of mine suggested I should take lessons in elocution from "one of those actor fellows." "It is not what you say but how you say it," he said to me. "Indeed!" I replied, rather nettled. "Matthew Arnold had a wretched delivery, and I think there was something in what he said." "True, but you are not a Matthew Arnold, nor I should say a George Dawson either. So take lessons in elocution, my boy, and save yourself and your audience." Therefore, modestly I went to consult ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... appearing before the public as a poet. Such was the intention early in their career with many of our best known prose writers, with Milton, and Goldsmith, and Samuel Johnson, with Scott, Macaulay, and more lately with Matthew Arnold; writers of verse and prose who ultimately prevailed some in one direction, and others in the other. Milton and Goldsmith have been known best as poets, Johnson and Macaulay as writers of prose. But with all of them there has been a distinct effort in each art. Thackeray ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... the good Clough, the generous, susceptible scholar, should die. I read over his Bothie again, full of the wine of youth at Oxford. I delight in Matthew Arnold's fine criticism in two little books. Give affectionate remembrances from me to Jane Carlyle, whom —-'s happiness and accurate reporting restored to me in ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... passing hours to the place where he had once reigned as the most 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 ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... completed a few months ago, when his publishers presented the reading world with his writings in ten sumptuous volumes, six containing the prose works, and the other four the poems and satires. He was, with the single exception of Matthew Arnold, the foremost critic of his time. Everything he said was well said. The jewels abounded on all sides. His adroitness, his fancy, his insight, his perfect good-humor, and his rare scholarship and delicate art, emphasize themselves on every page of his books. His political and literary addresses were ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... his style which has led to the common comparison of his writing with Shakespeare's; both seem to be preternaturally endowed with more information, to have a wider sweep of interest than ordinary men. Both were not only, as Matthew Arnold said of Burke, "saturated with ideas," but saturated too in the details of the business and desire of ordinary men's lives; nothing human was alien from them. Burke's language is, therefore, always interesting and always appropriate to his ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... and histrionic celebrities. It possesses quite a collection of personal mementos of distinguished authors, among them a paperweight which once belonged to Goethe, a lead pencil used by Emerson, an autograph letter of Matthew Arnold, and a chip from a tree felled by Mr. Gladstone. Its library contains a number of rare books, including a fine collection on chess, of which game several of the ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... Passing Through Lydia Maria Child Terminus Ralph Waldo Emerson Rabbi Ben Ezra Robert Browning Human Life Audrey Thomas de Vere Young and Old Charles Kingsley The Isle of the Long Ago Benjamin Franklin Taylor Growing Old Matthew Arnold Past John Galsworthy Twilight A. Mary F. Robinson Youth and Age George Arnold Forty Years On Edward Ernest Bowen Dregs Ernest Dowson The Paradox of Time Austin Dobson Age William Winter Omnia Sonmia Rosamund Marriott Watson The ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... in particular, to 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
... Mrs. Browning and Miss Blagden was initiated in the early months of the residence of the Brownings in Florence; but it was in this winter of 1849-1850 that they began to see each other so constantly. The poems of Matthew Arnold were published that winter, among which Mrs. Browning especially liked "The Deserted Merman" and "The Sick King of Bokkara," and about this time the authorship of "Jane Eyre" was revealed, and Charlotte Bronte discovered under the nom-de-plume ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... that skirts Lake Windermere and follows up through Ambleside. We get a glimpse of the old home of Harriet Martineau, and "Fox Howe," the home of Matthew Arnold. Just before Rydal Water is reached comes Rydal Road, running straight up the hillside, off from the turnpike. Rydal Mount is the third house up on the left-hand side, I knew the location, for I had read of it many times, and in my pocketbook I carried a picture taken from ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... own time, and smile at the airs of the comparatively little man. On the other hand, no self-respecting writer should ape the false deprecating "'umbleness" of Uriah Heep. In short, he wishes to pass, like a coin, for just what he is worth. Mr. Matthew Arnold was ludicrously unjust to the West when he wrote, "The Western States are at this moment being nourished and formed, we hear, on the novels of a native author called Roe." Why could not Mr. Arnold have taken a few moments to look into the bookstores of the great cities ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... the Heavenly order, that I counted the number of the beast, while I was writing the manuscript and preparing the print of the second volume in Philadelphia, I received soon a letter from Boston containing the information, that Matthew Arnold who is on the 86th place of the 144 witnesses and in the deputation who after my having excommunicated Bishop Benedict Fenwick from my ecclesiastical communion, came to move me to occupy the church for my performances, was inspired and remained when ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... 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 ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... But, years ago, 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 ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this evening is an old member of our club whom you all know, Mr. Parker, assistant editor of the Daily Democrat. The subject of his essay is the American Press, and he will use as his text a couple of paragraphs taken from Mr. Matthew Arnold's new book. He asks me to read these texts for him. The first is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... impaired if Mr. Ruskin's co-operation had been 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
... its characteristic effect by creating in the mind the sensuous images which best stimulate the mind to grasp the immanent idea, and it presents those images as instinct with life and movement—sometimes it goes so far as to personify them. This is what Matthew Arnold meant when he declared poetry to be "simple, sensuous, passionate." Coleridge has a good illustration (quoted by Nisbet). He ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... little from the turmoils of politics, the mixture of motives, the half-successes. Here is what glorified the whole business,—the development of souls like this; and in such is the promise of the future. Fitly to Armstrong belongs what Matthew Arnold has written of his father, a ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... you! I know Matthew Arnold, and am told that he whispered Truth exquisite, unheeded ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... Humphry Davy the priority of this invention. During this year Sir Austin Henry Layard published the results of his original researches of Nineveh and its remains. Macaulay printed the first two volumes of his "History of England," while Matthew Arnold brought out his "Strayed Reveller" and other poems. Elizabeth ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... from my family in California. The 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, but I ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... first glimpse of that possibility of a "free play of mind" over a subject which was to throw him with force at a later stage of culture, when subjects had considerably multiplied, into the critical arms of Matthew Arnold. So he is himself at least interested in seeing the matter—as a progress in which the first step was taken, before that crude scenic appeal, by his wondering, among his companions, where the absurd, the absurd for them, ended and ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... two other points on which I must beg leave to say a few words. Physical science will demand of our natural theologians that they should be aware of their importance, and let—as Mr Matthew Arnold would say—their thoughts play freely round them. I mean questions of Embryology, ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... 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. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... found the history of poetic forms, and the technique of poetic method, where he hoped to find the secret of poetry. He will be likely to get as much help from writings on poetry that are not text-books, such as Matthew Arnold's Essays: "On Translating Homer," "Last Words on Translating Homer," "Celtic Poetry," "Introduction to the Poetry of Wordsworth," and the "Introduction to Humphry Ward's English Poets"; Emerson's Essays: "The Poet" and "Poetry and Imagination"; Wordsworth's Introduction to the "Lyrical ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... hope that tardy justice will be accorded also to The Fair Haven. It is true that the subject is no longer the burning question that it was forty years ago. In the early seventies theological polemics were fashionable. Books like Seeley's Ecce Homo and Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma were eagerly devoured by readers of all classes. Nowadays we take but a languid interest in the problems that disturbed our grandfathers, and most of us have settled down into what Disraeli described as the religion of all sensible men, which no sensible ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... your own with other readers, or even of rendering yourself that enviable nondescript, a person of culture,—whatever, in short, is read with any assignable purpose whatever, is in so far not literature. The Bible may be literature to Mr. Matthew Arnold, because he reads it for fun; but to Luther, Calvin, or the pupils of a Sunday-school, it is essentially something else. Literature is the written communications of the soul of mankind with itself; it is liable to appear in the most unexpected places, and in the oddest company; ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... Icolumbkill, off the western point of Mull, became the apostle of Scotland and the north of England. I shall first speak of St. Brendan, and at some length. His name has become lately familiar to many, through the medium of two very beautiful poems, one by Mr. Matthew Arnold, and the other by Mr. Sebastian Evans; and it may interest those who have read their versions of the story to see the oldest form in which the ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... Matthew Arnold tells us that religion is "morality lit up by emotion." We turn to God for our inspiration, for the quickening of our motives, for fellowship, communion and comfort; but it is when we face the duties and relationships of the day's work and its play that we prove how ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... 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 ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... have ever had of a nature that seems equally to court and to baffle comprehension. Lord Houghton has little to add, on this subject, from his personal recollections; but his comments upon it evince perhaps as close a study and sagacious criticism, if not as much subtlety of thought, as Matthew Arnold's famous essay. The following passage, for example, sums up very felicitously the social aspect of Germany, and its influence on Heine: "The poem of 'Deutschland' is the one of his works where his humor runs over into the coarsest satire, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... are 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 ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... 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
... general it is. Its method is the classical appeal to universal knowledge and feeling, not the romantic method of strangeness of sentiment and detailed particularity of truth. Matthew Arnold once recommended those who cannot read Greek or Latin to read Milton as a far better key than any translation can be to the secret of the greatness of the ancient poets. This is the truth: and not only for the reason on which Arnold laid just stress—the ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... working in literature can produce poems, it should not seem strange that the heart, with its affections, furnishes the key of knowledge and wisdom. The time was when authors were supposed to think out their truths; now we know that the greatest truths are felt out. Matthew Arnold said that mere knowledge is cold as an icicle, but once experienced and touched with noble feelings truth becomes sweetness and light. This author thought that the first requisite for a good writer was ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... an 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 very much," my representative answered, "and he thinks him ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... is the touch of a poet, and we pluck up heart and read on. The book is a curious but not inartistic combination of the mental attitude of Mr. Matthew Arnold with the style of Lord Tennyson. Sometimes, as in The Sicilian Hermit, we get merely the metre of Locksley Hall without its music, merely its fine madness and not its fine magic. Still, elsewhere there is good work, and Caliban in East London has a great deal of power in ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Directory, have been obliged to use my imagination as factory for a name that connotes nothing and is ugly in itself may be taken as proof that such names do not exist actually. You cannot stump me by citing Mr. Matthew Arnold's citation of the words 'Ragg is in custody,' and his comment that 'there was no Ragg by the Ilyssus.' 'Ragg' has not an ugly sound in itself. Mr. Arnold was jarred merely by its suggestion of something ugly, a rag, and by the cold brutality of ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... chapter, paragraph by paragraph, word by word, the meaning of what it is to be a masterpiece? But such seems not to be the case. Taine reconstructs the English temperament out of Fielding and Dickens; Matthew Arnold, although he deals more than others in first principles, never carries his analysis beyond the widest generalizations, like the requirement for "profound truth" and "high seriousness," for great poetry. ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... among 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 its torpor like ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... to me by my clerical critic does not seem to me very edifying, his impartiality does not appear to be beyond reproach, and in his tone I fail to recognise any of the [Greek: epieikeia] which Mr. Matthew Arnold so justly admires. I shall not emulate the spirit of that article, and I trust that I shall not scant the courtesy with which I desire to treat Dr. Lightfoot, whose ability I admire and whose position I understand. I should not, indeed, consider ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... Exchange is as necessary to Society as the Church, and the Church is as vital, as essential to its spiritual well-being as my book-shop. And not until man develops his mental, spiritual and physical faculties to what Matthew Arnold calls 'a harmonious perfection,' will he be able to reach the heights from which ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Saphead, a man who parted his hair in the middle, couldn't earn seven dollars a century on his wits, is destined to remain hopelessly nothing, keeps her busy sewing buttons on his clothes, and to save his life couldn't tell the difference between Matthew Arnold and an automobile, and yet you tell me that ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... (of Carlyle) "He fills the office of a poet—by analyzing humanity back into its elements, to the destruction of the conventions of the hour." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 27, 1845.] This is what Matthew Arnold meant by calling poetry "a criticism of life." Poetry is captivating only in proportion as the ideal shines through the sensual; consequently men who are charmed by the beauty incarnate in poetry, are moved to discard all conventions through ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... was rich not alone in painting and sculpture. The whatnot was a museum whither might come the Northern Goth and Southern Vandal to learn what a Roman home can teach of the artistic taste that Matthew Arnold declares to be the natural heritage only of the nation which rocked the cradle of the Renaissance when its old Romanesque and Byzantine parents died. That whatnot was covered with tiny china dogs and cats, such as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... gift—a gift not fully recognised till Mr. Palgrave accorded him, in the second series of his "Golden Treasury" (1897), a greater number of selections than any Victorian poet but Tennyson: a larger space than he gave either to Browning or Rossetti or Matthew Arnold.[50] Comparatively little of O'Shaughnessy's work belongs to the department of mediaeval-romantic. His "Lays of France," five in number, are founded upon the lais of Marie de France, the Norman poetess of the thirteenth century whose little fable, "Du coq ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... as the earliest romantic novel in 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 in ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... and Matthew Arnold in the Prose-Writings of Oscar Wilde," by Ernst Bendz. London: H. Grevel ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... Sweden. The epics are, in a way, and as far as manners and institutions are concerned, historical documents. Whoever regards them in this way, must wish to read them exactly as they have reached us, without modern ornament, with nothing added or omitted. He must recognise, with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that what he now wants, namely, the simple truth about the matter of the poem, can only be given in prose, 'for in a verse translation no original work is any longer recognisable.' It is for this reason that we have attempted to tell once more, in simple prose, the story of Odysseus. ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A. |
