"Matthew Arnold" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and conquered England for Christ. Landseer and Livingstone had died, and the provinces could not decide whether "Dignity and Impudence" or the penetration of Africa was the more interesting feat. Herbert Spencer had published his "Study of Sociology"; Matthew Arnold his "Literature and Dogma"; and Frederic Farrar his Life of his Lord; but here the provinces had no difficulty in deciding, for they had only heard of the last. Every effort had been made to explain by persuasion and by force to the working man ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... 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 uses it. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... character of our day, the remark that Wordsworth's was "a genteel mind of the third rank." I put down the newspaper in which this airy dictum was printed, and, for the first time, I was glad that poor Mr. Matthew Arnold was no longer with us. But, of course, the evolutions of taste must go on, whether they hurt the living and the dead, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Church works on one side, and of orthodox ones on the other, now occupied a large 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 of them. For the ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... and place, his mind fitted out with the current ideas of his contemporaries, elevated, it may be, but not essentially changed? A dreamer, with the clouds of the visionaries and apocalyptists ever in his head? When we look at the ancient world, the great men are not archaic figures. Matthew Arnold found in Homer something of the clearness and shrewdness of Voltaire. There is thing archaic about Plato or Virgil or Paul—to keep abreast of their thinking is no easy task for the strongest of our brains, so modern, ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... 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 more strongly he felt ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... correcting, without irritating, wounding, or causing strife. Swift found the paper too gentle, but its influence was due in no small measure to its persuasiveness. Addison studied his method of attack as carefully as Matthew Arnold, who undertook a similar educational work in our own time, studied his means of approach to a public indifferent or hostile to his ideas. The two hundred and seventy-four papers furnished by Addison to the columns of the Spectator may be said to mark the full development ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... 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 works of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... of Matthew Arnold's, which I happened to remember, gave a certain importance to the half-hour I spent in the buffet of the station at Cette while I waited for the train to Montpellier. I had left Narbonne in the afternoon, and by the time I reached Cette ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the secrets of the art which he practiced with such splendid success as few men have known them. His command of the lyric form was complete. And yet who that loves his work has not felt that lack in it which Matthew Arnold had in mind when he said that with all his genius Byron had the ideas of a country squire? The poet was a master of the technique of his art; he had rare gifts of passion and imagination; but he lacked breadth, variety, and depth of thought. There is a monotony of theme ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... little book which many times that morning he had been attempting to read. It was an edition of Matthew Arnold's poems, and one of the stanzas was marked. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... 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 ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... very real—teaches acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be 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 ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... do not really need 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 ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... points of superiority over the quatrains of the first Omar of Naishapur. The genius of the East has, indeed, ever been slow to reveal itself in the West. It took a Crusade to bring to our knowledge anything of the schner Geist of the Orient; and it was not until the day of Matthew Arnold that the Epic of Persia[1] was brought into the proper realm of English poesy. What wonder, then, that not until the first Omaric madness had passed away were the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Jr., lifted into the light after an infinity of ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... the 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 ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... Matthew Arnold's travelling companion ("Essays in Criticism," 1st Edition, Preface), who was so nervous about railway murders, and who refused to be consoled by being reminded that though the worst should happen, there would still be the old crush at the corner of ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... 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 nature, triumphantly seeking its ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... poetry 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 of men, and some of the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... there are two examples which might be used in this book as examples of argument; in one of them, Huxley's essay on "The Physical Basis of Life," Huxley himself toward the end uses the words, "as I have endeavored to prove to you"; and Matthew Arnold's essay on "Wordsworth" is an elaborate effort to prove that Wordsworth is the greatest English poet after Shakespeare and Milton. Or, to take quite different examples, in any question of law where judges of the court disagree, as in the Income Tax Case, or in the Insular cases which decided the ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... disparagement of Shakespeare, and could not understand the inability of a supreme artist like Tolstoy to appreciate his greatness. Though he has written a noble sonnet in homage to Shakespeare's genius, Matthew Arnold once permitted himself to say that "Homer leaves Shakespeare as far behind as perfection leaves imperfection." Paul wrote in a marginal note, "Bosh! to put it bluntly." He would say with Goethe, "The first page of Shakespeare made me his for life, and when ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... mountains of Ettrick and Yarrow, the son of a shepherd. When he was but six years old he commenced to earn his living as a cowherd, and by his seventh year had received all the schooling which he was destined to have—two separate periods of three months. Matthew Arnold, when accounting for the sterility of Gray as a poet, says that throughout the first nine decades of the eighteenth century, until the French Revolution roused men to generosity, "a spiritual east wind was blowing." Hogg's ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... 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
... essentials. It is true that these alone would not have matriculated me. In addition to them the writing of a good essay and of a good general paper were required, to obtain success. Still, the sine qua non was what the representative of the old Oxford in Matthew Arnold's Friendship's Garland calls "the good old fortifying classical curriculum." I could by no possibility have reached the heights of "Hittal," who, it will be remembered, wrote "some longs and shorts about the Caledonian boar which were not bad." Though English verses came ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... You are not to neglect books. They must be read. If you are a professional man they must be more than read; they must be studied, absorbed, made a part of your intellectual being. I am not despising the accumulated learning of the past. Matthew Arnold, in his "Literature and Dogma," quite makes this point. What I am speaking of is ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... of Scotch drink, Scotch manners, and Scotch religion" was not, Matthew Arnold insisted, a beautiful world, and it was, he held, a disadvantage to Burns that he had not a beautiful world to deal with. This famous dictum is a standing challenge to any critic who regards Burns as a creator of beauty. ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... no doubt that Matthew Arnold says much that is true of the narrowness, bigotry, and jealous un-Christian temper of Puritanism; and I suppose no one doubts that they do misrepresent the true doctrine of Christianity, both by their exclusive devotion to one side only of the teaching of the Bible, and by their misconception ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the most 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 ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... "The Countess Cathleen" or of "The Land of Heart's Desire." Nor is one moved by "On Baile's Strand" as one is moved by other tellings of the same world story, as one is moved by the epic telling of it by Matthew Arnold in "Sohrab and Rustum," or even by such a casual telling of it as is Mr. Neil Munro's in "Black Murdo." If it were not for "Deirdre," in fact, one would have to say that the verse plays of Mr. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... world as unreal as the world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; but pictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin had a living charm. At this time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper on Maurice de Gu['e]rin, and I did not know that any appreciation of his sister had been written in English. I had seen a paragraph or two written by some third-rate person who objected to her piety as sentimental, and incomprehensible to ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... of life,—Saint Beauve, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Scherer, Amiel, Tolstoi, and Ruskin—have felt, or at least recognized, the powerful fascination of the new evangel ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... cannot permanently find satisfaction while thus suspended in mid-air; nor are we appreciably advanced by the temper which, after pointing out some alleged fundamental antinomy, "quietly accepts"—i.e., in practice ignores—it. Problems of this description are not solved by what Matthew Arnold called a want of intellectual seriousness; is it true, we ask, that the "mystical view of the Divine immanence" compels us to believe in the allness of God, and so to ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the classic and the Christian hymn, as Matthew Arnold has reminded us, there is a great gulf fixed. The Latin conception of the gods was civic; they were superior heads of the Republic; the Roman church was the invisible Roman state; religion was merely exalted patriotism. ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... expression. Knowledge does not become power until you use it. Children should read a great deal and reading should be made attractive to them. The amount of real literature suited to their taste and comprehension is not large and as much as possible of it should be read. Matthew Arnold says that school reading should be copious, well chosen and systematic. There is often a great difference between the books which the child reads when under observation, and those to which he resorts for solace and comfort and turns over and over again when he is alone. The latter ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... Joseph, op. cit., p. 47). Used in a vague way, mysticism stands for spiritual inwardness. Religion without mysticism, said Amiel, is a rose without perfume. This saying is no more precise and no more informing than Matthew Arnold's definition of religion as morality touched with emotion. Neither mysticism nor an emotional touch makes religion. They are as often as not concomitants of a pathological state which is the denial of religion. ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... English Novel', p. 272 f. ** 'The English Novel', p. 280. Of the numerous discussions of this thesis, the student should consult at least those by Matthew Arnold ('Preface' to his edition of 'Wordsworth's Poems'), John Ruskin ('Stones of Venice', vol. iii., chap. iv.), and Victor Hugo ('William Shakespeare', ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... in almost every life, puts belief on her trial, and cries for an examination of the creeds hitherto held upon authority, and by dint of use and wont. In a different way one can hardly care for Mr. Matthew Arnold, as a boy, till one has come under the influence of Oxford. So Mr. Browning was the only poet added to my pantheon at St. Andrews, though Macaulay then was admitted and appeared to be more the true model of a prose writer than he seems in the light of later reflection. ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... 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
... 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
... the Church. None of the great theological impulses of this age or the 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 finds itself ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... arbitrary being dealing out rewards and punishments grows dim, for we see the regular workings of Cause and Effect. We begin to talk of Energy, the Divine Essence, and the Reign of Law. We speak, as Matthew Arnold did, of "a Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness." But Emerson believed in a power that was in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... to Emerson, who stimulated his religious nature, his improved literary expression; while Whitman was to him a great humanizing power, and Matthew Arnold taught him clear thinking and clean writing. He had passed through these different influences by the time he was twenty-one or twenty-two; had taught for a while; and from 1863 to 1873 was vault-keeper and afterwards chief of the organization division ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... classic, classical), then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same high character. MATTHEW ARNOLD. ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... 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 ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... the other hand (without a nickname to show a close connection with the common), held that Shakespeare unlocked his heart with the sonnets for key. Browning jeered at this belief, to be in turn contradicted by Swinburne. Matthew Arnold gave us in a sonnet "the ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... is God;" but, says Mr. Matthew Arnold, "propositions about substance pass by mankind at large like the idle wind, which mankind at large regards not: it will not even listen to a word about these propositions, unless it first learns what their author was driving at with them, and finds that this object ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... 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 in selecting a point of view where he cannot be jostled, with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... 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 the "Aberglaube" of theology. His description of God as "the Power ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... 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; neither was the ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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
... attaches to that mild variety of anarchism which is commonly called laissez-faire, and which Matthew Arnold calls British Atheism or Quietism. The reader will recall Arnold's quotation ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... 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 essay ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... repetition. Simply to repeat in other words would be useless redundancy; but so to repeat that with each repetition the thought broadens or deepens is valuable in proposing a subject or explaining it. No person has attained greater skill in repetition than Matthew Arnold, and much of his clearness comes from his repetition, often ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... the PILOT.—"A most interesting and admirably written estimate of Matthew Arnold. This estimate, so far as regards Mr, Arnold's poetry and his prose critical essays, seems to me so nearly faultless as hardly to justify ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... his share in the work of making Matthew Arnold possible, but he is the antipodes of those men of culture and contemplation—those artists pensive and curious and sedately self-contained—whom Arnold best loved and of whom the nearest to hand is Wordsworth. ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... 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 forward against ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a beautiful highway 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 make ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... Mill was a skeptic. And nobody who has read the story of Thomas Huxley's boyhood will wonder at his becoming an agnostic. As Edward Clodd, his biographer, says, 'his boyhood was a cheerless time. Reversing Matthew Arnold's ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... men whom to abuse is pleasant. Coleridge is not one of them. How gladly we would love the author of 'Christabel' if we could! But the thing is flatly impossible. His was an unlovely character. The sentence passed upon him by Mr. Matthew Arnold (parenthetically, in one of the 'Essays in Criticism')—'Coleridge had no morals'—is no less just than pitiless. As we gather information about him from numerous quarters, we find it impossible to resist the conclusion that he was a man neglectful ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... picture we 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... I am 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 Year's End Timothy ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... received 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 ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... read (as it is given in Mr. Matthew Arnold's admirable volume of selections) with the earlier conclusion: the second form is less satisfactory, and the third, with its sermonizing tone, "thus all in vain exhorted and ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... and he would be free. But before 1870 orders, even deacon's orders, were indelible. Neither a priest nor a deacon could sit in Parliament, or enter any other learned profession. Froude was in great difficulty and distress. He consulted his friends Arthur Stanley, Matthew Arnold, and Arthur Clough. Clough, though a layman, felt the same perplexity as himself. As a Fellow and Tutor of Oriel he had signed the Articles. Now that he no longer believed in them, ought he not to live up his appointments? The Provost, Dr. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... 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
... gathering adjectives about his loins, stalks this little fluttered modern world, puts his huge, fumbling, hippopotamus hoof upon the Blessed Damozel, goes crashing through the press. He is greeted with a shudder of delight. Even Matthew Arnold, a man who had a way of seeing things almost, sometimes, criticises Emerson for lack of unity, because the unity was on so large a scale that Arnold's imagination could not see it; and now the chirrup from afar, rising from the east ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... of bootblacks, or the Alexander of chimney-sweeps, let us say with Matthew Arnold, than a shallow-brained attorney who, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... numbers and wealth will not bring it about. While the best is said and 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 been elsewhere. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... say what Matthew Arnold says—a distinguished new English writer who speaks of: 'The best that has been thought and ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... 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 ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... 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 tongue ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... to me, I should 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
... preceding age we have noted especially the poetical works, which constitute, according to Matthew Arnold, the glory of English literature. Now for the first time we must chronicle the triumph of English prose. A multitude of practical interests arising from the new social and political conditions ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... regional writer, if that term means anything—will whenever he matures exercise the critical faculty. I mean in the Matthew Arnold sense of appraisal rather than of praise, or, for that matter, of absolute condemnation. Understanding and sympathy are not eulogy. Mere glorification is on the same intellectual level as silver tongues and ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... illustrious poet-sage 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, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 manner, insight. He was no mean critic, whatever the ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... is 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, French and English ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... be remembered 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 ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... was there is the massive 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 idea of height ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... 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 ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... they move down the corridors of time together, arm in arm, this father and son. That excellent person who carried the gripsacks of greatness so long that he thought the luggage was his own, Major James B. Pond, launched at least one good thing. It was this: "Matthew Arnold gave fifty lectures in America, and nobody ever heard one of them; those in his audience who could no longer endure the silence ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... than be crying," said Lady Esmondet; "and though one must go through life with one's eyes open, one need not follow the example of Matthew Arnold's 'Sick King in Bokhara,' and keep them only open to the saddening sights of sin, sorrow, and despair, that the world we know, somewhere, has so much of; one can only do what one can for those in distress; give one's mite, and ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... 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 is worth reading as holding 'a mirror up to ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... The average auditor is moved mainly by the emotional content of a sentence spoken on the stage, and pays very little attention to the form of words in which the meaning is set forth. At Hamlet's line, "Absent thee from felicity a while"—which Matthew Arnold, with impeccable taste, selected as one of his touchstones of literary style—the thing that really moves the audience in the theatre is not the perfectness of the phrase but the pathos of Hamlet's plea for his best friend to outlive him ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... the public (Camoens: Life and Lusiads ii. 185-198), it has ever been my ambition to reverse the late Mr. Matthew Arnold's peremptory dictum:—"In a verse translation no original work is any longer recognisable." And here I may be allowed to borrow from my Supplemental Arabian Nights (Vol. vi., Appendix pp. 411-412, a book known to few and ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... 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
... the fact that this power of the will for restraint and self-control is undeveloped. So-called "willfulness" is a will in which the volitional power has not yet been balanced with this inhibitive power. One realizes in this way the force of Matthew Arnold's definition of character as ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... been in Hartford working at the play with Clemens, Matthew Arnold had arrived in Boston. On inquiring for Howells, at his home, the visitor was told that he had gone to see Mark Twain. Arnold was perhaps the only literary Englishman left who had not accepted Mark Twain at his larger value. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... this imperfect 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 ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... easily learned in our luxurious 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 not perceived, for ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... If I had gone to see the great apostle of beauty, I 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 ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... been so fully 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 life in the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... literature, of the rules of literary construction, of trained taste in selecting models, and of a quick imagination capable of perceiving pertinent comparisons and setting forth vivid impressions. Writers like Lessing, Victor Cousin, Matthew Arnold, and Jules Lemaitre have exercised in criticism a system which is quite as capable of exposition and analysis as that of the historian, the poet, or the novelist. In America this system has also done ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... 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.
... is a 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 ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... chastised with the 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
... 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 ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... 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 we benighted American Goths buy for ten cents ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various |
