18 Matthew Arnold Quotes on Nature

Matthew Arnold quotes on nature

9. Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city's jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar.

49. Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below. Now my brothers call from the bay; Now the great winds shoreward blow; Now the salt tides seaward flow; Now the wild white horses play, Champ and chafe and toss in the spray. Children dear, let us away. This way, this way!

50. Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep.

51. Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye? When did music come this way? Children dear, was it yesterday?

64. Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

66. Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done; To have advanc'd true friends, and beat down baffling foes?

67. The day in his hotness, The strife with the palm; The night in her silence, The stars in their calm.

68. Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, Returning home on summer-nights, have met Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, As the punt's rope chops round.

72. Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade, With a free, onward impulse brushing through, By night, the silver'd branches of the glade.

87. Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar men> Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days; Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

88. And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty's heightening.

89. He went; his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground; He could not wait their passing, he is dead!

90. The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.

92. Hear it, O Thyrsis, still our tree is there!- Ah, vain! These English fields, this upland dim, These brambles pale with mist engarlanded, That lone, sky-pointing tree, are not for him; To a boon southern country he is fled, And now in happier air, Wandering with the great Mother's train divine (And purer or more subtle soul than thee, I trow, the mighty Mother doth not see) Within a folding of the Apennine.

94. The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;-on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

95. Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

101. Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent;-hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!

103. What is the course of the life Of mortal men on the earth?- Most men eddy about Here and there-eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and, then they die- Perish; and no one asks Who or what they have been, More than he asks what waves In the moonlit solitudes mild Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd, Foam'd for a moment, and gone.