Poem by Matthew Arnold

Written in Butler’s Sermons

Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers,
Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control,--
So men, unravelling God’s harmonious whole,
Rend in a thousand shreds this life of ours.

Vain labor! Deep and broad, where none may see,
Spring the foundations of that shadowy throne
Where man’s one nature, queen-like, sits alone,
Centred in a majestic unity;

And rays her powers, like sister-islands seen
Linking their coral arms under the sea,
Or clustered peaks with plunging gulfs between,

Spanned by aërial arches all of gold,
Whereo’er the chariot-wheels of life are rolled
In cloudy circles to eternity.

1. Religious Isolation
2. To George Cruikshank
3. Written in Emerson’s Essays
4. To the Duke of Wellington
5. Quiet Work

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