Poem by Matthew Arnold

To a Republican Friend, 1848

God knows it, I am with you. If to prize
Those virtues, prized and practised by too few,
But prized, but loved, but eminent in you,
Man’s fundamental life; if to despise

The barren optimistic sophistries
Of comfortable moles, whom what they do
Teaches the limit of the just and true
(And for such doing they require not eyes);

If sadness at the long heart-wasting show
Wherein earth’s great ones are disquieted;
If thoughts, not idle, while before me flow

The armies of the homeless and unfed,--
If these are yours, if this is what you are,
Then am I yours, and what you feel, I share.


CONTINUED.

Yet, when I muse on what life is, I seem
Rather to patience prompted, than that proud
Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud,--
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme;

Seeing this vale, this earth, whereon we dream,
Is on all sides o’ershadowed by the high
Uno’erleaped mountains of necessity,
Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.

Nor will that day dawn at a human nod,
When, bursting through the network superposed
By selfish occupation,--plot and plan,

Lust, avarice, envy,--liberated man,
All difference with his fellow-mortal closed,
Shall be left standing face to face with God.

1. A Modern Sappho
2. To George Cruikshank
3. Stanzas Composed at Carnac
4. To the Duke of Wellington
5. “In Harmony with Nature”

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