The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems

Written in Butler’s Sermons

Matthew Arnold


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 labour! Deep and broad, where none may see,
Spring the foundations of the 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 cluster’d peaks, with plunging gulfs between
Spann’d by aërial arches, all of gold;
Whereo’er the chariot wheels of Life are roll’d
In cloudy circles, to eternity.


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