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 advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes;
That we must feign a bliss
Of doubtful future date,
And while we dream on this
Lose all our present state,
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
2 August 2015
To Have Enjoy'd the Sun
Matthew Arnold, "Empedocles on Etna" (lines 397-406), The Poems of Matthew Arnold (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), p. 111: