| Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895. 1895. |
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| From “Empedocles on Etna” |
| | | Matthew Arnold (1822–88) |
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| AND you, ye stars, | |
| Who slowly begin to marshal, | |
| As of old, in the fields of heaven, | |
| Your distant, melancholy lines! | |
| Have you, too, surviv’d yourselves? | 5 |
| Are you, too, what I fear to become? | |
| You, too, once liv’d; | |
| You too mov’d joyfully, | |
| Among august companions, | |
| In an older world, peopled by Gods, | 10 |
| In a mightier order, | |
| The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven. | |
| But now, ye kindle | |
| Your lonely, cold-shining lights, | |
| Unwilling lingerers | 15 |
| In the heavenly wilderness, | |
| For a younger, ignoble world; | |
| And renew, by necessity, | |
| Night after night your courses, | |
| In echoing, unnear’d silence, | 20 |
| Above a race you know not— | |
| Uncaring and undelighted, | |
| Without friend and without home; | |
| Weary like us, though not | |
| Weary with our weariness. | 25 |
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| No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you, | |
| No languor, no decay! languor and death, | |
| They are with me, not you! ye are alive— | |
| Ye, and the pure dark ether where ye ride | |
| Brilliant above me! And thou, fiery world, | 30 |
| That sapp’st the vitals of this terrible mount | |
| Upon whose charr’d and quaking crust I stand— | |
| Thou, too, brimmest with life!—the sea of cloud, | |
| That heaves its white and billowy vapors up | |
| To moat this isle of ashes from the world, | 35 |
| Lives; and that other fainter sea, far down, | |
| O’er whose lit floor a road of moonbeams leads | |
| To Etna’s Liparëan sister-fires | |
| And the long dusky line of Italy— | |
| That mild and luminous floor of waters lives, | 40 |
| With held-in joy swelling its heart; I only, | |
| Whose spring of hope is dried, whose spirit has fail’d, | |
| I, who have not, like these, in solitude | |
| Maintain’d courage and force, and in myself | |
| Nurs’d an immortal vigor—I alone | 45 |
| Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read | |
| In all things my own deadness. | |
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