n I see.
For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where in the sun's hot eye,
With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their minds to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall;
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast,
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they
are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them
Unfreed, having seen nothing still unblest.

And the rest, a few,
Escape their prison, and depart
On the wide ocean of life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where'er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor does he know how there prevail,
Despotic on life's sea,
Trade winds that cross it from eternity.
Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind and blackening waves.
And then the tempest strikes him, and between
The lightning bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguished face and flying hair,
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom,
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom."

In these lines, in powerful and highly-sustained
metaphor, lies the full tragedy of modern life.

"Is there no life but these alone,
Madman or slave, must man be one?"

We disguise the alternative under more fairly-sounding
names, but we cannot escape the reality; and we know
not, after all, whether there is deeper sadness in a
broken Mirabeau or Byron, or in the contented prosperity
of a people who once knew something of noble
aspirations, but have submitted to learn from a practical
age that the business of life is to make money, and the
enjoyments of it what money can buy. A few are
ignobly successful; the many fail, and are miserable;
and the subtle anarchy of selfishness finds its issue in
madness and revolution. But we need not open this
painful subject. Mr. Arnold is concerned with the
effect of the system on individual persons; with the
appearance which it wears to young highly sensitive
men on their entry upon the world, with the choice of
a life before them; and it is happy for the world that
such men are comparatively rare, or the mad sort would
be more abundant than th