And I. I know not if to pray
Still to be what I am, or yield and be
Like all the other men 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 they are.