Oh, born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife.

These lines come from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Scholar-Gipsy” (first published in 1853), an elegiac meditation set in the Oxford countryside. Arnold invokes the legendary “scholar-gipsy,” a seventeenth-century Oxford student said to have left the university to join wandering Romani and pursue a freer, more unified life of thought. Writing in the mid-Victorian period, Arnold contrasts an imagined earlier age of intellectual clarity and steadier purpose with the pressures of modern industrial society—its speed, fragmentation, and nervous exhaustion. The passage occurs as the speaker laments that the scholar-gipsy was “born” before the onset of this modern malaise.

Arnold idealizes a pre-modern condition in which mind and life feel coherent—“wits…fresh and clear” and existence flowing “gaily.” Against this he sets a diagnosis of modernity as a kind of illness: hurried, over-stimulated, and internally divided. The “sick hurry” and “divided aims” suggest a culture driven by competing ambitions and constant motion, producing intellectual strain (“heads o’ertaxed”) and emotional numbness (“palsied hearts”). In the poem, the scholar-gipsy becomes a symbol of escape from this condition—an emblem of sustained purpose and spiritual wholeness that the modern speaker longs for but finds difficult to attain.