Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge.

These lines come from Matthew Arnold’s sonnet “To a Friend” (often identified as addressed to Arthur Hugh Clough), written in the mid-Victorian period amid Arnold’s characteristic religious and intellectual uncertainty. The poem contrasts the restless questioning of “we”—those who seek answers from systems, authorities, or metaphysical speculation—with the friend’s composed independence. Arnold, a poet and cultural critic preoccupied with the erosion of traditional faith under modern knowledge, uses the sonnet to register admiration for a temperament that can remain inwardly free and serene even while others press for explanations. The tone is both reverent and slightly wistful: the speaker recognizes a rare steadiness that seems to transcend argument.

The speaker describes a figure who does not “abide” (submit to or depend on) the anxious questioning that preoccupies others. While “we ask and ask,” the addressed person “smilest and art still,” suggesting a calm, self-possessed silence that resists being forced into doctrinal or intellectual answers. “Out-topping knowledge” implies a stance beyond mere accumulation of facts or arguments—either a higher wisdom, a moral poise, or a spiritual composure that cannot be reduced to propositions. In Arnold’s world, where modernity unsettles inherited certainties, the lines praise an ideal of freedom: not ignorance, but a quiet mastery over the compulsion to resolve every doubt through explanation.