An interesting use of nature by Arnold comes in "The Scholar Gypsy." Here nature is presented as a place of retreat from the falsity and ceaseless flux of the modern world. When Arnold wrote the poem, Victorian England was experiencing rapid change, with industrial capitalism destroying many of the old certainties. It seemed to many, and not just Arnold, that everything was being turned upside-down. The scholar gypsy turns his back on this world in search of a more natural, more authentic life, wandering the remote English countryside, a place as of yet untouched by the relentless development of industrial capitalism. Not only that, but the scholar gypsy seeks—and finds—the kind of knowledge in nature that he could never find at Oxford, or in any other urban environment.

Arnold, in the cusp between the late Romantic and early Victorian periods (1822-1888) acknowledges Nature, but laments the distance from it that Mankind is experiencing as it moves away from the (literally) pastoral life.  A signature example is this line from "Thyrsis" (1866), a poem lamenting the loss of the pastoral life: “Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here, /But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick.”  At other times he compares the mystery of the sea in earlier times to the sea in the modern world, lamenting the loss of the sea’s mysteries--Dover Beach (1867) is his most famous example.  His homage to Shakespeare (1849) contains the image: “For the loftiest hill,/Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,/ Planting his stedfast footsteps to the sea…” Perhaps the most poignant statement is from To Marguerite: "We mortal millions live alone." So for Arnold, the loss of Man's sympathetic attachment to Nature is one price that had to be paid for “progress,” that is, for the looming Industrial Revolution.