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More "Poetry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... translations of Lenore about, and except by Scott's friends, little notice was taken of the volume. There were some excuses for the neglect, the best perhaps being that English criticism at the time was at nearly as low an ebb as English poetry. A really acute critic could hardly have mistaken the difference between Scott's verse and the fustian or tinsel of the Della Cruscans, the frigid rhetoric of Darwin, or the drivel of Hayley. Only Southey had as yet written ballad ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... sixth canto. In the fifth, which is occupied almost entirely by mortals, and bears a closer relation than the others to the chief works in narrative and dramatic poetry, are related the adventures of Zameia, which, with the story of her death, following the last extract, would make a fine tragedy. Her misfortunes are simply told by an aged attendant who had fled with her in pursuit of Meles, whom she had seen and loved in Babylon. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... with all our ideas of beauty and plenty, is, in general, a disappointing object. The hop plantations of our own country are far more picturesque. In France, the vines are trained upon poles, seldom more than three or four feet in height; and 'the pole-clipt vineyard' of poetry is not the most inviting of real objects. In Spain, poles for supporting vines are not used; but cuttings are planted, which are not permitted to grow very high, but gradually form thick and stout stocks. In Switzerland, and in the German provinces, the vineyards are as formal as those of ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... a solitary way, books are my companions; and poetry which speaks of the love of God and the mercies of Christ is very sweet to my mind. This must be my excuse for troubling you to read verses which others have written. I have intended, if my declining state of health permit, to go to —- for a few ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... Saint Pierre, Helvetius, Saint Lambert, La Harpe, were the church of the new era. One sole thought animated these diverse minds—the renovation of human ideas. Arithmetic, science, history, economy, politics, the stage, morals, poetry, all served as the vehicle of modern philosophy; it ran in all the veins of the times; it had enlisted every genius, it spoke every language. Chance or Providence had decided that this period, which elsewhere was almost barren, should be the age of France. From the end of the reign of Louis XIV. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... in health, and soon after, entered the high school, where he remained four years. A course at the university followed the high school, but Scott never gained distinction as a scholar. He loved romances, old plays, travels, and poetry too well, ever to become distinguished in philosophy, mathematics, or the dry study ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... with you, that poetry and music "teach us of the things that are unseen" as nothing else can do. Music especially, which is an unseen thing, not the product of man at all, but found from man as a gift from God's own hand. I don't know what at some periods of my life I should have done without these blessed sympathizers ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... showing any desire to afford her a part in his cares and labors. Matters ought not, should not go on so. Everything that had seemed to her beautiful and pleasant in her parents' home—was being destroyed here. Music and poetry, that had elevated her soul, clever conversation, that had developed her mind, were not to be found here. Barbara's kind feelings could never supply the place of these lost possessions; for her husband's love she would have resigned them all—but what ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... discredited, automatic writing has been largely employed as a method of experimentally investigating subconscious mental processes. Knowledge which had lapsed from the primary consciousness is frequently revealed by this means; e.g. forgotten fragments of poetry or foreign languages are occasionally given. An experimental parallel to this reproduction of forgotten knowledge was devised by Edmund Gurney. He showed that information communicated to a subject in the hypnotic trance could ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... New York, produced two vols. of verse (1786-8), the most considerable contribution to poetry made up to that date in America. He fought in the Revolutionary War, was taken prisoner, and confined in a British prison-ship, the arrangements of which he bitterly satirised in The British Prison Ship (1781). ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... swinging in my hammock in the grove reading a book of poetry, I came across those beautiful verses by Cowper, entitled, "Alexander Selkirk," and could not but think how true they were to my own lot in many points; in fact, few persons reading the poem could ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... melancholy of the present and the poetry of the past, my thoughts people with beautiful shapes, and my eyes ever gratified by the pure and harmonious lines of the landscape, I was resting in the tavern at Monte-Allegro, sipping a glass of heavy, fiery wine, when I saw two persons enter the waiting-room, ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... noticed those other incomprehensible persons, members of families innocent for generations past of practicing Art or caring for Art, who have notwithstanding displayed from their earliest years the irresistible desire to cultivate poetry, painting, or music; who have surmounted obstacles, and endured disappointments, in the single-hearted resolution to devote their lives to an intellectual pursuit—being absolutely without the capacity which proves the vocation, and justifies the sacrifice. ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... of man, were it not that the shadow of death fell upon his house, and cast its cold blight upon his children. Ere three years had elapsed he saw his eldest daughter fade out of life, and in less than two more his eldest son was laid beside her in the same grave. Decline, the poetry of death, in its deadly beauty came upon them, and whilst it sang its song of life and hope to their hearts, treacherously withdrew them to darkness ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... is doomed inevitably to disappear before steam, perhaps it does not matter much. The economic march of the world's progress will never be stayed by sentimental considerations, nor will all the romance and poetry in the world save the seaman from extinction, if his place can be more profitably filled by the engineer. From all appearances, it soon will be, for even now marine superintendents of big lines are sometimes engineers, ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... never separated. Music, Poetry, and Painting spring from the triune existence of man, represent his life in its triune being, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Lahmann's right hand. Her eyes were wide. Miriam thought she had never seen anyone look so pale. She was speaking very quickly in German. Pastor Lahmann rose and faced her. Miriam had just grasped the fact that she was taking the French master to task for reading poetry to his pupils and heard Pastor Lahmann slowly and politely enquire of her whether she or he were conducting the lesson when the two voices broke out together. Fraulein's fiercely voluble and the Herr Pastor's voluble and mocking and polite. The two voices ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... and my respected father did, years before. So he told me that I was a womanish sentimentalist, and would never do for business life; and advised me to take the bank-stock and the New Orleans family mansion, and go to writing poetry, and let him manage the plantation. So we parted, and I ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... liked writing poetry for them even more than he liked writing a Hebrew Dictionary. He wrote a whole ...
— Twas the Night before Christmas - A Visit from St. Nicholas • Clement C. Moore
... Communism, an equal reward for all, a doctrine which will be attractive only to the lowest rank of workers, the lazy, and the inefficient. Therefore Socialist Communists endeavour to make Communism appear more palatable to the active and the efficient by the lavish use of poetry and hyperbole. For instance, we learn: "He who makes the canvas is as useful as he that paints the picture. He who cleanses the sewer and prevents disease is as useful as the physician who cures the malady after it has been contracted."[1055] To learn painting ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... eighteen months he worked in various mines in various capacities, picking up, in actual experience, much of the mining wisdom which circumstances had denied that he should acquire in college. His Nevada experiences had given him a taste of the desert and he liked it. There was a broad strain of poetry in his make-up, inherited perhaps from his mother, and the desert appealed to that mystical sixth sense in him, arousing his imagination, taunting him with a desire that was almost pre-natal to investigate the formation on the other side of the sky-line. It pandered ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... easy in mind, since Miss Dickinson's canaries would be delivered. The name "County Council" meant nothing to her, but it had affinity with other names and titles of romance—Captain Judgment, for instance, in The Holy War, and County Guy in the poetry book— ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... see here is that of an inn whose fame is as widespread as the love of English poetry, for it is at the Tabard Inn that Chaucer more than five hundred years ago assembled his nine and twenty pilgrims who were preparing to visit the tomb of Thomas a Becket at Canterbury. The witchery of the springtime had stirred the blood of these Londoners who, perhaps, were enticed ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... bishops looked down upon kings and emperors and counted them their vassals, when the barbaric peoples which made up the population of Europe had been sufficiently schooled and educated in the new direction, a longing for something new, a yearning for art, for poetry, for beauty, began to stir the hearts of men and women. It found expression in the ideal of chivalry, the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy Grail, and suddenly love, bursting out in a brilliant flame, shed its radiance on the sordid relationship which had hitherto ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... pleasing and polished writer of lyric and pastoral poetry, appears to have been a close and attentive observer of nature and manners,—abounding in wit and humour,—and a pious and religious man. He was also a soldier, a good fisherman, and a warm admirer of Queen Elizabeth, of whom he gives a beautiful character in "A Dialogue ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... more! They are the very essence of poetry—poetry at its purest. We'll see the effect of them on Mr. Machin. We'll just see. It's the ideal opportunity to test my theory. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... liked Miss Ponsonby and we pitied her. She confided to us that she was very lonely and that she wrote poetry. We never asked to see the poetry, although I think she would have liked to show it. But, as Jerry says, there ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... so far, nor enriched myself with such varied knowledge of the relics of ancient history, as I might have purposed or wished, I have at least learned to know the Turk and the Arab, been soothed by the patience inspired by their fatalism, and warmed by the gorgeous gleams of fancy that animate their poetry and religion. These ten months of my life form an episode which seems to belong to a separate existence. Just refined enough to be poetic, and just barbaric enough to be freed from all conventional fetters, it is as grateful to brain and soul, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... roses, a couple of luxurious easy-chairs, some old prints upon the wall. On the sideboard was a basket, as yet unpacked, filled with hothouse fruit, and on a low settee by the side of one of the easy-chairs were a little pile of reviews, several volumes of poetry, and a couple of library books. In the centre of the mantelpiece was a photograph, the photograph of a man a little older, perhaps, than this newly-arrived visitor, with rounder face, dressed in country tweeds, a flower in his buttonhole, the picture ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... traversed by deep red lanes, and enclosing a wide-spreading summer palace and two immense reservoirs walled with masonry, and the vision of these serene sheets of water, in which the olives and palms are motionlessly reflected, is one of the most poetic impressions in that city of inveterate poetry. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... has in numerable elements to mingle in her combinations, has turned out some marvelous leaders among these poor men. Their hard fortunes have driven out of their minds all illusions, all imagination, all poetry; and in solemn fashion they have bent themselves to the grim and silent struggle with their environment. Without imagination, I say, for this seems to me to be a ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... of Scotland, and the Tales of the Covenanters, and some books of poetry that my aunt has got. But I like Flavel too. ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... of Englishmen, who, though they beat their own wives, are always indignant at a man who dares to lay a little finger on those of anybody else. Then, too, the subject was Oriental: it might even be invested with something of romance and poetry; the zenanah, sacred in the eyes of the oppressed natives, had been ruthlessly insulted, under a glaring Indian sun, amid the luxuriance of Indian foliage, these acts had been committed, &c. &c. It was a fertile theme for a poet; and how little soever Sheridan cared for the Begums and ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... process called "Pleading," which has been the delight and the pride of so many ages; developing gradually century by century, until at last it has perfected itself into the most beautiful system of evasion and duplicity that the world has ever seen. It ranks as one of the fine Arts with Poetry and Painting. A great Pleader is truly a great Artist, and more imaginative than any other. The number of summonses at Chambers is only limited by his capacity to invent them. Ask any respectable solicitor how many honest claims are stifled by proceedings ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... say, I always thought they were pretty good; but I never thought any one would appreciate my poetry like that." ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... strong house saves a failing one, and then the Blends go on successfully? Let "P. and G." give us a first-rate Champagne, call it, say, The "G.B.," or "Golden Blend," at a reasonable price, and, to drop once again into poetry, No matter what their name may be, We'll ever ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... Poetry is always congenial to an Irishman, probably because it has licences almost as great as he likes to take, and has a vague, irresponsible way of putting things, much akin to his ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... some spirit, for the implied slur upon Our Square stung me. "In fact, I was reading one of our local publications when you inter—when you arrived. It contains some very interesting poetry." ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... brain work in mysterious ways. Radmore will never know, to the day of his death, the effect that this curious night drive had on the whole of his future life. He was not a man to quote poetry, even to himself, but to-night there came into his mind some words he had heard muttered by a corporal ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... later years Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson revived this custom for his own daughters; and their friends (being, indeed, with few changes, the same set of young people as had formerly met in Agassiz's library) used to meet in Mr. Emerson's study at Concord for a similar object. He talked to them of poetry and literature and philosophy as Agassiz had talked to them of nature. Those were golden days, not to be forgotten by any who shared their ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... faith, in the usual acceptance of those words. "He never joined a church; but still, as I believe, he was a religious man by nature. He first seemed to think about the subject when our boy Willie died, and then more than ever about the time he went to Gettysburg; but it was a kind of poetry in his nature, and he never was a ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... the people and in the terms of their speech, to the weal of the people and their youth throughout the centuries, it was here. The explanation of the Second Article is one of the chief creations of the home art of German poetry. And such it is, not for the reason that it rises from desert surroundings, drawing attention to itself alone, but because it sums up and crowns the character of the book ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... time he is about to read). I feel, beforehand, my heart beating for joy. I love poetry to distraction, particularly when the ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... take the place of that phantom mother, herself—a phantom mother. And who knows but that such dream-children, as she called those two little girls, were more satisfactory in the end than real children? They represented, so to say, the poetry of children. Had Margaret been a real mother, there would have been the prose of children as well. But here, as in so much else, Margaret's seclusion from the responsible activities of the outside world enabled her to gather the fine flower of existence ...
— Different Girls • Various
... relative had heatedly imagined to reach us, in a hushed-up manner from behind, was the sounds attendant on the application of blows to some acrobatic infant who had "funked" his little job. Impossible such horrors in the world of pure poetry opened out to us at Niblo's, a temple of illusion, of tragedy and comedy and pathos that, though its abords of stony brown Metropolitan Hotel, on the "wrong side," must have been bleak and vulgar, flung its glamour forth into Broadway. What more pathetic for instance, so that we publicly ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... well," he replied; "he was one of the gentlest souls that ever dwelt in human clay. As ethereal in his music as John Keats in his poetry, he was one of those creatures born of dreams and rapture that rarely visit this planet. Happy fellow! What a death ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... age of poetry. A generation of great Welsh poets found an equal welcome in the courts of Gwynedd, Powys, and Deheubarth; and even the Norman barons of Morgannwg began to feel the charm of Welsh legend and song; Robert of Gloucester was a great patron of learning. One of ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... with pomegranates; and so did he fo' the othah chapiter. And the chapiters that were upon the tip of the pillahs were of lily work in the porch, fo' cubits. Lily work," he lingered over the words, smiling at their musical poetry. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... impression that my character required improvement and discipline;" and so on to the end of the chapter, near which, however, it is right to say that there appears a redeeming touch, in so far as that he thanks the gods that he could not write poetry, and that he had never occupied himself about the appearance of things in ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... Wheat-head Farm I took a fancy to trying my "prentice hand" at writing poetry. I got a little encouragement in this at home. My father held singing classes, and gentlemen from the neighbourhood used to meet at our house to have their "lessons." I remember that the present Mr. Lund, of Malsis Hall, was one of my ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... wonder at nothing more, than how a man can be idle; but, of all other, a Scholar; in so many improvements of reason, in such sweetness of knowledge, in such variety of studies, in such importunity of thoughts. . . . To find wit, in poetry; in philosophy, profoundness; in mathematics, acuteness; in history, wonder of events; in oratory, sweet eloquence; in divinity, supernatural light and holy devotion; as so many rich metals in their proper mines, whom would it not ravish with delight!"—Joseph ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen
... treat which ought not to be missed. Carter's style of oratory was of the impassioned order; he thumped on the desk, and went through the "extension motions," with the exception of that awful movement where you bend double and try to touch your toes. It was rumoured that he wrote deep, unintelligible poetry that did not rhyme; and if the school rules had not forbidden the practice, he would have worn long hair and a fly-away necktie. Shepherd, on the other hand, went in for logic, unadorned by any movements suggestive of setting-up drill. His style bore a suspicious resemblance ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... Had she not already given the best years of her youth to others? Had she not waited without a thought of rebellion for the coming of the right one? And Love, and Love's mysterious touch, wrought fantastic changes in Stella Beckman's affairs. She and Lee read poetry. She had never known how beautiful poetry was nor how much of it there was to read. He knew the good novels and sent her all that he himself read, and these were plenty! Then, when he was away, he wrote ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... a keen appreciation of natural beauty, and of the art which could represent it, either on canvas or in marble. He was fond of poetry. But of all the poets, Burns stood first in his estimation. He could enter so easily into the spirit of this writer, because, in some respects, they were kindred spirits. Burns' touching pathos, his humor, his love and pity for man and beast, penetrated his ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... with Regard to the Origin of Gavroche's Poetry. The Influence of an Academician on this Poetry II. Gavroche on the March III. Just Indignation of a Hair-dresser IV. The Child is amazed at the Old Man V. The ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... spring new opportunities for growth, a more productive, fulfilled and united people, and a stronger America—an America that will lead the technological revolution, and also open its mind and heart and soul to the treasures of literature, music, and poetry, and the values of ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... effective if it has no story to tell. There must be something, be it fact or fiction, to attach to a place before its beauties can be fully appreciated. The charm of poetry and romance is a very real one, and can add much to one's enjoyment of a particular view. I suppose that something is needed to interest and attract the intelligence, at the same moment that the sense of sight is captivated, so that a double result ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... was filled with the old Greek and Roman learning. Now he saw the ancient symbolism reproduced in the great forests of North America by the nations of the Hodenosaunee, who had never heard of Greece or Rome, nor, to him, were the religion and poetry of the Iroquois inferior in power and beauty, being much closer kin than the gods of Greece and Rome to ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... rich with tributes to the songs of the birds. The thoughts and feelings aroused or suggested by these songs are the topics of much of the world's enduring poetry. Longfellow, in his "Birds of Killing-worth" (Tales of a Wayside Inn) sings exquisitely of the use and beauty and worth of birds. Shelley, in his "Skylark", describes in glowing verse "the unbodied joy" that "singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest". Wordsworth hears the blithe ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... down—a very good kind of prose, but well considered, well thought out. For instance, I know all Mr. Wilcox's faults. He's afraid of emotion. He cares too much about success, too little about the past. His sympathy lacks poetry, and so isn't sympathy really. I'd even say"—she looked at the shining lagoons—"that, spiritually, he's not as honest as I am. ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... thinking. "Blister wouldn't be bad," he announced. "Something about the vister causin' a blister. I don't know as you are aware of the fact, Sue, but I wrote consider'ble poetry when I was a young feller. Mrs. Crow's got 'em all tied up in a pink ribbon. It's a mighty funny thing that she won't even show 'em ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... terms "higher" and "lower," when used in a moral sense. We have seen that John Stuart Mill made much of the distinction in his utilitarianism. Bentham appears to sin against the enlightened moral judgment in holding that, quantities of pleasure being the same, "push- pin is as good as poetry." ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... during the century which followed his death, was indeed great, but was almost entirely confined to religious families of the middle and lower classes. Very seldom was he, during that time, mentioned with respect by any writer of great literary eminence. Young coupled his prose with the poetry of the wretched D'Urfey. In the "Spiritual Quixote," the adventures of Christian are ranked with those of Jack the Giant-killer and John Hickathrift. Cowper ventured to praise the great allegorist, but did not venture to name him. It is a significant circumstance that, till a recent ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... table. He patted Dotty's head, and said she looked like "a sweet-pea on tiptoe for a flight." He seemed very fond of quoting poetry; and nothing could have been more pleasing to Dotty, who loved to hear high-sounding words, even if they did ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... the rising of the sap incites some to poetry, some to making maple sugar, and some to watching for the first flowers, it is well to look at a few tree-blooms, and to consider the possibilities and the pleasures of a peaceful hunt that can be made with profit in city ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... 'Kerrigan's Quality' (1894), is told with her distinguishing charm, but the book has not the close-knit force of the 'Idyls.' Miss Barlow herself prefers the 'Bogland Studies,' because, she says, they are "a sort of poetry." "I had set my heart too long upon being a poet ever to give up the idea quite contentedly; 'the old hope is hardest to be lost.' A real poet I can never be, as I have, I fear, nothing of the lyrical faculty; and a poet without that is worse ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... express chiefly in terms of fundamental movements, stripped of their accessory finish and detail, every important act, vocation, sentiment, or event in the life of man in language so universal and symbolic that music and poetry themselves seem to have arisen out of it. Before it became specialized much labor was cast in rhythmic form and often accompanied by time-marking and even tone to secure the stimulus of concert on both economic and social principles. In the dark background of history there ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... above us is to say, 'We know nothing.' The world has learned half of a great verse of the Gospel: 'No man hath seen God at any time, nor can see Him.' If the world is not to go mad, if hearts are not to be tortured into despair, if morality and enthusiasm and poetry and everything higher and nobler than the knowledge of material phenomena and their sequences is not to perish from the earth, the world must learn the next half of the verse, and say, 'The only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... formula or incantation; in Zend, manthra is an incantation against disease, and hence we have the Erse manadh, incantation or juggling, and moniti in Lithuanian. The linguistic researches of Pictet, Pott, Benfey, Kuhn, and others show that in primitive times singing, poetry, hymns, the celebration of rites, and the relation of tales, were identical ideas, expressed in identical forms, and even the name for a nightingale had the same derivation. So also the names ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... great that she even condescended to be amusing to her own husband? For a more serious and life-long affection there are few heroines so satisfactory as Sophia Western and Amelia Booth (nee Harris). Never before nor since did a man's ideal put on flesh and blood—out of poetry, that is,—and apart from the ladies of Shakspeare. Fielding's women have a manly honour, tolerance, greatness, in addition to their tenderness and kindness. Literature has not their peers, and life has never had many to compare with them. They are not "superior" like ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... March, 1811. I learned from a well-informed person that the sum of one hundred thousand francs from the private funds of the Emperor was distributed by M. Dequevauvilliers, secretary of the treasury of the chamber, among the authors of the poetry sent to the Tuileries; and finally, fashion, which makes use of the least events, invented stuffs called roi-de-Rome, as in the old regime they had been called dauphin. On the evening of the 20th of March at nine ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... daylight, and going out to the barn to do chores, to get ready to go into the field to work! Working, wasting y'r life on dirt. Waiting and tending on cows seven hundred times a year. Goin' round and round in a circle, and never getting out. You needn't talk to me of the poetry of a farmer's life." ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... moral husband that I took his words deeply to heart, and that ever since my return to Worcester I have been spending one afternoon a week reading poetry with the inmates of the Female Inebriate Asylum. My life is not so ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... in poetry that all the world understands a lover. In real life he is called throaty, and given a level spoonful of that nauseous ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... spirit of Chaucer's poetry; but alongside of it existed yet the ballad poetry of the people, wholly untouched by courtly elegance and classical pedantry; rude in art but never coarse, true to the backbone; instinct with indignation against ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... too; and these are revealed in the rude songs and epics in which they delighted. Monstrous barbarities are committed, but always to accomplish some stern purpose of duty. They are cruel in order to be just. This sluggish, ravenous, drinking brute, with no gleam of poetry, no light-hearted rhythm in his soul, has yet chaotic glimpses of the sublime in his earnest, gloomy nature. He gives little promise of culture, but much of heroism. There is, too, a reaching after something ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... at twenty-one. Gladstone was in Parliament before he was twenty-two, and at twenty-four he was Lord of the Treasury. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was proficient in Greek and Latin at twelve; De Quincey at eleven. Robert Browning wrote at eleven poetry of no mean order. Cowley, who sleeps in Westminster Abbey, published a volume of poems at fifteen. Luther was but twenty-nine when he nailed his famous thesis to the door of the bishop and defied the pope. Nelson ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... lady. The audience, easy believers in spells, magic, and witchcraft, are in full sympathy with Puck's mission to secure the potion whose magic power will create love or cause infidelity and hatred. Never had poetry been fuller of imagery or sweeter in verification than in the lines spoken by Oberon; nor had Queen Elizabeth ever received a more ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... hills. Almost his earliest memory was having been crowned king of a castle by some of his playfellows. At his first school he was the show-boy of the schoolmaster: at thirteen years old he had written poetry that attracted and justified admiration. In 1797 he was "a man of mark"; at the University,[J] in 1798, at the age of nineteen, he had made "considerable progress" in translating the Odes of Anacreon; and in 1800 he was "patronized" and flattered by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... There they did their work. They made their calling and election sure. Greek architecture—one birth of beauty after another—was born. Athens was crowned with marvellous temples, whose exquisite proportions amaze and charm us to-day—inimitable creations of beauty. Homer came, and then epic poetry was born. AEschylus and tragedy came; Pindar and the lyric song; Theophrastus and pastoral music; Anacreon and the strain which bears his special name. And so Phidias and his companions created sculpture, Herodotus history, Demosthenes oratory, Plato and Aristotle philosophy, Zeuxis ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... said Julia. "I find no difficulty in learning my lesson by once reading, and as I am very fond of poetry, I like to employ the rest of my time in trying ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... wholly devoted to reading and to rural occupations. The latter, particularly gardening, served as a counterpoise to the sedentary temptation that would have proved physically injurious; but laying in, as I daily did, a plentiful store of romantic adventure or fascinating poetry for rumination when abroad, my mind was unprofitably occupied at all times, to the exclusion of better things. On Sundays, indeed, I made it a point of conscience to abstain from light reading; and, as far as I could, to banish from my thoughts the week's acquisition of folly. I went ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... are as eager to see things in a true light as they are quick to sympathize with whatever is heroic or beautiful; and all their talk is of truth and justice, the good, the fair, the excellent, of philosophy, religion, poetry, and art, and of whatever else seems favorable to human life and to the development of ideal manhood. Of the merely useful they have the scorn of young and inexperienced minds; and Hippocrates proclaims himself ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... poetical? It was Lucan's misfortune that the ideal side was already occupied; he had no power to choose. Few who have read the Pharsalia would wish it unwritten. Some critics have denied that it is poetry at all. [33] Poetry of the first order it certainly is not, but those who will forgive artistic defects for energy of thought and strength of feeling must always retain a strong admiration for ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... see!" she exclaimed. "And what a beautiful set of changes, like real poetry! The stamen in a flower, and growth, and a ray of sunlight are all one ...
— Every Girl's Book • George F. Butler
... was a verse-maker. Poetry suited my emotions better than prose. The following is one ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... Seigniory of Tilly. Vases of china, filled with freshly-gathered flowers, shed sweet perfumes, while they delighted the eye with their beauty, etherializing the elements of bread and meat by suggestions of the poetry and ideals of life. A grand old buffet, a prodigy of cabinet-maker's art, displayed a mass of family plate, and a silver shield embossed with the arms of Tilly, a gift of Henry of Navarre to their ancient and loyal house, hung upon the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... your cards. It might be well to write some message on the card recalling the events of the preceding evening—nothing intimate, but simply a reminder of your first meeting and a suggestion that you might possibly desire to continue the acquaintanceship. Quotations from poetry of the better sort are always appropriate; thus, on this occasion, it might be nice to write on the card accompanying the flowers—"'This is the forest primeval'—H. W. Longfellow," or "'Take, oh take, those lips away'—W. Shakespeare." You will ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... daughter of Sir Charles Bingham, who in 1776 was created Baron Lucan. Her mother, Lady Lucan, was a remarkably talented woman, trying her hand with success at modelling, painting, and poetry. She was ambitious to be an intellectual leader, and like several other ladies of the time entertained after the fashion of the French salons, inviting people of wit and learning to meet in her drawing-room for discussion. Her ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... satiety; but all lines which do not go in the steady jog-trot of alternate beats as regularly as the piston of a steam engine, are more or less defective. This simple-minded system naturally makes wild work with the poetry of the 'mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies.' Milton's harsh cadences are indeed excused on the odd ground that he who was 'vindicating the ways of God to man' might have been condemned for 'lavishing ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... certainly the most wonderful writer of the day. His novels are a new literature in themselves, and his poetry as good as any—if not better (only on an erroneous system), and only ceased to be popular, because the vulgar learned were tired of hearing 'Aristides called the Just,' and Scott the Best, and ostracized him."—Byron ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... animal of which the quest calls forth the combined characteristics of the ibex, the stag and the tiger-hunter. Some of my own experiences I have described in 'Seonee;' but let those who wish to learn the poetry of the thing read the glowing, yet not less true pages of Colonel Walter Campbell's 'Old Forest Ranger;' and for clear practical information, combined also with graphic description, the works of Captain J. Forsyth and Mr. G. P. Sanderson ('The Highlands of Central India' ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... minute Dorothy was dancing opposite the delighted and capering half-breed, and almost enjoying it. With hands on hips, with head thrown back, and with feet tremulous with motion, she kept time to the music. She was a good dancer, and realised what is meant by the poetry of motion. The fiddler played fairly well, and Pierre La Chene, if somewhat pronounced in his movements, was at least a picturesque figure, whose soul was in the dance. So amusing, were his antics that the girl laughed heartily, despite the danger ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... in the Kentucky Militia in connection with one of those feud cases, I was asked by a private if I were related to Edgar Allan Poe, "De mug what used to write poetry," and when I replied, "Yes, he was my grandmother's first cousin," he, evidently thinking I was too boastful, remarked, "Well, man, you've got ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... too, eh? Who's got to do the poetry, though? Somebody propose somebody"—thereupon every fag proposed his chiefest enemy, and the battles raged along the line. "And you call yourselves gentlemen!" said Grim in disgust—he had been overlooked for ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... with the other sex, who love poetry and romance, as he well knew, for which reason he often used the phrases of both, and in such a way as to answer his purpose with most of those whom he wished to please. He had one great advantage in the sweepstakes of life: he was not handicapped ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... he went on, "to remain a daughter of the crude West. I want to take you back with me to the land where life still moves to poetry, to the land where one can live in a world unknown by these struggling hordes. You shall live in a palace where the perfume of flowers lingers always, with the sound of running water in your ears, a palace from ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... scarcely extends beyond the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. Sailors driven by storms into the western sea might have brought to Asia Minor accounts of the existence of a western land and possibly also of its whirlpools and island-mountains vomiting fire: but in the age of the Homeric poetry there was an utter want of trustworthy information respecting Sicily and Italy, even in that Greek land which was the earliest to enter into intercourse with the west; and the story-tellers and poets of the east could without fear ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... seldom forgotten. Things learned later in life, not only are learned with greater difficulty, but more rapidly disappear. I recall instantly and without effort, texts of Scripture, hymns, catechisms, rules of grammar and arithmetic, and scraps of poetry and of classic authors, with which I became familiar when a boy. But it is a labor of Hercules for me to repeat by memory anything acquired since attaining the age of manhood. The Creator seems to have arranged ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... the English poets evidently the great favorite of our guide: the choice does honor to his head and heart. A man must have a very strong bent for poetry, indeed, who carries Southey's works in his portmanteau, and quotes them in proper time and occasion. Of course at Waterloo a spirit like our guide's cannot fail to be deeply moved, and to turn to his favorite poet for sympathy. ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a delightful companion. He was a very good man, she thought, for she had heard him say at Mr. Luff's, one day, that he always wished to do his duty in whatever state of life he might be placed; and he knew a great deal of poetry, for one day he had repeated a verse of a song. She wondered if he had made the words of the valentine!—it ended ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... books read as Jesse Bulrush and Nurse Egan, and even her mother, read them to Crozier after his operation, to help him pass away the time. The only time she ever cared to listen— at school, though quick and clever, she had never cared for the printed page—was when, by chance, poetry or verses were read or recited. Then she would listen eagerly, not attracted by the words, but by the music of the lines, by the rhyme and rhythm, by the underlying feeling; and she got something out of it which had in one sense nothing to do with the verses themselves ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "the story of evolution" will attract workingmen to a lecture when zooelogy or chemistry will drive them away. The "outlines of literature" or "the best in literature" will draw an audience when a lecturer in English poetry will be solitary. This results partly from a wholesome desire to have general knowledge before special knowledge, and is partly a rebound from the specialization of labor to which the workingman is subjected. When he is free from work and can direct his own mind, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... leg, with one arm outstretched and one eye closed, perhaps to concentrate the force of the spell,[1122] but the power lay mainly in the spoken words, as we have seen in discussing Celtic formulae of prayer. Such spells were also used by the Filid, or poets, since most primitive poetry has a magical aspect. Part of the training of the bard consisted in learning traditional incantations, which, used with due ritual, produced the magic result.[1123] Some of these incantations have already come before ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... into a ropery and succeeded by Parr-street. By the way, Duke-street, which occupies a portion of its site, has been famous for notable persons residing in it. In the third house from Colquitt-street Felicia Hemans was born, and she wrote some of her early poetry there. In the yard of the next house was once a tree, the last remnant of the Ladies Walk, which had two rows of trees down the sides and centre as in the other Ladies Walk previously mentioned. Mrs. Hemans apostrophizes this tree in one of her early poems. I recollect her very well, for she ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... the warmth and loveliness of the infant morn? And what was the magic acting on the enthusiast himself, that all traces of gloom and pensive thought were banished from his brow, that the full tide of poetry within his soul seemed thrilling on his lip, breathing in his simplest word, entrancing his whole being in joy? Scarce could he himself have defined its cause, such a multitude of strong emotions were busy at his heart. He saw not the dangers overhanging the path of the ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... prerogatives and their functions, and indicated their form," would not, of course, be accepted in a literal sense by any modern mythologist. But it is nevertheless true that the clear and vivid personality and individuality given to the gods by the epic poets affects all later poetry and all Greek art. The imagination of the poets could not, as we have already noticed, have had so deep and wide an influence unless it had been based upon popular beliefs and conceptions. But it fills these ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... rustling with trills and fluttering of wings. Quail, thrushes, nightingales are imprisoned in them. The nightingale, the singing-bird beyond all others, so difficult to tame, is the honoured guest, the privileged dweller in these rustic cages. With the rose, he is an essential part of Arab poetry. The woods round about Thagaste were full of nightingales. Not the least doubt that the child Augustin had felt the little musical throats of these singing-birds throb between his hands. His sermons, his heaviest treatises, have a recollection ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... that Mr. Stepfast told her the young Baronet told him (and he verily believed he was head and ears in love with her!) Miss Robbs was the most lovely creature he had seen since he left Belgravia. And then he went into a perfect rhapsody of excitement while praising the poetry of her motion, the grace with which she performed the smallest offices of the drawing-room, her queenly figure, her round, alabaster arms, her smooth, tapering hands, (so chastely set off with two small diamonds, and so unlike the butchers' wives of this day, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... to a large class of Chinese terms. The significative portion of it is the character for 'speech,' but the other half is merely phonetical, enabling us to approximate to its pronunciation or name. The meaning of the compound has to be learned from its usage. Its most common significations are 'poetry,' a poem, or poems,' and a collection of poems! This last is its meaning when we speak of the ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... those children as they stood before me. I looked at their bright, clear faces, their eyes wonder-wide, their clean brows alert for knowledge, hungry for life and its beauty. Despite their hideous clothes, they were the poetry of the world: all that is young and fresh and lovely. Then I thought of them five years hence, their minds larded with a Sound Commercial Education, tramping the streets of the City from nine o'clock in the morning until six o'clock in the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... confuse and frighten himself with thoughts of "literature in all its branches." Experts and pedagogues (chiefly pedagogues) have, for the purpose of convenience, split literature up into divisions and sub-divisions—such as prose and poetry; or imaginative, philosophic, historical; or elegiac, heroic, lyric; or religious and profane, etc., ad infinitum. But the greater truth is that literature is all one—and indivisible. The idea of the unity of literature should be well planted and fostered in the head. All literature ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... refuge in times of stress are of the "notebook" and "table-talk" kind. Poetry I have tried, but could not approach it. It is too distant. Romance, which many found good, would never hold my attention. But I had Samuel Butler's Note Books with me for two years in France, and found that the ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... grief that seemed to rise up in my throat and choke me. I could not think of the meaning of the prayers nor join in the singing: and all the time that Mr. Butler, our clergyman, was preaching, a verse of a little piece of poetry which I learnt as a girl was running ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... still inconsolable, poor youth! He looked so drearily pathetic, and quoted such doleful poetry, that Mrs. Gwynne, who, in her matter-of-fact plainness, had no patience with any of Lyle's "romantic vagaries," as she called them, began to exert the dormant humour by which she always quenched his little ebullitions. Olive at last considerately ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... air, the cloudless sky. Not a bird piped, not a breeze whispered—solitude, you, and I. The motionless leaves did not quiver in the beautiful sunset hues which are both light and shadow. You felt that heavenly poetry—you who experienced so many various emotions, and who so often raised your eyes to heaven to avoid answering me. You who are proud and saucy, humble and masterful, who give yourself to me so completely in spirit and in thought, and evade the ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... an imagination you have got! One of these days, Iris, I shall be prouder of you than ever; I shall find you a famous literary character. I don't mean writing a novel; women who can't even hem a handkerchief can write a novel. It's poetry I'm thinking of. Irish melodies by Lady Harry that beat Tom Moore. What a gift! And there are fortunes made, as I have heard, by people who spoil fair white paper to some purpose. I wish I ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... began to really write, "bad poetry," he says, and during his solitary rambles fought with certain problems ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... promptly. "We've got to make it tally up with what the subscribers pay for it. I mean to put in politics, poetry, philosophy, and every other sort of dope," he concluded with ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... and what little vestige of the hole that still remains in that island within an island is to-day pointed out as the spot where the first white settler's house was built hereabouts. Unfortunately for the picturesqueness and poetry of this historic incident, modern civilization has utilized the island as a hen-yard, and the historic ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... her grace, of her beauty, with a simple love and reverence that are indescribably touching; in contemplation of her goodness his hard heart melts into pathos; his cold rhyme kindles and glows into poetry, and he falls down on his knees, so to speak, before the angel, whose life he had embittered, confesses his own wretchedness and unworthiness, and adores her with ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... far as I am aware, unique. Single figures of the Goddesses, and the whole movement of the scene upon Olympus, are transcribed without attempt at concealment. And yet the fresco is not a bare-faced copy. The manner of feeling and of execution is quite different from that of Raphael's school. The poetry and sentiment are genuinely Lombard. None of Raphael's pupils could have carried out his design with a delicacy of emotion and a technical skill in coloring so consummate. What, we think, as we gaze upward, would the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... friends would not let me try them. I found myself, therefore, all at once in the midst of all kinds of home comforts, domesticities, and distractions, with delightful cicerones in host and hostess, and charming little companions in their two children. This is the poetry of travel; thus to journey from one place to another, provided with introductory letters which open hearts and doors at every stage, and make each one the inauguration of a new friendship. I wish I could subjoin an illustration of "How I travelled through Franche-Comte," for my exploration ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is. What philosophers call 'natural theology' has been one way of appeasing this craving; that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has been another way. Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its {41} facts 'hard;' suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving for communion, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... breast, and in similar attitude the angel half kneels before her. The scene takes place before a little grated window in the colonnade of a cloister, utterly bare of ornament, but in this very simplicity lies all the charm and poetry of Angelico. ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... it so long to understand it, till he gets it without book. He may with much industry make a breach into logic, and arrive at some ability in an argument; but for politer studies he dare not skirmish with them, and for poetry accounts it impregnable. His invention is no more than the finding out of his papers, and his few gleanings there; and his disposition of them is as just as the book-binder's, a setting or gluing of them together. He is a great discomforter of young students, by telling them what travel it ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Chapel-master, who knows a great deal about such things, says that when he wears that robe he looks like a certain Diente, or some name of the sort, who lived hundreds of years ago in Italy, and went down into hell, and afterwards described his journey in poetry." ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... "In novels, and poetry, and sometimes in real life, beautiful young women are fallen in love with, and then trouble is liable to begin," explained Tom ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Catholic Church has adopted, for its hymns, the poetry of the low Latinity of the middle ages. Among these is distinguished for its originality that which is generally sung in the office for the dead. The two principal verses ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... the detectives in that gentleman's house. You enter the girl's room; what is the first thing you observe? Why that it is not only one of the best in the house, but that it is conspicuous for its comforts if not for its elegancies. More than that, that there are books of poetry and history lying around, showing that the woman who inhabited it was above her station; a fact which the housekeeper is presently brought to acknowledge. You notice also that the wild surmise of her abduction by means of the window, has some ground in ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... again. We shall get lots of ideas out of them.' It was Noel who suggested this, but we made him shut up, because we knew well enough he only wanted to get back to his old books. Noel is a poet. He sold some of his poetry once—and it was printed, but that does not come in this part ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... of late years concerning the far-famed Treaty of Penn with the Indians. A circumstance, which has all the interest both of fact and of poetry, was confirmed by such unbroken testimony of tradition that history seemed to have innumerable records of it in the hearts and memories of each generation. But as there appears no document or parchment ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... good beginning for the music and poetry of the south, and promised well for all that was to come; but that music was the last, as it had been the first, I had heard in France; where, in general, there is no melody amongst the people, in any part that I ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... moor when she was unhappy, going as far as a certain saucer-shaped hollow, though she always meant to go to a more distant ridge; and there she sat down, and took out the little book hidden beneath her cloak and read a few lines of poetry, and looked about her. She was not very unhappy, and, seeing that she was forty- five, never perhaps would be very unhappy, desperately unhappy that is, and leave her husband, and ruin a good man's career, as she ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... corresponded with the truth, and tomorrow she was to discover what had suggested to Philostratus the story that when Achilles begged Calliope to endow him with the gifts of music and poetry she had given him so much of both as he required to enliven the feast and banish sadness. He was also said to be a poet, and devoted himself most ardently to verse when resting from the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... survival of one amongst several competing words (e.g. why German keeps only as a high poetic word "ross", which is identical in origin with the English work-a-day "horse", and replaces it by "pferd", whose congener the English "palfrey" is almost confined to poetry and romance), the persistence of evolution till it becomes revolution in languages like English or Persian which have practically ceased to be inflectional languages, and many other problems. Into these Darwin did not enter, and they require a fuller investigation than ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... possesses but few of the attractions with which poetry and painting have embellished it. The following is a list of the officers composing the California Battalion:—Lieut.-colonel J.G. Fremont, commanding; A.H. Gillespie, major; P.B. Reading, paymaster; H. King, commissary; J.R. Snyder, quartermaster, since appointed ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... been for the kindly clause in the printed slip that insinuated in graceful terms that this rejection did not imply a lack of literary merit in the contribution itself, the good lady, knowing well that there was even less money to be made from rejected than from accepted poetry, would have been inclined to request the poet to vacate the premises. The very next day, however, she was glad she had not requested the resignation of the poet from the laureateship of her house; for the same basket gave forth another printed slip from another editor, begging the poet ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... of Alain, fifth of the name, Viscount of Rohan, married in the year 1236 Matthew, Seigneur of Beauvau, son of Rene, Constable of Naples. Breton popular poetry has in many ballads recounted the adventures of Jeanne and her husband, one ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... was nothing; but after thinking a few moments said, "Well, there was one, a very small thing, but that couldn't have had any thing to do with the matter. One day a peddler came along; and among his books was a pretty, red-covered poetry book, and I wanted it bad. But my husband said he couldn't afford it, and the peddler went off. I couldn't get that book out of my mind; and in the night I took some of my own money, and travelled on foot to the next town, found the peddler, ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... smiling. "I see you are off upon one of your hobbies. . . . But you will not tell me that the fine rugged epic of Beowulf, to which the historians trace back all that is noblest in our poetry, had lost its generative impulse even so early as Alfred's time. That ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the head a ribbon big like a hat. He want not I keep for the Sundays but he tie me up and then he say I am pretty—jolly he say, and he demand I show him to speak the French. So he commence to read my book of when I was little, the "Lectures Enfantines" and I make him say the little poetry that is on the page 3 and it say: "Cher petit oreiller," and then my great sister enter and she have on her bodice of Sundays and very much the powder of rice on the nose. And she say: "Go in the bed-chamber and amuse yourself, and I talk with this Monsieur Americain." And I want not to go, ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... imagination could not conceal itself even in his philosophical works, which are everywhere adorned with very shining, ingenious metaphors and figures. Nature had almost made him a poet; and indeed he wrote a piece of poetry for the entertainment of Christina, Queen of Sweden, which however was suppressed in honour ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... hearts, will always carry in their inmost souls a chord that has never been touched, and in their work an indefinable quality will be lacking, a something in the stroke of the brush, a mysterious element that we call poetry. The swaggerers, so puffed up by self-conceit that they are confident over-soon of their success, can never be taken for men of talent save by fools. From this point of view, if youthful modesty is the measure of youthful genius, the stranger on the staircase might be allowed ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... of the sixteenth century there dwelt in Ferrara—(it was then flourishing under the sceptre of its magnificent dukes, the patrons of the arts and of poetry)—there dwelt two young men, named Fabio and Muzio. Of the same age and nearly related, they were almost never separated; a sincere friendship had united them since their early childhood, and a similarity of fate had strengthened this bond. Both belonged to ancient ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... one of the few sad people I met in America. He could have sat upon the ground and "told sad stories of the deaths of kings" with the best. In England he loved going to see graveyards, and knew where every poet was buried. He was very familiar with the poetry of the immediate past—Cowper, Coleridge, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and the rest. He liked us, so everything we did was right to him. He could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he disliked a thing, he had no ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... well-closed harbour of Norfolk; whence, crossing the Elizabeth river, we entered, in a couple of hours, the noble stream now rightly called, after its legitimate sovereign, the Powhatan, but better known as the James's river,—"a great sinking in the poetry of the thing," though Jamie also was a king, "but no more like his ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... the lighthouse, where they would have lingered longer if Avice had not suddenly remembered an engagement to recite poetry from a platform that very evening at the Street of Wells, the village commanding the entrance to the island—the village that has now advanced ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... written by one of the Highland drovers, whose appearance moved the compassion of Macky, the tourist of 1723. His name is Robert Doun or Donn. He had left his heart behind him in his native glen, as people will do, drovers as well as others. There is a ring of genuine poetry in the verses in which he expresses his love-sickness—his desire to go upon the wings of the wind as ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... out of the rule of Plato. . . . To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... of the French with the Roman Empire was very favourably received. The poetry which I have sent is merely the emptying out of my desk. The epigrams are wretched indeed, but they answered Stewart's purpose, better than better things. I ought not to have given any signature to them whatsoever. I never dreamt of acknowledging, either ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Raven, "his poetry is. But that's natural enough. He belongs to the new school. You don't find him conventional ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... England the note of the nightingale suddenly ceased, to be succeeded by the mere chirping of the barn-door sparrows, the divine and melancholy voice began to be heard further north. It was during that most barren period of English poetry—extending from Chaucer's death till the beginning of Elizabeth's reign—that Scottish poetry arose, suddenly, splendidly—to be matched only by that other uprising nearer our own time, equally unexpected and splendid, of Burns and Scott. And ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... his head. 'I am afraid we are hardly ready for that. And there is scant time. I must be content to do without the poetry, this year, ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... and fantastic, as when 'the most remarkable incident in modern history' proves to be George Fox the Quaker making a suit of leather to render himself independent of tailors; in others it rises to the highest pitch of poetry, as in the sympathetic lament over the hardships of manual labour. 'Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... affection for the reigning house certainly prevailed. It was arbitrary, rococo, unrelated to current conditions as a tradition sung down in a ballad, an anachronism of the heart, cherished through long rude lifetimes for the beauty and poetry of it—when you consider, beauty and poetry can be thought of in this. Here was no Court aiding the transmutation of the middle class, no King spending money; here were no picturesque contacts of Royalty and the people, no pageantry, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... that the English mind has fairly come in contact with this German culture. Its first loud manifestation may be heard in the prose of Carlyle and his school; yet even now its influence has permeated our whole literature so much, that, when reading some of our latest poetry, tones and melodies will come like distant echoes from the groves on the hillsides where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... the boy's countenance needed a twinkle of merriment to redeem it from a too serious acceptance of self. "Not to like poetry—if it's real poetry—is simply to be a plain clod." He spoke with an oracular and pedantic assurance which challenged the girl's ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... spoke the Arabic language, and worshiped Mohammed instead of Christ, in churches called mosques. They taught the Spanish people algebra and the science of astronomy; they introduced a new kind of poetry, music and dancing. They brought many new kinds of trees and flowers to Spain, like the date palm, the orange and the pomegranate, and taught the people how to grow them with an irrigation system which is still in use today. ...
— Getting to know Spain • Dee Day
... of 1613 contains, in connection with the preliminary matter, two pieces of poetry, one signed L'ANGE, Paris, the other MOTIN. They were contributed doubtless by some friend, intended to be complimentary to the author, to embellish the volume and to give it a favorable introduction to the reader. This was in conformity to a prevailing custom of that period. They contain no ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... so," protested Nellie. "I 'm sure all the story-books and poetry say that old folks are much given to reviewing their youth in a pensive, regretful sort ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... impression than a fine overture played by a full orchestra. In all music there is, besides the thought of the composer, the soul of the performer, who, by a privilege granted to this art only, can give both meaning and poetry to passages which are in themselves of no great value. Chopin proves, for that unresponsive instrument the piano, the truth of this fact, already proved by Paganini on the violin. That fine genius is less a musician than a soul which makes itself felt, and ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... want to raise mushrooms, I'd like to know? Who wants their old collar-buttons? And for mercy's sake, how many people who read those advertising columns can write poetry?" ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... poverty of the house, a gold coin, hanging by a ribbon, lay on her brown bosom. These were proofs, had any been needed, of her inborn delight in life and her own loveliness. On the other hand, in her eyes that hung upon mine, I could read depth beyond depth of passion and sadness, lights of poetry and hope, blacknesses of despair, and thoughts that were above the earth. It was a lovely body, but the inmate, the soul, was more than worthy of that lodging. Should I leave this incomparable flower to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and, like the Irish of the present day, they revelled in the joy of party politics, and discussed religious questions with the keenest zest. With them religion came first and foremost. All their poetry was religious; all their legends were religious; and thus the message of Wycliffe fell on hearts prepared to give it ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... had read a good deal of poetry, and enjoyed it in a surface-sort of fashion: discovering that Lady Joan had a fine taste in verse, he made use of his acquaintance there; and effected the greater impression, that one without experience is always ready to take familiarity ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... kind for which the place is famed. Besides this industry, the people are great bee-keepers, and make a good trade by selling the honey. The produce of the hives in the Southern Carpathians is the very poetry of honey; it is perfectly delicious, not surpassed by that of Hymettus or Hybla, so famed in ancient story. This "mountain honey" sometimes reaches the London market, but, unfortunately, not with any regularity. It ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... Miss Summerson, here is our friend Richard," said Mr. Skimpole, "full of the brightest visions of the future, which he evokes out of the darkness of Chancery. Now that's delightful, that's inspiriting, that's full of poetry! In old times the woods and solitudes were made joyous to the shepherd by the imaginary piping and dancing of Pan and the nymphs. This present shepherd, our pastoral Richard, brightens the dull Inns of Court ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... a book, but even a book of what people call poetry. You have heard of that bold young man over the mountains, who is trying to turn poetry upside down, by making it out of every single thing he sees; and who despises all the pieces that we used to learn at school. I can not remember his name; but never mind. I thought that we ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... of the philosopher, who likened the world to a vast animal, is appearing each day as too real for poetry. The ocean lungs pulse a gigantic breath at every tide, her continental limbs vibrate with light and electricity, her Cyclopean fires burn within, and her atmosphere, ever giving, ever receiving, subserves the stupendous equilibrium, and betrays the universal motion. Motion is material ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... do you ever read poetry?" remarked Bill to him one night soon after the episode of the brick-bats as they sat in an estaminet. "I guess your average love tosh leaves me like a one-eyed codfish; but there's a bit I've got in me head writ by some joker who knows me and the ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... the local grammar-school, whose headmaster, Dr. Bidlake, was a man of some culture, though not a deep classic. He wrote poetry, encouraged his pupils to draw, and took them for country excursions, with a view to fostering their love of nature. Mr. Haydon, though he was proud of Benjamin's early attempts at drawing, had no desire that he should be turned into an artist, and ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... entitled Hive Beestock, Melliotropheum Alucar, or Rusca Apium, still remains, containing one thousand pages with about one hundred lines to a page. It is a medley of knowledge and fancy, history, philosophy, and poetry, written in seven languages. A large portion of his poetry is devoted to the pleasures of gardening, the description of flowers, and the care of bees. The following specimen of his punning Latin is addressed to ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... experiment I might try, which would illustrate to you a very important subject. Suppose I should call one of the boys, A., to me, and should say to him; 'I want you to go to your seat and transcribe for me a piece of poetry, as handsomely as you can. If it is written as well as you can possibly write it, I will give you 25 cents.' Suppose I say this to him privately, so that none of the rest of the boys can hear, and he goes to take his seat, and begins ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... The white wappatto blooms along the marshes, its roots ungathered, the dusky hands that once reaped the harvest long crumbled into dust. Blue and majestic in the sunlight flows the Columbia, river of many names,—the Wauna and Wemath of the Indians, the St. Roque of the Spaniards, the Oregon of poetry,—always vast and grand, always flowing placidly to the sea. Steamboats of the present; batteaux of the fur traders; ships, Grey's and Vancouver's, of discovery; Indian canoes of the old unknown time,—the stately ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... intense but may express chiefly in terms of fundamental movements, stripped of their accessory finish and detail, every important act, vocation, sentiment, or event in the life of man in language so universal and symbolic that music and poetry themselves seem to have arisen out of it. Before it became specialized much labor was cast in rhythmic form and often accompanied by time-marking and even tone to secure the stimulus of concert on both economic and social principles. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the habits and customs of the aboriginal race by whom the Highlands of Scotland were inhabited, had always appeared to me peculiarly adapted to poetry. The change in their manners, too, had taken place almost within my own time, or at least I had learned many particulars concerning the ancient state of the Highlands from the old men of the last generation. I had always ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Nelson W. Aldrich, Generals Schofield, Howard, Porter, and Breckenridge, and foreign diplomats from Russia, Chile, Brazil, and Peru. Of the march to the sea Chauncey M. Depew said: "It was a feat which captured the imagination of the country and of the world, because it was both the poetry of war and the supreme fact of ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... admiration - or rather mutual hero-worship - which is so strong among the members of secluded families who have much ability and little culture. Even the extremes admired each other. Hob, who had as much poetry as the tongs, professed to find pleasure in Dand's verses; Clem, who had no more religion than Claverhouse, nourished a heartfelt, at least an open-mouthed, admiration of Gib's prayers; and Dandie followed with relish ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... scientific or military men, he would have proven himself first among the foremost; as it was, much of the talent that would have distinguished him there, grew and throve upon those domestic affections which were to him the poetry of life. ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... public a complete text and a tolerably complete glossary of "Bewulf." The edition is the first published in America, and the first of its special kind presented to the English public, and it is the initial volume of a "Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry," to be edited under the same auspices and with the coperation of distinguished scholars in this country. Among these scholars may be mentioned Professors F.A. March of Lafayette College, T.K. Price of Columbia College, and W.M. ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... explain our attitude to Germans who have been in London, because they know what vulgar and vicious farces and musical comedies pass muster with us, and indeed are extremely popular. It is only when a play touches the deeps of life and shows signs of thought and of poetry that we take fright, and by the lips of our chosen official cry, "This will never do." Tolstoy, Ibsen, Gorky, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Hauptmann, and Otto Ernst are the modern names I find on one week's programme cut from a Berlin paper late in ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... we thought! It would have been much easier, and a great satisfaction. But, for all that, we finally got quite a song of it, which I have not forgotten, even to this time. To be sure we did not know much about making verses, and nothing at all about what they call 'feet' in poetry; yet we got some pretty good rhymes for all, though they might be called a little worm-fency, or like as if they hadn't got their sea-legs on, you know. Now, would you like to hear this little song that the Dean and I made about the little ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... Really lasting stories (Robert Louis Stevenson). 6. Cheerful laborer (Charles Lamb). 7. Tender, brilliant author (Thomas Bailey Aldrich). 8. Heroism wisely lauded (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). 9. Just, gentle writer (John Greenleaf Whittier). 10. Poetry bridged skyward (Percy Bysche Shelley). 11. Clever delineator (Charles Dickens). 12. Rare brain (Robert Browning). 13. Weird ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... milkmaid, in 1771. Mr. Child quotes a verse parallel, preserved in Faroe, and in the Icelandic. There is a similar incident in the cycle of Kullervo, in the Finnish Kalevala. Scott says that similar tragedies are common in Scotch popular poetry; such cases are "Lizzie Wan," and "The King's Dochter, Lady Jean." A sorrow nearly as bitter occurs in the French "Milk White Dove": a brother kills his sister, metamorphosed into a white deer. "The Bridge of Death" (French) seems to hint at something of the same ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... is always struggling to express itself," he went on. "Most people are not capable of voicing their feelings. They depend upon others. That is what genius is for. One man expresses their desires for them in music; another one in poetry; another one in a play. Sometimes nature does it in a face—it makes the face representative of all desire. That's what has ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... church in the morning, and in the afternoon, in fine weather, went out for a walk; or, if it were raining or cold, I played to him till he fell asleep on the sofa. Then in the evening, after tea, we had more music, some poetry, which we read alternately, and a chapter of the New Testament, which he always read to me. I mention this, to show you that I did not come all unprepared to the study of the Newgate Calendar. Still, I cannot think, that, under any circumstances, it could have ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... other fruit. The essentials of vineyard management, however, are easily learned. Indeed, care of the vine comes almost instinctively; for the grape has been cultivated since prehistoric times and the races of the world are so familiar with it through sacred literatures, myths, fables, stories and poetry, that its care is prompted by natural impulse. The grape has followed civilized man so closely from place to place through the temperate climates of the world, that rules and methods of culture have been developed for almost every condition under which it ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... writing poetry out there,' he reflected finally, 'or else living it. Living it, probably. He's a grand fellow anyhow, grand as a king.' Stars, wars, kings, thrones-the words flew in and out among a ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... the teachers in the Upanishads, but we have very little respect for the logical ability of any early Hindu teachers; that is to say, there is very little of it to admire. The doctors of the Upanishad philosophy were poets, not dialecticians. Poetry indeed waned in the extreme south, and no spirited or powerful literature ever was produced there, unless it was due to foreign influence, such as the religious poetry of Ramaism and the Tamil Sittars. But in secondary subtlety and in the marking of distinctions, in classifying ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... pictures they seldom deal with our modern life, or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pictures unlike that life? Are we not good enough to paint ourselves? How is it that we find the dreadful times of the past so interesting to us—in pictures and poetry?" ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... been brought on this far journey. Long, tedious hours are beguiled in the perusal of their contents. History, politics, war, poetry, religion, and romance are freely discussed by different members of the party during hours spent in camp. Both German and Russian speak English fairly well; the Hindu guide is easily understood. There is a plentiful ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... represented a side of the Queen's nature which continually troubled the wise Minister. Their accomplishments were not his. They were costly. While he cannot have failed to perceive something admirable in Ralegh, he would not value the majority of his merits. The poetry and imaginativeness he despised. Still he always preserved amicable relations. He condescended to use Ralegh's personal influence as well as Hatton's. In the spring of 1583 he solicited the mediation ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... ignorant of their true meaning, as, for instance, in the following formula of an oath, in the West Gothic law: Sva se mer gud hull (So help me the gods). In lieu of a missing literature of sagas and poetry, these provincial laws give a good insight into the character, morals, customs, and culture of the heathen and early Christian times of Sweden. From the point of philology they are also of great value, besides forming the solid basis of later Swedish law. How the laws could ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... are no help to us, but a hindrance rather. Here in the West the rivers, and they are many and great, mostly run southward, the way we want to go, and they bring our gunboats on their bosoms. Excuse my poetry, but ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... measuring my Poems by their pretensions. They have looked at them as they really were;—as the amusements of the leisure hours of a man whose fortune will not favour his inclination to devote himself to poetry; and conceiving a favourable opinion of them in that character, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... was very precious, and because the book was intended as an aid to literary rather than linguistic study. In making the selections, my first principle was to give a good deal of the best rather than a little of everything. I wished to make friends for medieval German poetry, and it seemed to me that this could best be done by showing it in its strength and its beauty. So I have ignored much that might have had a historical or linguistic interest for the scholar, and have steadily applied the ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... ourselves. My friend knits, and draws landscapes on the backs of cards; and I have established a correspondence with an old bookseller, who sends me treatises of chemistry and fortifications, instead of poetry and memoirs. I endeavoured at first to borrow books of our companions, but this resource was soon exhausted, and the whole prison supplied little more than a novel of Florian's, Le Voyage du jeune Anarcharsis, and some of the philosophical romances of Voltaire.—They say it ennuyes ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... a romantic man, Bob," he would say sometimes, "and I never read a line of poetry in my life that was any more to me than so many words and so much jingle; but a feeling has come over me, since my wife's death, that I am like a man standing upon a long, low shore, with hideous cliffs ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... I mean was about a man who walked along a road at night in fear and dread. He used to look round and then turn no more his head, because he knew a frightful fiend did close behind him tread. That's exactly what those two spies did today when they were sailing across Finilaun; so you see poetry is some use after all. I used to think it wasn't; but it is. It's frightfully silly to make up your mind that anything in the world is no use. You never can tell until you've tried and that ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... the daily press overflowed, as it were, with those two magic words; analytical chemists investigated the properties of the beverage, and one and all pronounced it in highly technical language to contain more bone-forming and sinew-developing elements than any other known beer. The poetry-and-beer-loving public was fascinated by a ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... in part my own fault, in part owing to historical veracity. Plenty of things in real life are superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half of art to select from realities those which contain possibilities of poetry. ...
— The Message • Honore de Balzac
... every Sunday morning, and I soon got so that I could read. Mis' Mary taught me every day at her knee. I soon could read nicely, and went through Sterling's Second Reader, and then into McGuthrie's Third Reader. The first piece of poetry I recited in Sunday school was taught to me by Mis' Mary during the week. Mis' Mary's father-in-law, an ex-judge, of Clayton, Alabama, heard me recite it, and thought it ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... Butterworth went up to her room, her eyes moist with the effect of the unconscious poetry of ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... I answered as well as I could. I was then obliged to sing pathetic songs, drinking songs, comic songs, opera bouffe, English ballads, and then—worse than all—requested to recite some dramatic poetry. Here I was at sea. I ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... uprightness of character, in scorn of the low and trivial, in lofty idealism. The art of all three is too far above the common level to be popular; it requires too much thinking to attract the superficial. In poetry, in music, and in sculpture, all three utter the profoundest truths of human experience, expressed in grand ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... until they finally reach the stage when they unconsciously use the words correctly, or as habits of speech. The same principles apply in learning the addition and multiplication tables, and the tables of weights and measures in arithmetic; in the memorization of gems of poetry and prose; in the learning of dates, lists of events, and important provisions of acts in history; and in the memorization of lists of places and products in geography, where this is desirable. In all the cases mentioned, it must ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... ancient Greece and Rome—and he incarnated this passion in the picturesque figure of Julian Casti (in The Unclassed), toiling hard to purchase a Gibbon, savouring its grand epic roll, converting its driest detail into poetry by means of his enthusiasm, and selecting Stilicho as a hero of drama or romance (a premonition here of Veranilda). The second or heart's idol was Charles Dickens—Dickens as writer, Dickens as the hero of a past England, Dickens ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... letters. His place among the poets has never been denied—it is in the first rank; nor is he lowest, though little remembered, among letter-writers. His letters gave Jeffrey a higher opinion of him as a man than did his poetry, though on both alike the critic saw the seal and impress of genius. Dugald Stewart thought his letters objects of wonder scarcely less than his poetry. And Robertson, comparing his prose with his verse, thought the former the more extraordinary of the two. In the ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... intuitive grasp which he ascribes to Mrs. Siddons and to Kean, and that he never reached the intensity and complete abandon which gave an overwhelming effect to their highest performances. We may apply to his acting what Carlyle has so justly said of the poetry of Schiller, that it "shows rather like a partial than a universal gift—the labored product of certain faculties rather than the spontaneous product of his whole nature." There was always the perception of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... these eggs of Bourg, as if it had been the in- tention of the very hens themselves that they should be promptly served. "Nous sommes en Bresse, et le beurre n'est pas mauvais," the landlady said, with a sort of dry coquetry, as she placed this article before me. It was the poetry of butter, and I ate a pound or two of it; after which I came away with a strange mixture of impressions of late Gothic sculpture and thick tartines. I came away through the town, where, on a little ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... you remember the beautiful little gems of poetry that used to appear in the Gazette, under ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... a touch of poetic sentiment, but these Indian races of the Columbia lived in a region that was itself a school of poetry. The Potlatch was sentiment, and the Sun-dance was an actual poem. Many of the tents of skin abounded with picture-writing, and the stories told by the night fires were full of ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... there is a fashion in intellect. The German to-day is essentially practical, cold, cynical, and calculating. The poetry and the Christmas trees, the sentiment and sentimentality, remain like the architectural monuments of a vanished race, mere reminders of the kindlier Germany that once was, the Germany of our first impressions, the Germany that many once loved. But that Germany has long since disappeared, ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... this volume, is in no way deceptive. The tiny insects buried in the soil or creeping over leaf or blade have for him been sufficient to evoke the most important, the most fascinating problems, and have revealed a whole world of miracle and poetry. ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... and, like many lads of his time, a romantic temperament and the love of poetry. There were many books in his father's home and the boy had lived his leisure in them. He ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... apparent: the service was really only an honest attempt to make the best of a commercial contract of property and slavery by subjecting it to some religious restraint and elevating it by some touch of poetry. But the actual result is that when two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... be a good opportunity of sounding the praises of sleep, and if I were a poet I might indulge my fancy and produce something wonderfully novel; but as I never wrote a line in my life worthy of being called poetry, I will not inflict anything of this sort on ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... volume in his hands, with all its extravagance and its savage realism, is not aware that it is animated through and through with indubitable genius—then he must be too much the slave of the conventional and the ordinary to understand that Poetry metamorphoses herself in many diverse forms, and that its one sovereign and ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... was a good deal of melancholy in the girl's mind at that moment. She was taking leave of the place: had come to say it a farewell. That park had been her playground, her studio, her stage, her world of fancy and romance and poetry since her infancy. She had driven her brother as a horse there, and had played with him at hunting lions. She had studied landscape drawing there from the days when a half staggery stroke with some blotches out of it was supposed to represent a tree, and a thing shaped like ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... exists no necessity why a vivid power to conceive ideas, should NOT be combined with a dialectic skill in expressing them. Degerando, an admirable French writer, in one of his Treatises, has some profound observations on this subject; and does not hesitate to define poetry itself as a species of ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... Literature, Poetry, &c., with a Retrospect of Literature, and a View of modern English Literature. 18mo, Muslin, ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... of the Anglo-Saxon race, to regret her pre-eminence, and sneer at her fame. In the matters of municipal government, gas, water, fog, and snow, much can be alleged and proved against the English capital, but in the domain of poetry, which I take to be a nation's best guaranteed stock, it may safely be said that there are but two shrines in England whither it is necessary for the literary pilgrim to carry his cockle hat and shoon—London, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... a cultured gentleman, who loved poetry well enough for its own sake, told me that he had obtained a more correct and more satisfying idea of the Lake district from an eighteenpenny book of photographic views than from all the works of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth put together. I also remember his saying ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... show the meaning of her multiple existence. It will reveal dark things, but also those quiet heights to which man's spirit turns for rest and faith in this bewildering maze of a world. And to this art about to come—art inevitably moves slowly—into its own, to American drama, poetry, fiction, music, painting, sculpture—sincerity, an unswerving fidelity to self, alone will bring the dignity worthy of a great ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... voice, which can at all hours thus speak to the throne. Poetry, in old days, was called the language of the Gods—it is better named now—it is ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which combine to form mukims, districts or hundreds (to use the nearest English term), which again combine to form sagis, of which there are three. Achin literature, unlike the language, is entirely Malay; it includes poetry, a good deal of theology and several chronicles. Northern Sumatra was visited by several European travellers in the middle ages, such as Marco Polo, Friar Odorico and Nicolo Conti. Some of these as ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... expenses of the establishment! It was three or four years ago, when he had his money and ran through it. For all I know, Sibyl may go there—I can't tell her about such things, and she wouldn't believe me if I did. She's an idealist—sees everything through poetry and philosophy. I should be a brute if I soiled her mind. And, I say, old man, why don't your wife and she see more of each other? Is it ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... circumstances, she enjoyed a reputation for vast learning and exquisite culture. It was said in Wiltstoken that she knew forty-eight living languages and all dead ones; could play on every known musical instrument; was an accomplished painter, and had written poetry. All this might as well have been true as far as the Wiltstokeners were concerned, since she knew more than they. She had spent her life travelling with her father, a man of active mind and bad digestion, with a taste for sociology, science in general, and ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... rationalism, I thought it my conscientious duty to accept, step by step, the dictates of destructive criticism until the Bible was only inspired to me in religion as Kant in philosophy, Milton in poetry and Beethoven in music. But when I came to the end of the business I discovered that my conscience, that had urged me along, was gone also. For I was gravely taught that conscience is simply a creation of experience and education ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... and when he began to read it, it became to him utterly confused and unintelligible. So he put it back, and went to another portion of the room and took down Wittier's "Hallelujah;" and of this he could make neither head nor tail. He was informed, by a heading in the book itself, that a piece of poetry was to be sung "as the ten commandments." He could not do that, and put the book back again, and declared to himself that farther search would be useless. He looked round the room and tried to price the books, and told himself that three or ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... neck, and a heavy, dark, and yet pleasingly modeled face. From both her father and mother she had inherited a penchant for art, literature, philosophy, and music. Already at eighteen she was dreaming of painting, singing, writing poetry, writing books, acting—anything and everything. Serene in her own judgment of what was worth while, she was like to lay stress on any silly mood or fad, thinking it exquisite—the last word. Finally, she was a rank voluptuary, dreaming dreams of passionate ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... all there. Mrs. Ewing's "Jackanapes" and Charles Kingsley's "Water-Babies" jostled the "Seven Little Sisters" series; Hawthorne's "Wonder-Book" lay close to Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare;" and Whittier's "Child-Life in Prose and Poetry" stood between Mary Howitt's "Children's Year" and Robert Louis Stevenson's ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... an old one of sixty-two, he was growing to be exactly like him, with the same upright carriage, the same silence and reserve. Then I looked at Emmy: she, too, was changed,—she, the wild little pet, all of whose pretty individualities were dear to us,—that little unpunctuated scrap of life's poetry, full of little exceptions referable to no exact rule, only to be tolerated under the wide score of poetic license. Now, as she sat between the two Misses Evans, I thought I could detect a bored, anxious expression on her little mobile face,—an involuntary watchfulness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... not a bard who is careful at all about keeping his singing robes about him. He can doff them and work like a 'navvy' when he sees reason. He is very fond of coming out with good, sober, solid prose, in the heart of his poetry. He can rave upon occasion as well as another. Spontaneities of all kinds have scope and verge enough in his plot; but he always keeps an eye out, and they speak no more than is set down for them. His ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... reached the Greek cities in that island. We are told that many of these captives on their return to Athens affectionately embraced Euripides, and told him how some of them had been sold into slavery, but had been set free after they had taught their masters as much of his poetry as they could remember, while others, when wandering about the country as fugitives after the battle, had obtained food and drink by reciting passages from his plays. We need not then wonder at the tale ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... theirs in inspiration. If those were the "secretaries of nature," these were the secretaries of the very Author of nature. If Greece and Rome have gathered into their cabinet of curiosities the pearls of heathen poetry and eloquence, the diamonds of pagan history and philosophy, God himself has treasured up in the Scriptures, the poetry and eloquence, the philosophy and history of sacred law-givers, of prophets and apostles, of saints, evangelists, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... gifted with a true sense for it, the might and the freshness of the sea! O asparagus, he that has not the wit to enjoy thee, can know nothing of the mysteries which the dreaming world of plants reveals to us! Can one understand anything of the history of the world or of poetry, if one is a stranger to all these natural elementary feelings, and incapable of doing justice to the worth of a snipe, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... one, just a little one?" he continued. "There was a bird (girl) where I used to be billeted at St. Albans, and I would like to send 'er a bit of poetry." ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... had been from the first deeply impressed by the holy associations of the place. He had a nature at once fiery and poetic; there were but three things he could have been,—a soldier, a poet, or a priest. Circumstances had made him a priest; and the fire and the poetry which would have wielded the sword or kindled the verse, had he found himself set either to fight or to sing, had all gathered into added force in his priestly vocation. The look of a soldier he had never quite lost,—neither the look ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... away with Neaera, and the General can't pursue them, though he has got the postchaise at the door, because Tim O'Toole has hidden his wooden leg! By Jove, it's capital!—All the funny part—I don't like the sentimental stuff, and suicide, and that; and as for poetry, I ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hung like a cloud over the city. Its population suffered some diminishment in the next two years in spite of its position on the main highway of trade. Dream cities, canals and railroads built without hands became a part of the poetry of American commerce. Indeed they had come of the prophetic vision and were therefore entitled to respect in spite of the fact that they had been smirched and polluted ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... most Europeans it is ridiculous, but I used to cry when the carriers beat the most noble of all knights, when I was a little girl and read Don Quixote; and now I felt as it were like Sancho, when I listened to Osman reciting bits of heroic poetry, or uttering 'wise saws' and 'modern instances,' with the peculiar mixture of strong sense of 'exultation' which stamps the great Don. I may not repeat all I heard from him of the state of things here, and the insults he had to endure—a Shereef and an educated ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... a sound maxim, if not first-class poetry. If Mr. Arnot, the husband of your old friend, is willing to take him, you cannot do better than place your son in his charge, for he is one of the most methodical and successful business men ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... that Chaucer's ancestors were merchants, of no valydytye. Master Speight misquoteth Gower. Chaucer submitteth his works to Gower, not Gower to Chaucer. Gower the poet was not of the Gowers (orGores) of Stittenham. Gower's chaplette for knighthood not for poetry. The chaplette of roses a peculiar ornament of honour. The knighting of Erle Mortone of Normandye. Chaucer being a grave man unlikely to beat a Franciscan Fryer but? The lawyers not in the temple till the latter part ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... horse—a dark bay with black points. I rode him a lot, and oh! it was nice! It was like poetry, like living it, you know, like being a poem one's self. And I'm glad I did it. If I should die for it, I couldn't regret it. And I shouldn't wonder if I did die, for I feel as if those knocks had ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... of the little synagogue tucked away in a back street: in which for four generations prayer had ebbed and flowed as regularly as the tides of the sea, with whose careless rovers the worshippers did such lucrative business. The synagogue, not the sea, was the poetry of these eager traffickers: here they wore phylacteries and waved palm-branches and did other picturesque things, which in their utter ignorance of Catholic or other ritual they deemed unintelligible to the heathen ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... the plan just named, whether you keep one at home or not. Try to do it well, but do not undertake too much. Write facts such as what you saw, heard, did, and failed to do; but do not try to write poetry or fine writing of any kind. Mention what kind of weather; but do not attempt a meteorological record unless you have a special liking for that science. If you camp in Jacob Sawyer's pasture, and he gives you a quart of milk, say so, instead of "a good old man showed us a ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... dissatisfaction. He had expected that this, his first service in England after ten years, would have carried him back to the days when he knew nothing of the Tree of Knowledge; but, instead of that, it had made no appeal to him. Its poetry was destroyed by the hideousness of the surroundings; whilst even the glorious words of the Benediction seemed but a perfunctory dismissal, giving the congregation leave to hasten away to the heavy dinners which were awaiting ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... kind and beautiful, and though always in rigid attire, her appearance is softened by a spotlessly clean white collar and cuffs. One would expect that he would tell her of his love, but he is not one to commit romantic absurdities. Poetry and the enthusiasm of love cover their blushing faces before the pure beauty of the lady. He silences the voice of his nature, and remains correct. She, too, is always exact, always rational, always well behaved. I fear if they had formed a union, the young man would have risked freezing to death. ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... poets?" repeated the queen, and this time she laughed lightly. "Indeed I fear the king will talk to you more than ever, for he loves poetry, I daresay Zoroaster, too, has repeated many verses to you in the winter evenings at Ecbatana. He used to know endless poetry when ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... activities which help to keep young America employed in a great university, Galusha might have been, and was, seen hopping about some grass-grown graveyard, like a bespectacled ghoul, making tracings of winged death's-heads or lugubrious tombstone poetry. When they guyed him he merely grinned, blushed, and was silent. To the few—the very few—in whom he confided he made explanations which were ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... 'after-wings,' that are so bright as to give common name to the species. We are studying them constantly and hope soon to learn all we care to know of any moths, for our experience with them is quite limited when compared with other visitors from the swamp. But think of the poetry of adding to the long list of birds, animals and insects that temporarily reside with us, a ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... is a character who is likely long to remain deservedly popular in this country's literature. 'The sonnet shining in the eyes' has been fixed by Mr. Dennis in what is certainly a classic of its class, and he secures an effect of true poetry without straining a simile or defying the ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... of our old popular poetry will recognize, in the principal incident of this story, the subject of the well-known ballad, "The Heir ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... was the introduction of logic into every subject whatever, so far, that is, as this was done. Before I was at Oriel, I recollect an acquaintance saying to me that "the Oriel Common Room stank of Logic." One is not at all pleased when poetry, or eloquence, or devotion, is considered as if chiefly intended to feed syllogisms. Now, in saying all this, I am saying nothing against the deep piety and earnestness which were characteristics of this second phase of the Movement, in ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... that is poetry, is it? Well, songs are better than poetry, I knew a Georgian once! He was the man to sing! He sang so loud—so loud—he would have thought his throat was being cut? He finished by murdering an inn-keeper, and was banished ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... no poetry to speak of thy white angel. We believe that each one of us has a white angel at his right hand, recording his good actions. But ordinary mortals have also their black angels, keeping to the left, writing down wicked thoughts and deeds. Hast ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a pencil without a point. A picture was a decoration in paint and was either a pretty decoration in paint or a not pretty decoration in paint. Music was a tune, and was either a tune or merely music. A book was a story, and if it was not a story it was simply a book. A flower was a decoration. Poetry, such as ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... The 'first' volume comprises a sketch of all that is at present known of the physical phenomena of the universe; the 'second' comprehends two distinct parts, the first of which treats of the incitements to the study of nature, afforded in descriptive poetry, landscape painting, and the cultivation of exotic plants; while the second and larger part enters into the consideration of the different epochs in the progress of discovery and of the corresponding stages of advance in human civilization. The 'third' volume, the publication of which, as M. Humboldt ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... parts of a dialogue of Plato to tend equally to some clearly-defined end. His idea of literary art is not the absolute proportion of the whole, such as we appear to find in a Greek temple or statue; nor should his works be tried by any such standard. They have often the beauty of poetry, but they have also the freedom of conversation. 'Words are more plastic than wax' (Rep.), and may be moulded into any form. He wanders on from one topic to another, careless of the unity of his work, not fearing any 'judge, or spectator, who may recall him to the point' ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... Vatican, alike in one respect only, their mutual hatred of each other. They were, indeed, as unlike as two boys could be. Ippolito, as the child of gentle parents, had an aristocratic bearing. He was a clever lad and excelled especially in classical learning, in music and poetry. In appearance he became remarkably handsome, with polished manners and a fondness for spending money and ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... prizes which Oxford could bestow, the Newdigate used to be the most popular. Its fortunate winner was an admitted poet in an age when poetry was read, and he appeared in his glory at Commemoration, speaking what the ladies could understand and admire. The honour was attainable without skill in Greek particles or in logarithms; and yet it had a real value to an intending preacher, ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
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