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More "Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the "Messiah" a Christian epopee, in musical sounds. It is certainly written in the large, grand style of a noble epic, for it had large matters to express, and its composer regarded music as a means of addressing heart and soul. The theme is treated with reverence, delicacy and judgment, and the leading tone is that of a mighty hymn of rejoicing. Following an overture that is in itself ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... love of Gunnar's mother Rannveig, and the caution of Kolskegg his brother, who "sailed long ago and far away from us" in obedience to the doom or sentence of the Thing—all these bring out sharply the quite reckless daring of Gunnar himself, who braves the decree. A mysterious and epic touch is added by the three ancient hags-evidently of these minor Norns who watch over individual destinies and announce the irrevocable doom of the gods. It was Hallgerd who broke their thread, representing, of course, ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... Pope's women; they have no character Occasional instalments—just to freshen the account Oh! I can't bear that class of people Partake of a morning draught Patronizing woman Propitiate common sense on behalf of what seems tolerably absurd Rare as epic song is the man who is thorough in what he does Requiring natural services from her in the button department Said she was what she would have given her hand not to be She was at liberty to weep if she pleased She, not disinclined to dilute her grief ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... of the head. Thereafter she escaped incontinently, but successfully, as she had entered; closed the hidden door behind her, and restored The Faerie Queene very carefully to its place. Rachel no longer proposed to join the select band of those who have read that epic through. ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... have jist about as much to do a-bossin' that party as ye'll have in selectin' yer harp en halo when ye git inside the pearly gates. Ten years from now, thar won't be a cow hand ner a gun outside a dude ranch er a rodeo. Singin' 'The Lament' would be about as well understood as recitin' a Latin epic." ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... Dante's great epic was called by him a comedy because its ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... come to the "Grecian Patterson," or "Cary," which Mr. Gell has begun to publish; and really he has carried the epic rule of concealing the person of the author to as great a length as either of the above-mentioned heroes of itinerary writ. We hear nothing of his "hair-breadth 'scapes" by sea or land; and we do not even ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the adventures of this amazing horse and predatory cow. Somewhere near the middle of the epic little Royal Beaudry usually dropped asleep. The rhythmic tale always comforted him. These nameless animals were very real friends of his. They had been companions of his tenderest years. He loved them with a devotion from which no fairy tale ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... themselves, a certain mist and confusion will always veil the crucial moment, when, against all reasonable calculation, the final stroke was given by intervening fate, wrapped in that obscure cloud which by epic rule closes round the ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... morality, and innocence. The discovery of this happy people, as unexpected as it was accidental, and all that regards their condition and history, partake so much of the romantic as to render the story not ill adapted for an epic poem. Lord Byron, indeed, has partially treated the subject; but by blending two incongruous stories, and leaving both of them imperfect, and by mixing up fact with fiction, has been less felicitous than usual; for, beautiful as many passages in his Island are, in a region where every ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... cathedral inspires Michael Angelo's great dome; a Divine Saviour and His transfiguration exalt Raphael; Paradise explains Dante; listening to the sevenfold Hallelujah chorus of God arouses the sweep and majesty of Milton's epic; the woes of three million slaves made eloquence possible for Phillips and Beecher. The saving of a Union, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal, represented ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... cannot be called a poem. It would not be possible to write satire, epic, idyl, not even elegy, upon that "rat-hole philosophy," as Mr. Emerson once styled the new fetichism of the mahogany tables. It has not one element that asks the sense of beauty to incorporate it, or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... progress of our own, was at last opened to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain undecided. Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio—both his epic poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which Petrarch praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were mingled with others of undeniable jocoseness—the immortal "Decamerone." He could examine the refined gold of Petrarch's ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... expression in terms of beautiful paint of natural truths. In Chardin's case—by him the relativity of mundane things was accepted with philosophic phlegm—an onion was more important than an angel, a copper stew-pan as thrilling as an epic. And then the humanity of his youth holding a fiddle and bow, the exquisite textures of skin and hair, and the glance of the eyes. You believe the story told of his advice to his confrere: "Paint with sentiment." But he ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... love a woman like that once, see her once grow pale with passion, and once wring your lips out upon hers, would it not be a small thing to die? Not that there is not a passion of a quite other sort, much less epic, far more dramatic and intimate, that comes out of the very frailty of perishable women; out of the lines of suffering that we see written about their eyes, and that we may wipe out if it were but for a moment; out of the thin hands, wrought and ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Whitefield under the name Leuconomus, a translation into Greek, of White field. It was his conversion to Evangelicism which gave him his inspiration and his themes. 'The Task' has been as justly called the poem of Methodism as the 'Paradise Lost' has been called the epic of Puritanism. In it we are presented with a number of pictures of the utterly fossilized condition of the clergy of the day in the Established Church (see especially book II., vv. 326-832, in which he satirizes the clergy ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... going to watch. I'm going to watch one of the epic events of our time—" For a moment Beardsley was solemn, almost shocked, as a thought struck him. "In a way it will be sad. Yes, it will! ECAIAC is about to lose her ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... four months later he was pointed out to strangers by the people of Sweetwater Springs. "That is Richard Clement, the sole owner of 'The Witch,' a mine valued at three millions of dollars." This in itself was truly an epic. ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... be issued. They are all devoted to small-town people. In them I have sought the same end as in the city novels: to be true to truth, to observe with sympathy and explain with fidelity, to find the epic of a stranger's existence and shape it for the eyes of strangers—to pass the throb of another heart through my ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... the mighty painter's ill-appreciated art; and Turner's colour-dreams, in which "form" was often to a great extent ignored, were not more tempting to the satirical Philistine than those extraordinary quotations from his formless epic, called "The Fallacies of Hope," extracts from which he loved to append to his pictures' titles. Nothing could be better in the way of satire than the manner in which Punch turned upon the poor painter, and "guy'd" his picture with a burlesque ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... story of one of the greatest of English heroes, a story which shows him to have been at Hastings by the side of Harold, to have won fame there, to have continued the fight for English liberty as leader of the English patriots, and to have earned a place in the unsung English epic. ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... conscience, no turning towards the light, no sorrowful confessions at all. He has given us a great deal, but it is not too much to say that what he rejected, a Catholic poet would have seized with delight as the purplest patches of his epic, and the climax to ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... is lost, and the mind is displeased to find a picture which bears no resemblance to any original. Nor are such excessive refinements more agreeable in the epistolary or philosophic style, than in the epic or tragic. Too much ornament is a fault in every kind of production. Uncommon expressions, strong flashes of wit, pointed similes, and epigrammatic turns, especially when laid too thick, are a disfigurement rather than any embellishment ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the Anglo-Saxon epic poem of Beowulf, one of the most remarkable and precious of our early poems, there is a splendid and graphic description of a lonely mere, such as would have delighted the heart of Edgar Allan Poe, the author of Ulalume. In Professor Earle's prose translation ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... picturesque village, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, is entitled to notice in the annals of literature, as the family seat of the MILTONS, ancestors of Britain's illustrious epic poet. Of this original abode, our engraving is an accurate representation. One of Milton's ancestors forfeited his estate in the turbulent times of York and Lancaster. "Which side he took," says Johnson, "I know not; his descendant inherited no veneration for the White ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... Eastern front the Grand Duke Nicholas has been forced to give ground; in Gallipoli slow progress is being made at heavy cost on land and sea. The Turk is a redoubtable trench fighter and sniper; the difficulties of the terrain are indescribable, yet our men continue the epic struggle with unabated heroism. King Constantine of Greece, improved in health, construes his neutrality in terms of ever increasing benevolence to his brother-in-law ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... be learned from the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer of phlebotomy. Both were regarded as the sons ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... their old brood of dragons. Wherever there is romance, these monsters come by inimical attraction. Because the heavens are certainly propitious to true lovers, the beasts of the abysses are banded to destroy them, stimulated by innumerable sad victories; and every love-tale is an Epic Par of the upper and lower powers. I wish good fairies were a little more active. They seem to be cajoled into security by the happiness of their favourites; whereas the wicked are always alert, and circumspect. They let the little ones shut their eyes to fancy they are ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and harmonious Greek calm is hard to find. "For repose and serenity of mind," says a modern author, "we must go back to the Greek temple and statue, the Greek epic and drama, the Greek oration and moral treatise; and modern education will never become truly effectual till it brings more minds into happy contact with the ideal of a balanced, harmonious development of all the powers of ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... me; Herman Lunkenheimer, his throat cut before all of us by the hound Bombini as Kid Twist stretched the throat taut from behind; the two mates, Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire, mutually destroying each other in what must have been an unwitnessed epic combat; Ditman Olansen, speared by Wada as he charged Berserk at the head of the mutineers in the attempt to rush the poop; and last, Henry, the cadet of the perishing house, shot at the wheel, from the ventilator-shaft, in the course of his ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... sunset. In April, the month of piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London, smoking royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray for possession of the portly dames. There is immensity, swinging motion, collision, dusky richness of colouring, to the sight; and to the mind idea. London presents it. If we can allow ourselves a moment for not inquireing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... transcendent epic, show how a Paradise was regained when woman gave her generous sympathy to man, and reproduced for all coming ages the image of Spiritual Love,—the inamorata of Dante and Petrarch, the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... brave as any rover described in gay, romantic screeds, but, when my fitful life is over, no epic will narrate my deeds. Condemned to silent heroism, I go my unmarked way alone, and no one hands me prune or prism, as token that my deeds are known. But yesterday my teeth were aching, and to the painless dentist's lair I took my way, unawed, ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... had he doubled our obligation by giving us—a Pope. He had a strong imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... descend to such absurdity? But worse still: that he may bear down every argument in favor of these poems, he triumphantly drags forward a passage, in his abomination with which he expects the reader to sympathise. It is the beginning of the epic poem 'Temora.' 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light; the green hills are covered with day; trees shake their dusty heads in the breeze.' And this—this gorgeous, yet simple imagery, where all is alive and panting with immortality—this, William Wordsworth, the author ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... simple than Tasso, more nervous than Lucretius, had he lived in a later age, and learned to polish some rudeness in his verses; had he enjoyed better fortune, and possessed leisure to watch the returns of genius in himself; he had attained the pinnacle of perfection, and borne away the palm of epic poetry. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... is a literal reprint from Keightley's Library edition. Print, binding, and size all render the tasteful little book a pleasant form in which to possess the greatest epic in the English tongue. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... didactics crying aloud on obsolete muses from childish lips. The Greeks were my demi-gods, and haunted me out of Pope's Homer, until I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of Moses the black pony. And thus my great "epic" of eleven or twelve years old, in four books, and called "The Battle of Marathon," and of which fifty copies were printed because papa was bent upon spoiling me—is Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone; for, although a curious production for a child, it gives ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... "painted the life he knew and everyone knew;" that he painted, of course, nothing ideal or heroic, and that the world of thought and passion lay beyond his horizon; but that, with his artificial performers and his feeble-witted audiences, "all the resources of the bourgeois epic were in his grasp; the joys and pains of childhood, the petty tyrannies of ignoble natures, the genial pleasantries of happy natures, the life of the poor, the struggles of the street and back parlour, the insolence of office, the sharp social contrasts, east wind and Christmas jollity, hunger, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... only the highest art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since it combines the greatest mass and diversity of the elements of truth and pleasure. Such are epics, and the few prose tales that have the epic weight. But as from a school of works, aping the creative, incident and romance are ruthlessly discarded, so may character and drama be omitted or subordinated to romance. There is one book, for example, more generally loved ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... way, if not all of them in a dramatic way, though in some he has in vain sacrificed poetry to attain true dramatic speech attaining instead only "rhetoric and logic and dry circumstance." One values the plays of Mr. Yeats highest when one thinks of them as a new kind of drama, as a redevelopment of epic and lyric poetry into drama, an epic and lyric poetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let us not forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest," and another effect which is of "Lear," and that it is after all something of a convention to ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... CXCIX; Baruch, Ch. VI, p. 43. Modern scholars confirm the statements of Herodotus from the study of Babylonian literature, though inclined to deny that religious prostitution occupied so large a place as he gives it. A tablet of the Gilgamash epic, according to Morris Jastrow, refers to prostitutes as attendants of the goddess Ishtar in the city Uruk (or Erech), which was thus a centre, and perhaps the chief centre, of the rites described by Herodotus ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of earlier days, I spread the King's or Hero's praise, And struck the martial Chords with epic fire: But farewell, Hero! farewell, King! Your deeds my lips no more shall sing, For Love alone shall be the subject ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... myth of Demeter Erinnys is undeniably a blending of the epic tradition [of the ideal war-horse] with the local cult of Demeter. . . . It is a probable hypothesis that the belief in the wedding of Demeter and Poseidon comes from the sight of the waves passing over the cornfield. . . ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... poetry; and, amongst the French, the greatest of this age, Boileau and Rapin; the latter of which is alone sufficient, were all other critics lost, to teach anew the rules of writing. Any man, who will seriously consider the nature of an epic poem, how it agrees with that of poetry in general, which is to instruct and to delight, what actions it describes, and what persons they are chiefly whom it informs, will find it a work which indeed is ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... Creophylus, an early epic poet, reputed author of the 'Capture of Oechalia', which he was said to have received from Homer as the dowry of the ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... solution is, phtheirhiasis morbus pedicularis. With this piece may be read Peter Pindar's epic, "The ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... interested in the psychology and experience of persons so extraordinary, both for their genius in society, and for the quantity and quality of their private experience full of solid instruction and romantic interest. The inner life of Madame Swetchine was a sacred epic: the outer career of Lacordaire, an electrifying drama. This double interest of a private, spiritual ascent, and of a chivalrous gallantry in the thick of battle, is clearly unfolded ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... to the recital of some of the High Churchman's parish troubles with a slight half-embarrassed smile. The vicar of Nottingham was always in trouble. The narrative he was pouring out took shape in Langham's sarcastic sense as a sort of classical epic, with the High Churchman as a new champion of Christendom, harassed on all sides by pagan parishioners, crass churchwardens, and treacherous bishops. Catherine's fine face grew more and more set, nay disdainful. Mr. Newcome was quite blind to it. Women never entered into ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... When he speaks of his hero as having assumed the feather, he means that he has donned the uniform of a soldier. He has come to town, in other words, to enlist. Then behold the transformation! He begins at once to act irrationally. The whole epic paints in never-fading colors the disastrous effect upon the intellect of putting on soldier-clothes. You will pardon me, my friends, if I speak thus plainly, but I must open to you the hidden wisdom ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... story of duelling, which became a legend in the army, runs through the epic of imperial wars. To the surprise and admiration of their fellows, two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined gold or paint the lily, pursued a private contest through the years of universal carnage. They were officers of cavalry, and their connection with the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... Zuni ritual or history of the tribe. Although repeatedly promised that it should be given, and while at one time I thought that I had obtained part of it, I must acknowledge an utter failure to accomplish what was hoped in this line. The Zuni epic, so called, is still unrecorded on the phonograph, although at one time I was so confident that I had obtained it, that I stated such to be the fact, and my ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... quantities of wild creatures—quail, rabbits, doves, and ground squirrels and, unfortunately, a number of social outcasts. Never shall I forget an epic incident in our history—the head of the family in pajamas at dawn, in mortal combat with a small black-and-white creature, chasing it through the cloisters with the garden hose. Oh, yes, there is plenty of adventure ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... doubt, was worth studying for a long, long time; and I suppose I may have given, on an average, a minute to each. What an absurdity it would seem, to pretend to read two or three hundred poems, of all degrees between an epic and a ballad, in an hour or two! And a picture is a poem, only requiring the greater study to be felt and comprehended; because the spectator must necessarily do much for himself towards that end. I saw many beautiful things,—among them some landscapes by Claude, which to ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lodged in the Bastille in consequence. 'Let him sit,' thought M. Arouet Senior, 'and come to his senses there!' He sat for eighteen months (age still little above twenty); but privately employed his time, not in repentance, or in serious legal studies, but in writing a Poem on his Henri Quatre. 'Epic Poem,' no less; LA LIGUE, as he then called it; which it was his hope the whole world would one day fall in love with;—as it did. Nay, in two years more, he had done a Play, OEDIPE the renowned name of it; which ran for forty-eight nights' (18th November, 1718, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... In Maghas' epic, The Death of Sisupala, plants and animals lead the same voluptuous life as the 'deep-bosomed, wide-hipped' ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... has made an important contribution to both scholarship and teaching. Not only has she brought together for the first time in one volume most of the extant Elizabethan minor epics, but in so doing, she has hastened the recognition that the minor epic, or "epyllion" as it has often been called in modern times,[1] is a distinctive literary genre as deserving of study as the sonnet, the pastoral, or the ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... not unfamiliar with the great epic opened pretty nearly to the place, and very soon found the passage: He read, aloud with grand scholastic intonation and in a deep voice that silenced the table as if a prophet had just uttered Thus ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... silently in his hand, has no poetry in it, and that machinery is not a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging for myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowded into their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also a great foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing the bodies and the souls of men around the world, beating out the floors of cities, making the limbs of the great ships silently striding the sea, and rolling out the roads ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... fortunate was a silent young lieutenant of infantry—a taciturn, but not unamiable young lieutenant—who was afterward destined to give the name of a great general into the keeping of history forever. Wrapped up somewhere in this Mexican war is the material for a brief American epic; but it is not to ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... so fast, from pure good-nature, to give you time to recollect yourself; for I know you've the worst of memories, especially for what Clarence Hervey says. But come, my dear, dash into the middle of things at once, in the true Epic style." ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... nation, are surely the poorest of popgun paper pellets. The English kick at the insolence, when they are not in the mood for pelleting themselves, or when the armed Foreigner is overshadowing and braceing. Colney's pretentious and laboured Satiric Prose Epic of 'THE RIVAL TONGUES,' particularly offended him, as being a clever aim at no hitting; and sustained him, inasmuch as it was an acid friend's collapse. How could Colney expect his English to tolerate ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ingenious and successful attempt, on the part of the Brahmans, to unite all classes of worshippers in India against the Buddhists. In this sense the Brahmans edited anew the Mahabharata, inserting in that epic passages extolling Vischnu in the form of Krishna. The Greek accounts of India which followed the invasion of Alexander speak of the worship of Hercules as prevalent in the East, and by Hercules they apparently ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... present essay. The scattered verses of Bjoernson were collected into a volume of 'Digte og Sange' (Poems and Songs) in 1870, and in the same year was published 'Arnljot Gelline,' the author's only long poem not dramatic in form. This uneven and in passages extraordinarily beautiful work is a sort of epic in fifteen songs, difficult to read, yet simple enough in general outline. Arnljot Gelline was a sort of freebooter of the eleventh century, whose fierce deeds were preserved in popular tradition. The 'Heimskringla' tells us how, grown weary of his lawless life, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... terms with Lafayette and the Republican leaders, and here was a pivotal point in his life. Had not Washington persuaded him to remain "just for the present" in America, he might have played a part in Carlyle's best book, that book which is not history, but more—an epic. So, among the many obligations that America owes to Washington, must be named this one of pushing Thomas Jefferson, the scholar and man of peace, into the political embroglio and shutting the door. Then it was that Hamilton's taunting ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... great bard became less passionate and more thoughtful; and, at the age of twenty, wrote "Idiosyncracy" (in forty books, 4to.): "Ararat," "a stupendous epic," as the reviews said; and "The Megatheria," "a magnificent contribution to our pre-Adamite literature," according to the same authorities. Not having read these works, it would ill become me to judge them; but I know that poor Jingle, the publisher, always attributed ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pyramid, the laurel'd bust, The trophy'd arch had crumbled into dust; The sacred symbol, and the epic song, 110 (Unknown the character, forgot the tongue,) With each unconquer'd chief, or fainted maid, Sunk undistinguish'd in Oblivion's shade. Sad o'er the scatter'd ruins Genius sigh'd, And infant Arts but learn'd to lisp and died. 115 Till to astonish'd realms PAPYRA taught To paint ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... century of the Christian AEra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour." With what a grand epic roll, with what anticipations of solemn music, did the noble history begin! Far, far into the night Julian turned over page after page, thoughtless of sleep and the commonplace duties of ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... from Mrs. McCarter's pen is pronounced by critics the best work she has ever done. It is a tale of the soil, of winning the land from wilderness to fruitfulness. The author has written into it a great human story, an epic of the prairies. It is aptly called "The Sunflower Book," for this flower figures in the glowing romance running through its pages—the golden flower that Kansas chose as its emblem because its face is ever turned ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... period, but it is not a literary language in any case. The Greek of the New Testament is not the Eolic, the language of the lyrics of Sappho; nor the Doric, the language of war-songs or the chorus in the drama; nor the Ionic, the dialect of epic poetry; but the Attic Greek, and a corrupted form of that, a form corrupted by use in the ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... night in the death-shout. Lycidas, with all the enthusiastic admiration which noble deeds inspire in a poetic and generous nature like his, had regarded the career of the Hebrew hero. The history of Maccabeus was to the Greek an acted epic; in character, in renown, Judas, in his estimation, towered like a giant above all other men of his generation. Lycidas had met the chieftain but once; but in that one meeting had received impressions which made him idealize Maccabeus into a being more like the ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... Homer returned to life, no one would dispute with him his claim to be the author of the Iliad, and each would vie with the rest to do honour to the father of epic poetry. But if peradventure some rich landowner of that day came back to assert a claim to the fields, the woods, the pastures of which he used to be so proud, ten to one he would be received like a thief and perhaps die ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... forest with the romance of man's heart, making a story that is big and elemental, while not lacking in sweetness and tenderness. It is an epic of the life of the lumbermen of the great forest of the Northwest, permeated by out of door freshness, and the glory ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... consideration give us only materials for the great epic of iron, but with such materials we can make our own rhythm and harmony. From the feeble beginning of the savage, rejoicing in the fortunate possession of two old nails, and deriving a sufficient income from letting them out to his neighbors for the purpose of boring holes, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... only universal classic, the classic of all mankind, of every age and country of time and eternity; more humble and simple than the primer of a child, more grand and magnificent than the epic and the oration, the ode and the dramas when genius, with his chariot of fire, and his horses of ire, ascends in whirlwind into the heaven of his own invention. It is the best classic the world has ever seen, the noblest that has ever honored and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the tales is slight; yet who can think of the Greeks without remembering the story of Troy, or of Rome without a backward glance at AEneas, fabled founder of the race and hero of Virgil's world-famous Latin epic? Any understanding of German civilization would be incomplete without knowledge of the mythical prince Siegfried, hero of the earliest literature of the Teutonic people, finally immortalized in the nineteenth century through the musical dramas of Wagner. Any understanding of English ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... bed over a hundred miles long, is by universal confession the richest treasure-house the ransackers of the whole earth have yet brought to light. "The wealth of Ormuz or of Ind," immortalised by Milton's most majestic epic, the wealth of the Rand completely eclipses, and nothing imagined in the glowing pages of the "Arabian Nights" rivals in solid worth the sober realities now being unearthed along this uninviting ridge. It fortunately was not in the power of the Boer Government to carry off this as yet ungarnered ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... their fine powers to have full play, it was necessary that they should deal with things seen: in other words, that feeling should take a concrete shape. Once this condition is fulfilled, they can focus their own impressions and render them with unsurpassable skill. We shall find in them nothing epic, nothing inventive on a grand scale: the transfiguring, ennobling vision of the greatest creators was denied them. But they remain consummate masters in their own restricted province: delicate observers of externals, noting ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... kind as that of the Blacksmiths, which should sum up the most poetical methods of human activity, and which should be called (unless you advise otherwise) Labourers, Sailors, and Soldiers, would form a lyric epic of which the genius of Rossini or Meyerbeer would be proud. I know I have no right to make any such claim, but your kindness to me has always been so great that I have a faint hope of obtaining this new and glorious favor. If, however, this work would give you even an hour's trouble, ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... your native greatness, that for our particular Iliad you prove a very nutshell Homer indeed. For I must not disguise it from you that this is exactly the case. It was Homerus in nuce first; and the pitiful purport of the epic results less from any smallness in the action celebrated than from that important law, not, perhaps, wholly new to your own observation, which forbids a pint-measure to contain more than a pint, though you dip it full from the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... Chapelain was in the pay of the Duc de Longueville, a descendant of Dunois.[115] It is of Dunois that he sings; "the illustrious shepherdess" contributes the marvellous element to his poem, and, according to the good man's own expression, furnishes les machines necessaires for an epic. Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret are too commonplace to be included among ces machines. Chapelain tells us that he took particular care so to arrange his poem that "everything which happens in it by divine favour might be believed to have taken place through human agency carried to the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... steamship Nome was more than a thing of wood and steel. It was a living, pulsating being, throbbing with the very heart-beat of Alaska. The purr of the mighty engines was a human intelligence crooning a song of joy. For him the crowded passenger list held a significance that was almost epic, and its names represented more than mere men and women. They were the vital fiber of the land he loved, its heart's blood, its very element—"giving in." He knew that with the throb of those engines romance, adventure, tragedy, and hope were on their way north—and with these ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... eruptions of Etna, Vesuvius, and Hecla, I feel an impulse to fumigate, at [now] 25, College-Street, one pair of stairs room; yea, with our Oronoko, and if thou wilt send me by the bearer, four pipes, I will write a panegyrical epic poem upon thee, with as many books as there are letters in thy name. Moreover, if thou wilt send me "the copy book" I hereby bind myself, by to-morrow morning, to write out enough copy for a sheet ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... the Second quite liked Voltaire, because Voltaire quite liked Lady Sandon, his mistress. Only a Frenchman could have successfully paid court to the King, Queen and Lady Sandon at the same time, as Voltaire did. His great epic poem, "Henriade," that he had been sandpapering for ten years, was now published, dedicated to the Queen. The King headed the subscription-list with more copies than he needed, at five guineas each, on agreement. Voltaire afterward said that he would not be ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... I've had some notion at times, of trying my hand at an ode, or an epic, but, man, I find too many difficulties in the way. As to 'feet,' now, I can't manage feet in poetry. If it were inches or yards, one might get along, but feet are neither one thing nor another. Then, rhyme bothers me. I've often to run over every letter in the alphabet to get hold of a ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... epic poets plunge in medias res, (Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road), And then your hero tells, whene'er you please, What went ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... great sea-fight which was to determine whether Popery and despotism, or Protestantism and freedom, were the law which God had appointed for the half of Europe, and the whole of future America. It is a twelve days' epic, worthy, as I said in the beginning of this book, not of dull prose, but of the thunder-roll of Homer's verse: but having to tell it, I must do my best, rather using, where I can, the words of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... engines. They had come from the West, and were all covered with snow and ice, like soldiers with the dust of battle upon them. They had massed their forces, and were now moving with augmented speed, and with a resolution that was epic and grand. Talk about the railroad dispelling the romance from the landscape; if it does, it brings the heroic element in. The moving train is a proud spectacle, especially on stormy and tempestuous nights. When I look out and see its ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... statesman, the ambassador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where, in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or dallies by the south wall with ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Aruntha, and in the Epos of Pentaur it is stated that this battle took place at Kadesh by the Orontes. The name of the city survives, at a spot just three miles north of the lake of Riblah. The battle itself I have described from the Epos of Pentaur, the national epic of Egypt. It ends with these words: "This was written and made by the scribe Pentaur." It was so highly esteemed that it is engraved in stone twice at Luqsor, and once at Karnak. Copies of it on papyrus are frequent; for instance, papyrus Sallier III. and papyrus Raifet—unfortunately ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... said her father, smiling, "a forlorn lover seeing your cheeks aflame and your eyes suffused with tears of sympathy for young heroes, one of whom was reciting his epic. Strahan is soon to repeat his; then Lane will appear and ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... AEolians spread over northern Greece, and also occupied the western coast of the Peloponnesus and the Ionian islands. It continued, to the latest times, to occupy the greater part of Greece. The Achaeans were the most celebrated in epic poetry, their name being used by Homer to denote all the Hellenic tribes which fought at Troy. They were the dominant people of the Peloponnesus, occupying the south and east, and the Arcadians the centre. The Dorians and Ionians were of later celebrity; the former occupying ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Captain wouldn't fail us!" chuckled Betty delightedly. "Linda must compose an epic on it for the School Magazine. It beats ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... directed in the nobler branches of our art. Upon this principle the Roman, the Florentine, the Bolognese schools, have formed their practice; and by this they have deservedly obtained the highest praise. These are the three great schools of the world in the epic style. The best of the French school, Poussin, Le Sueur, and Le Brun, have formed themselves upon these models, and consequently may be said, though Frenchmen, to be a colony from the Roman school. Next to these, but in a very different ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... stocked with pieces of solid merit, which long held their place. In August, 1792, he accompanied the duke to the campaign in the Ardennes. In 1793 he went with his master to the siege of Mainz. Goethe took the old German epic of Reynard the Fox, with which he had long been familiar, and which, under the guise of animals, represents the conflicting passions of men, and ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Cuailgne'" says the late Professor O'Curry, "is to Irish what the Argonautic Expedition, or the Seven against Thebes, is to Grecian history." For an account of this, perhaps the earliest epic romance of Western Europe, see the Professor's "Lectures on the ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... could not go out of himself, as Shakspeare could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate other existences, but in himself he had an eye to perceive and a soul to embrace all forms and modes of being. He would have made a great epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one; for his Homer is not so properly a translation as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses rewritten. The earnestness and passion which he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... spreading of hands to protect it, and the stern opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases, or the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease. For such the expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new. It is to be indirect, and not direct or descriptive or epic. Its quality goes through these to much more. Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted, and their eras and characters be illustrated, and that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative, and has vista. Here comes ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... with a Roman calmness, yet touched as no Roman had hitherto been touched with pity and tenderness for the sorrows of men. The one poem is a song of passion, a mighty triumph of the individual man, a poem of human energy in defiant isolation. The other is an epic of social order, of a divine law manifesting itself in the fortunes of the world, of the bonds which link man to his fellow men, a song of duty, of self-sacrifice, of reverence, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... league with the disaffected, ran full tilt towards the solemn equipage of the Duke, which the projecting lance threatened to perforate from window to window, at the risk of transfixing as many in its passage as the celebrated thrust of Orlando, which, according to the Italian epic poet, broached as many Moors ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... kings who draw his chariot, or puts fragments of similar bombast into the mouth of Pistol. According to Coleridge, on the other hand, this idea is 'below criticism.' No sort of ridicule was intended. 'The lines, as epic narrative, are superb.' It is true that the language is 'too poetical—the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the drama'; but this is due to the fact that Shakespeare had to distinguish the style of the speech from that of his ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... for Georgoepiscopal Meanderings, and the combination of the utile dulci during his walks to and from any given place, composed, together with a book and a half of an Epic Poem, during one ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... censured for his "fall from Homer's numbers, free as air, lofty and harmonious as the spheres, into childish shackles and tinkling sounds; for putting Achilles into petticoats a second time:" but we are told that the dying swan talked over an epic plan with Young a few weeks before his decease. Young's chief inducement to write this letter was, as he confesses, that he might erect a monumental marble to the memory of an old friend. He, who employed his pious pen for almost the ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... an arbitrary-enough origin; it is satira, from satur, mixed; and the application is as follows: each species of poetry had, among the Romans, its own special kind of versification; thus the hexameter was used in the epic, the iambic in the drama, etc. Ennius, however, the earliest Latin 'satirist,' first disregarded these conventionalities, and introduced a medley (satira) of all kinds of metres. It afterward, however, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Microcosm, whose essays and jeux d'esprit, while having reference primarily to Eton, demonstrated that the writers were not insensible to what was going on in the great world without. It was for this college paper that Canning wrote his "Essay on the Epic of the Queen of Hearts," which, as a burlesque criticism, has been awarded a high place in English literature. Lord Henry Spencer, Hookham Frere, Capel Lofft, and Mr. Millish, were also contributors to the columns of the Microcosm. In the year 1820 W. Mackworth Praed set on foot a manuscript ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... thing in the forest. At first the enemies had been saloon-keepers, and wicked men who tempted him to drink with them. The names of these men were household words to him, portents of terror; they peopled his imagination as epic figures, such as Black Douglas must have been to the children of the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... asserts that he is guided in his choice of definite styles and definite forms by an absolutely clear purpose; that he has, for example, essayed every kind of metre which could possibly be suited to his "cosmic" epic, or that he has written a novelette solely in order to have once written a novelette. Although in these confessions, as well as in Edgar Allen Poe's celebrated Poet's Art, self-delusion and pleasure ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 'may overlade a ship or barge, and therefore I will skip at once to the effect, and let all the rest slip.' And he unconsciously suggests a striking difference between himself and the great Elizabethan epic poet who owes so much to him, when he declines to make as long a tale of the chaff or of the straw as of the corn, and to describe all the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I have seen the epic struggle of my compatriots against Greeks and Turks, and I took part with them in order to obtain these national institutions. And did you come there in Ochrida, and everywhere in Macedonia protected by ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... Manhattan, to some unseen goal. It was magnificent; it was colossal; but it was uncanny. Mr. Neal had always been moved by the romance of the subway, but tonight, in his elevation of spirit, it seemed something of epic quality, full of a strange, unreal grandeur. Faint red lights here and there revealed nothing of the tunnel; they but lent mystery to dimly seen arches and darkling bastions, fleeting ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... prose work of the fifteenth century was completed in 1470 by a man who styles himself Sir Thomas Malory, Knight. We know nothing of the author's life; but he has left as a monument a great prose epic of the deeds of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. From the various French legends concerning King Arthur, Malory selected his materials and fashioned than into the completest Arthuriad that we possess. While his ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... anything? Is splendid folly the measure of its inspiration? Is wisdom its base and summit?—that which it recedes from, or tends toward? And by what definition do you award the name to the creator of an epic, and deny it to the creator of a country? On what principle is it to be lavished on him who sculptures in perishing marble the image of possible excellence, and withheld from him who built up in himself a transcendent character, indestructible as the obligations of duty, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... heard the harp of Pindar, and the impassioned song of the dark-eyed Sappho. I thought I heard the lofty epic of the blind Homer, rushing on in the red tide of battle, and the divine Plato discoursing like an oracle ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... quite luxurious for those poor oxen. Let us interrogate these paintings and those of all these walls; they will instruct us, perhaps, with reference to the destination of the building. There are mythological and epic pieces reproducing certain sacred subjects, of which we shall speak further on. Others show us winged infants, little Cupids weaving garlands, of which the ancients were so fond; some of the bacchanalian divinities, ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... She had a sweet thrilling voice, and accompanied herself on the lyre. She could act the improvisatrice, and her expressive features were a running commentary on the varied meaning, the sunshine and the shade, of her ode or her epic. She could relate how the profane Pentheus and the self-glorious Hippolytus gave a lesson to the world of the feebleness of human virtue when it placed itself in opposition to divine power. She could teach how the chaste Diana ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... of four stanzas and a couplet, are no more Sonnets than they are Epic Poems. The Sonnet is of a particular and arbitrary construction; it partakes of the nature of Blank Verse, by the lines running into each other at proper intervals. Each line of the first eight, rhimes four times, and the order in which those rhimes should ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... Sirius is in the already glorious heavens of a November midnight. As a thing of beauty, of simple grandeur, of wild strength, of heroic nobility, as a song, in short, I do not hesitate to affirm that it finds its like only in the Iliad. It is an epic song, and a song not of an individual soul but of a whole nation. Written down it was indeed by the hands of Gogol, but composed it was by the whole of Little Russia. As the whole of heroic Greece sings in the wrath of Achilles, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... the wise regent Oleg was more fruitful in consequences than the choice of a wife for the young Igor. Olga, who acted as regent during the minority of her son, was destined to be not only the heroine of the Epic Cycle in Russia, but the first apostle of Christianity in that heathen land; canonized by the Church, and remembered as "the first Russian who mounted ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... Quite this epic boldness and wholeness we cannot attribute to Goethe. He is still a little straitened, a little pestered by the doubting and critical optics which our time turns upon man, a little victimized by his knowledge of limitary conditions and secondary laws. Nevertheless, a noble ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... life in Homer's manner, we cannot see why this passage, and indeed the whole poem, should not be thought as good as any one of the episodes in the "AEneid." We are not comparing Mr. Arnold with Virgil: for it is one thing to have written an epic and another to have written a small fragment; but as a working up of a single incident it may rank by the side of Nisus and Euryalus, and deeper chords of feeling are touched in it than Virgil has ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... deepening round us, and drifting gales ran shudderingly along the bleak strand, and rising over the waters, lashed them into fury, till they broke upon the ears like distant thunder. Sometimes there was an epic grandeur in these scenes, when a rush of black clouds, descending upon the sea, blotted out its mighty palpitations, burying it, and the masses that floated on its surface, under one vast pall, which hung there ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... accidental fact the presence of this simple and practical man amid the more mystical western problems and dreams which were very distant from his mind, an element which clings to all his career and gives it an unconscious poetry. He had many qualities of the epic hero, and especially this—that he was the last man in the world to be the epic poet. There is something almost provocative to superstition in the way in which he stands at every turn as the symbol of the special trials and the modern transfiguration of England; from this moment ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... from head to heel. His heart fondled it: May! May! May! and, with inexpressible vague, sweet longing, May! once more. Then her hair! then her voice! then the rosy softness of her hand! then, with hideous revulsion, from her perfections to himself! The gulf of shame! His boots were an epic of despair, his necktie was a tragedy. Then back to her with all the graces of the heavens upon her! Then back to himself again, and the deep damnation of the button which was missing from his waistcoat Paul was a poet, and should have had a soul above buttons; but before ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... complain that it was difficult to distinguish his jocular from his serious poetry; and sometimes indeed to know his poetry from his prose. He has now contrived to manufacture a large quarto, which he has styled a poem, but of what description it is no easy matter to decide. The title of epic, which he indignantly disclaims, we might have been inclined to refuse his production, had it been claimed; and we suppose that Mr. Southey would not suffer it to be classed under the mock-heroic. The poem of Madoc is not didactic, nor elegiac, nor classical, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... grace the old feudal stronghold of Warwick the king maker. These trees, standing as they do amid magnificent sweeps and undulations of lawn, throwing out their mighty arms with such majestic breadth and freedom of outline, are themselves a living, growing, historical epic. Their seed was brought from Holy Land in the old days of the crusades; and a hundred legends might be made up of the time, date, and occasion of their planting. These crusades have left their mark every where through Europe, from the cross panel on the doors ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... most American thing in that great American epic is Tom Sawyer's elaboration of an extremely difficult and romantic scheme, taking days to carry out, for securing the escape of the nigger Jim, which could have been managed quite easily in twenty minutes. You know how fond they are of lodges and brotherhoods. Every college club has its secret ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... other epoch of that sublime scrimmage called history. Five or six names may be selected from the list of the early American prophets whose deeds and outcry, if reduced to hexameters, would be not the Iliad, not the Jerusalem Delivered, but the Epic ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... the wise Merlin think of it? In the mirror of his lake, whose depths are known to himself only, what did he behold? What said he in the colossal epic produced by him in 1860? Why, that Satan will not disarm, if disarm he ever do, until the Day of Judgment. Then, side by side, at peace with each other, the two will fall ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... Salariki clansmen in the hall. Here was ceremony. The storm priests invoked their own particular grim Providence, and there was an oath taken over the weapons of battle. When the actual engagement began the betting among the spectators had reached, Dane decided, epic proportions. Large sections of Sargolian personal property were due to change hands as a result of ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... Christ, or the conditions of our own sin: while through the entire system of these musical complaints are interwoven moralities, instructions, and related histories, in illustration of both, passing into Epic and Romantic verse, which gradually, as the forms and learnings of society increase, becomes less joyful, and more didactic, or satiric, until the last echoes of Christian joy and melody vanish in ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... looked back at the leading incidents of the big strike it wasn't the epic note which interested her the most, although the contest had for her its ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... the estates of his grandfather in Jamaica. She was b. at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, but spent her youth at Hope End, near Great Malvern. While still a child she showed her gift, and her f. pub. 50 copies of a juvenile epic, on the Battle of Marathon. She was ed. at home, but owed her profound knowledge of Greek and much mental stimulus to her early friendship with the blind scholar, Hugh Stuart Boyd, who was a neighbour. At the age of 15 she met with an injury to her spine which confined her to a recumbent ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... eyes have vivid visions. Theirs is the light in darkness which stirred the soul of a Milton with a "gift divine;" inspired a Homer with the "fire and frenzy" which crowned an Iliad and an Odyssey, the master pieces of Epic verse; gave to the antique and traditional literature of the Celtic race its meteoric brilliancy, and produced the weird, wondrous sublimity of ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... story of Donaldson's true courage, cheerfulness, self-denial, readiness to sacrifice himself for others, is no less than an epic of the noblest heroism that stands an irrefutable answer to the charge later made ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... quotation, right good-humouredly, though he was somewhat bewildered; for he had begun to fall a-marvelling at the little dingy maiden, with the untidy hair and dirty frock, who had thoughts of her own, and would not concede the faculty of song to the greatest of epic poets. ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... ancient comrades, and how he was now wedded to Helen of Troy. Yet the local tradition of Lacedaemon showed the sepulchre of Helen in Therapnae. According to a Rhodian legend (adopted by the author of the "Epic of Hades"), Helen was banished from Sparta by the sons of Menelaus, came wandering to Rhodes, and was there strangled by the servants of the queen Polyxo, who thus avenged the death of her husband at Troy. It is ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... laugh, by the narrative of nascent odes, epics, and didactics crying aloud on obsolete muses from childish lips. The Greeks were my demi-gods, and haunted me out of Pope's Homer, until I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of Moses the black pony. And thus my great "epic" of eleven or twelve years old, in four books, and called "The Battle of Marathon," and of which fifty copies were printed because papa was bent upon spoiling me—is Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone; for, although a curious production for a ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... with the War Minister, Enver Pasha, paced along the long German and Turkish fronts. Then he led forth his forty-four men and marched, amid new ovations, all through Stamboul, across the great bridge to Galata, to the deck of the steamship General, at the head of his little band, now grown epic, amid the cheers of Byzantium, on which he and his officers had never set foot before—always in the clear blue and sunlight of this ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... handsomeness such as occasionally flowers at Naples, with long curly hair, a lily-like complexion, a rosy mouth, and soft eyes full of a dreamy languor. The old man presented him in fatherly fashion, Angiolo Mascara his name was, and he was the grandson of an old comrade in arms, the epic Mascara of the Thousand, who had died like a hero, his body ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... developed art of the thirteenth century, a development full of incidents and experiments and variety. I have called the early form rude, but the phrase is not very happy, as those who know either the early mosaic or the early epic will understand. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... defend the magnificent creator of 'The Bride of Lammermoor' and 'The Fair Maid of Perth,' "the whole past lives in those admirable novels of his;—that is history, that is epic!" ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... German Iliad, has hitherto been a sealed book to the mere English reader. Mr. Lettsom has however just published a most successful translation of it under the title of The Fall of the Nibelungers. Few will rise from a perusal of the English version of this great national epic—which in its present form is a work of the thirteenth century—without being struck with the innate power and character of the original poem; and without feeling grateful to Mr. Lettsom for furnishing them with so pleasing and spirited a version ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... the human race cheat itself unanimously and delightfully by the illusion that he preordains; while as an obscure Fate, he sits invisible, and hardly lets his being be divined by those who cannot flee him. The Lyric Art is childish, and the Epic barbarous, compared to this. But of the true and perfect Drama it may be said, as of even higher mysteries, Who is sufficient for these things?"—On this Tragedy of Strafford, writing it and again ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Chaldean Book of the Beginnings creation was effected in successive acts. According to the epic of it, humanity's primal home was a paradise where ten impressive persons—the models, it may be, of antediluvian patriarchs—reigned interminably, agreeably also, finally sinfully as well. In punishment a deluge swept them away. From the flood there escaped one man who separated a ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... that morning from a soldier brother who had taken part in that epic of human gallantry had apparently inspired the Young Doctor. He pointed ahead with a dramatic gesture at the cliffs. "Yonder are the Turks! See, they fly, they fly!" A pair of agitated cormorants, sunning themselves on ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... are all poets, and with one exception English poets. They are poets, too, so to speak, of one family, unequal in rank, but having that resemblance of character which marks the higher and lower peaks of the same mountain-chain. All are epic and lyric, none in a proper sense dramatic. All are poets de pur sang, endowed by nature with the special qualities which cannot be confounded with those of a different order, and which forbid all doubt as to a true "vocation." Dante, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, differing as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... attached themselves to their better-situated brethren, becoming their dependents and willing tools. The relation of the nobility to the peasantry is well characterised in a passage of Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz, where a peasant, on humbly suggesting that the nobility suffered less from the measures of their foreign rulers than his own class, is told by one of his betters that this is a silly remark, seeing that peasants, like eels, are accustomed to being skinned, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... collected into a volume of 'Digte og Sange' (Poems and Songs) in 1870, and in the same year was published 'Arnljot Gelline,' the author's only long poem not dramatic in form. This uneven and in passages extraordinarily beautiful work is a sort of epic in fifteen songs, difficult to read, yet simple enough in general outline. Arnljot Gelline was a sort of freebooter of the eleventh century, whose fierce deeds were preserved in popular tradition. The 'Heimskringla' tells us how, grown ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... was trained to the contemplation of aesthetic beauty in temples, in statues, and in pictures; and the great artist was rewarded with honors and material gains. The love of art is easier kindled than the love of literary excellence, and is more generally diffused. It is coeval with songs and epic poetry. Before Socrates or Plato speculated on the great certitudes of philosophy, temples and statues were the pride and boast of their countrymen. And as the taste for art precedes the taste for letters, so it survives, when the literature has lost ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... whilst he was driving in a cab towards the Via Venti Settembre, he recalled to mind the heroic story of old Orlando's life which had been told him in Paris. It was like an epic poem, full of faith, bravery, and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... his horse, as if in league with the disaffected, ran full tilt towards the solemn equipage of the Duke, which the projecting lance threatened to perforate from window to window, at the risk of transfixing as many in its passage as the celebrated thrust of Orlando, which, according to the Italian epic poet, broached as many Moors as a Frenchman ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... such good purposes, when the agreeable is blended with the useful, then is the writer said to have succeeded in every point. Pleasantry (as the ingenious author of Clarissa says of a story) should be made only the vehicle of instruction; and thus romances themselves, as well as epic poems, may become worthy the perusal of the greatest of men: but when no moral, no lesson, no instruction, is conveyed to the reader, where the whole design of the composition is no more than to make us laugh, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... Nilghai, then. Of course. Mass-meeting of his wives in Trafalgar Square. That's it. They came from the ends of the earth to attend Nilghai's wedding to an English bride. This shall be an epic. It's a sweet ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... more imagery in twenty lines of Pope than in any equal length of quotation in English poesy, and that in places where they least expect it. For instance, in his lines on Sporus,—now, do just read them over—the subject is of no consequence (whether it be satire or epic)—we are talking of poetry and imagery from nature and art. Now, mark the images ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... learned from the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer of phlebotomy. Both were regarded as the sons of AEsculapius; ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... language of Greece, which became so powerful in the development of the Roman literature and Roman civilization and, in the later Renaissance, a powerful engine of progress. Associated with the language is the literature of the Greeks. The epic poems of Homer, the later lyrics, the drama, the history, and the polemic, all had their highest types presented in the Greek literature. Latin and modern German, English and French owe to these great originators a debt of gratitude for every form of modern literature. The ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the first Omar of Naishapur. The genius of the East has, indeed, ever been slow to reveal itself in the West. It took a Crusade to bring to our knowledge anything of the schner Geist of the Orient; and it was not until the day of Matthew Arnold that the Epic of Persia[1] was brought into the proper realm of English poesy. What wonder, then, that not until the first Omaric madness had passed away were the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Jr., lifted into the light after an infinity of sudor et labor spent in excavating ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... for it was a Frenchman, Geoffrey de Villehardouin, seneschal of Theobald III., Count of Champagne, who, after having been one of the chief actors in it, wrote the history of it; and his work, strictly historical as to facts, and admirably epic in description of character and warmth of coloring, is one of the earliest and finest monuments ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... life in it. There is no poem or novel that is worth the Memoirs of Saint Helena, although it is written in ridiculous fashion. What I think of Napoleon, if you wish to know, is that, made for glory, he had the brilliant simplicity of the hero of an epic poem. A hero must be human. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... But before the comic paper was born, Y. had another happy thought. He suggested that if I wrote a Jewish story, we might make enough to finance the comic paper. I was quite willing. If he had suggested an epic, I should ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... faith in him; but the imitator will neither know nor have faith—neither science nor true opinion can be ascribed to him. Imitation, then, is devoid of knowledge, being only a kind of play or sport, and the tragic and epic poets are imitators in the ...
— The Republic • Plato
... would have known better what to do. I reformed Peter in one night in Naples when he took too much of that queer Italian wine merely because it was his birthday. I used tears, and he said it should never happen again. I don't believe it has, or he wouldn't have got an act and a half of his "Epic of American Life" finished as he told me he had done when I dined with him in New York the night I landed. I missed Peter dreadfully when he left us in London in June, and so did Miss Greenough and Mabel, though she is his sister. We all felt that if he had ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... and eloquence pleaded in vain, for they were wasted on the rocks of rocks, a strong will and a vulgar soul. But indeed the whole thing was like epic poetry wrestling with the Limerick Chronicle ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... obtained and sustained by means new to piano literature and potent in color and vigor. The sonata formula is warped to the purpose of the poet, but the themes have the classic ideal of kinship. The battle-power of the work is tremendous. Huneker calls it "an epic of rainbow and thunder," and Henry T. Finck, who has for many years devoted a part of his large ardor to MacDowell's cause, says of the work: "It is MacDowellish,—more MacDowellish than anything he has yet written. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... shall be sung another golden age, The rise of empire and of arts, The good and great inspiring epic rage, The wisest heads ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to hear The moment's music which they gave. Oft pealed for him a lofty tone From nodding pole and belting zone. He heard a voice none else could hear From centred and from errant sphere. The quaking earth did quake in rhyme, Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime. In dens of passion, and pits of woe, He saw strong Eros struggling through, To sun the dark and solve the curse, And beam to the bounds of the universe. While thus to love he gave his days In loyal worship, scorning praise, How spread their lures for him ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of the great epic poems, the Ramayana, rests on a rash promise given by Dasaratha, king of Ayodhya, to his second wife, Kaikeyi, that he would grant her two boons. In order to secure the succession to her own son, she asks that Rama, the eldest ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... Singh, Maharaja of Jeypore, is one of the most interesting persons in India, and he represents the one hundred and twenty-third of his family, descendants of the hero of a great Sanskrit epic called the Ramayana, while the emperor of Japan represents only the one hundred and twenty-third of his family, which is reckoned the oldest of royal blood. The poem consists of 24,000 stanzas, arranged in seven books, ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... was now, in the comprehensive sense of the phrase, a public character. Some choice spirits took the hint from the public feeling, and determined to dine on the public curiosity. A Sunday journal was immediately established. Of this epic our Duke was the hero. His manners, his sayings, his adventures, regularly regaled, on each holy day, the Protestant population of this Protestant empire, who in France or Italy, or even Germany, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... modern poets has detected the same touch of terror wherever the deepest note possible has been struck, the fullest sense possible of genuine and peculiar power conveyed to the student of lyric or dramatic, epic or ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and tobacco-roll in Cloath-fair near West-Smithfield, who selleth the best Arabian coffee powder and chocolate in cake or roll, after the Spanish fashion, etc." The following extracts will serve to illustrate its epic character: ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Constitution; Vol. III., The Guillotine." The publication of this book produced a profound impression on the public mind. A history abounding in vivid and graphic descriptions, it was at the same time a gorgeous "prose epic." It is perhaps the most readable of all Carlyle's works, and indeed is one of the most remarkable books of the age. There is no other account of the French Revolution that can be compared with it for intensity of feeling ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... secret envy for such a career. The Old-World charm of the "Odyssey" is one of the priceless possessions of every fresh student, and to feel it for the first time is like discovering the sea anew. It is, indeed, the Epic of the Sea; the only poem in all literature which gives the breadth, the movement, the mighty sweep of sky belted with stars, the unspeakable splendours of sunrise and sunset,—the grand, free life of the sea. I would place the "Odyssey" in every collection of modern ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... to his ideal. He calls the traditional Christ an abstract being who never was alive. He would bring the marvellous human figure before our eyes. He heightens the brilliancy of his delineation by the deep shadows of mistakes and indiscretion upon Jesus' part. In some respects an epic or an historical romance, without teaching us history in detail, may yet enable us by means of the artist's intuition to realise an event or period, or make presentation to ourselves of a personality, better than the scant records acknowledged ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... it was in respect to the number of glasses of ale that he drank on his Welsh rambles—and has not "Wild Wales" been called "The Epic of Ale?"—or his associations with the great fighting-men of his day, he was never ashamed to admit his liking both for the ale and the men. "Why should I hide the truth?" he asks, when telling of ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... Achilles dwelt there with his ancient comrades, and how he was now wedded to Helen of Troy. Yet the local tradition of Lacedaemon showed the sepulchre of Helen in Therapnae. According to a Rhodian legend (adopted by the author of the "Epic of Hades"), Helen was banished from Sparta by the sons of Menelaus, came wandering to Rhodes, and was there strangled by the servants of the queen Polyxo, who thus avenged the death of her husband at Troy. It is certain, as we learn both from ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... there is scarce a page in which the dollars do not jingle; full of the unrest and movement of our century, so that the reader is hurried from place to place and sea to sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama—in the end, as blood-bespattered as an epic? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... science of war seems to be conceded to him; he is allowed to be a good military critic; but all this is possible without his possessing any positive qualities of a great general, just as a literary critic may show the profoundest acquaintance with the principles of epic poetry without being able to produce a single stanza of an epic poem. Nevertheless, I shall not give up my faith in General McClellan's soldiership until he is defeated, nor in his courage and ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that the Finnish race is more akin to the Tartar races, and therefore probably to the Japanese, than the races of Europe proper. Again, through Longfellow, the value of Finnish poetry to English poetry was first suggested, and I think you know that Longfellow's Indian epic, "The Song of Hiawatha," was modelled entirely upon the ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... the allegorical and poetical style, of which you were so fond in many of your writings. Mine also run sometimes into poetry, particularly in my "Telemachus," which I meant to make a kind of epic composition. But I dare not rank myself among the great poets, nor pretend to any equality in oratory with you, the most eloquent of philosophers, on whose lips the Attic ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... Restauraw is one of the few superior hostelries of the Territory. Mrs. Rucker, its charming proprietress, is a cook who might outrival even that celebrated chef, now dead, M. Soyer. Her pies are poems, her bread an epic, and her beans a dream, Mrs. Rucker has cooked her way to every heart, and her famed establishment is justly regarded as the bright particular gem ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the modern poetry of individual life, creative poetical activity fell mainly within the mysterious period when a nation was experiencing the fears and pleasures of growth: without prejudice to the greatness of the Greek epic and tragic poets we may assert that their poetry mainly consisted in reproducing the primitive stories of human gods and divine men. This basis of ancient poetry was totally wanting in Latium: where the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... has received no less attention than Greek politics. The Homeric problem continues to exert an irresistible attraction. Every expert from Wilamowitz to Gilbert Murray and Walter Leaf adds to our comprehension of the epic; but no positive results have been established, and Holm uttered the gloomy prophecy that we shall never know whether Homer existed, who he was, or what he wrote. On the other hand we have gained a deeper insight into the early mind and soul of Greece, thanks in large measure to a group ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... high distinction, cannot be doubted. It was his generous dream, we are told, to acquire a competency by painting commissions, and then dedicate his time and pencil to historical compositions,—a dream which many artists have dreamed; but his works have little of the epic in them. Nature gave him good advice, when she directed his steps to the surf-beat shore, and bade him paint the swelling tide, the busy boats, fishermen drying their nets, and the sea-eagle looking from the rock upon his wide and, to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. A people with a native genius for seafaring won and held a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and then forsook this heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was no more extraordinary ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... pictures, drew upon all literature for its materials. In Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, in the German Niebelungenlied, in the French romances, in the Icelandic Sagas, in Froissart and the chroniclers, you may find the same spirit; and each town smote its own epic into stone upon the walls of its cathedral. Every village, even, had its painter, its carvers, its actors; the cathedrals that have remained are but the standard from which we may imagine the loving perfection to which every form of craftsman's art was ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... sheep country where fortunes were being made by the flock-masters. Shepherding was not a peaceful pursuit in those bygone days. Adventure met him at every turn—there is a girl of course—men fight their best fights for a woman—it is an epic ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... detailed the adventures of this amazing horse and predatory cow. Somewhere near the middle of the epic little Royal Beaudry usually dropped asleep. The rhythmic tale always comforted him. These nameless animals were very real friends of his. They had been companions of his tenderest years. He loved them with a devotion from which no ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... thousand prancing hoofs and rumble for an hour with a steady flow of carriages, and the walls of the great temple of music a few hundred yards to the north would throw back all this clamor, with the added notes of slamming doors and shouted numbers and epic struggles between angry drivers and determined policemen; sometimes he would extend his smoking stroll far enough to skirt the edge of all this Babel. Then, towards midnight, long after all staid ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... the stars, saying that some of the [298] passages are superior to Homer and Virgil! However, it is really better than I expected, and I read on, partly from curiosity and partly for the history. The French would have been very glad to find it an epic worthy of the name, for they have n't one. Voltaire frankly confesses that the French have not a genius for great poetry,—too much in love, he ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... instructions, or its works of art. This character is prophesied only in part by what is said and thought while the people is becoming great, and the molten constituents are sparkling as they run into their future form. We have been so dependent upon traditional ideas that we suppose an epic, for instance, to be the essential proof that a people is alive and has something to express. Let us cease to wonder whether there will ever be an American poem, an American symphony, or an American Novum Organon. It is a sign of weakness and subservience: and this is a period ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... opinion neither do these report anything; for if they did the Scythians also would report it, as they do about the one-eyed people. Hesiod however has spoken of Hyperboreans, and so also has Homer in the poem of the "Epigonoi," at least if Homer was really the composer of that Epic. ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where, in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or dallies by the south wall with the ruddy ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in the psychology and experience of persons so extraordinary, both for their genius in society, and for the quantity and quality of their private experience full of solid instruction and romantic interest. The inner life of Madame Swetchine was a sacred epic: the outer career of Lacordaire, an electrifying drama. This double interest of a private, spiritual ascent, and of a chivalrous gallantry in the thick of battle, is clearly unfolded in the book ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... maniacs, and mendicants with the finest breath of her spirit. The 'Fable-tree' Fontaine is as immortal as Corneille; Christopher Smart's 'David' shall live as long as Milton's 'Paradise Lost;' and the rude epic of a blind wanderer, whose birth, parentage, and period of death are all alike unknown, shall continue to rank in interest with the productions of one who inherited that kingdom of Scotland, the independence of which was bought by ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody has made before me. You know very well that I write verses sometimes, because I have read some of them at this table. (The company assented,—two or three of them in a resigned sort of way, as I thought, as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and was going to read half a dozen books or so for their benefit.)—I continued. Of course I write some lines or passages which are better than others; some which, compared with the others, might be called relatively excellent. It is in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... many minor passions in the Garden. It sees and passes on, embodying none of them in deathless epic as His passion was embodied.... Men and women have cried out to listening Heaven that the cup might pass from their lips, and it has not been permitted to pass, as His was not permitted to pass. In the souls of men and of women is something of the divine, something high and marvelous—a ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... supreme event approached. He saw it with Nature's eyes. It dawned on him, as on Ansell, that personal love and marriage only cover one side of the shield, and that on the other is graven the epic of birth. In the midst of lessons he would grow dreamy, as one who spies a new symbol for the universe, a fresh circle within the square. Within the square shall be a circle, within the circle another square, until the visual eye is baffled. Here is meaning ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... English history are animated by a patriotism which boldly seeks and faces the truth. His dramatic presentations of English history have been often described as fragments of a national epic, as detached books of an English Iliad. But they embody no epic or heroic glorification of the nation. Taking the great series which begins chronologically with King John and ends with Richard III. (Henry VIII. stands apart), we find ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... had turned our heads a little. That, or something else, started us off, making rhymes. After great efforts, amidst much laughter and profound knitting of brows, we produced what, in the innocence of youth, we called a poem!—an epic, on our adventure. I still preserve the old scrawl of it, in several different youthful hands, on crumpled sheets of yellowed paper. It has little value as poesy, but I would not part with it for autograph copies of the masterpieces of ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... and tree-fellers, and the war-worn regulars who fought beside them in the forest, pushed ever westward the frontier of the Republic. Year after year each group of rough settlers and rough soldiers wrought its part in the great epic of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... language of a sunny summer afternoon, little stories of tropic seas, of nodding sails and of flying fish that spring from the foam beneath the forefoot and skim the purple waves. This song was an epic of the age-long battle between the sea and the shore, a song without words, but told so well in tone that it was easy, seeing nothing there in the black shadow of the wood, yet to see it all; the jagged horizon against the sullen ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... one upon the other, that the senses fail of their mission and only chaos and a great confusion are carried to the brain. The whirring of invisible wings and the movement of the wind in the low branches become one and the same: it is an epic, told in some strange tongue, an epic filled to overflowing with tragedy, with poetry and mystery. The cloth of this drama is woven from many-colored threads, for Nature is lavish with her pigment, reckless with life ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... unless an attempt is made to reproduce this metrical form in the modern English rendering. The possibility of retaining the original meter in an adequate translation was formerly the subject of much debate, but since Professor Gummere's excellent version of Beowulf and the minor epic poems,[footnote: The Oldest English Epic, New York, 1909.] and other recent successful translations of poems in the Old English meter, there can be no question of the possibility of putting Anglo-Saxon poems into readable English verse that reproduces ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... of Bavaria. Of his life little is known, not even the exact dates of his birth and death. He flourished in the latter part of the twelfth and early part of the thirteenth century, and was by far the best and most extensive representative of the Court epic poetry. He is best known by his Parzival, which contains 24,812 lines divided up into sixteen books. The following extract is taken from Book III. For editions of his works, see Lachmann, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Berlin, 1833, ...
— A Middle High German Primer - Third Edition • Joseph Wright
... form for the story. One almost wishes it were true. How fine a unity it would give our epic! But perhaps, after all, the real truth is more interesting. The life of the nation cannot be reduced to these so simple terms. These two great forces, of the North and of the South, unquestionably existed,—were unquestionably projected in ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... genuine—pure from one flaw of affectation, rich in noble imagery. How far the applause of critics has rewarded the author of Orion I do not know, but I think the pleasure he enjoyed in its composition must have been a bounteous meed in itself. You could not, I imagine, have written that epic without at times deriving ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Constantinople, who was a cotemporary of Zonaras. The other is John Tzetzes, who wrote a rambling work consisting of mythological and historical notices in Greek political, civil, or profane verse, as it may be called, (versus politici)—the epic poetry of modern Greece; correctly compared by Lord Byron to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... is an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of vastness ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... for which he had little love. London in short was grotesque to him, and he made capital sport of it; his only allusion that I can remember to his own work was his saying that he meant some day to do an immense and general, a kind of epic, social satire. Miss Ambient's perpetual gaze seemed to put to me: "Do you perceive how artistic, how very strange and interesting, we are? Frankly now is it possible to be MORE artistic, MORE strange and interesting, than this? You surely won't deny that we're remarkable." ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, strings them into an epic." And so forth; Peacock going on to characterise, in further illustration of his argument, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Moore, and Campbell. He did not refer to Shelley; and Shelley read his friend's whimsical attack on poetry with all good humour, proceeding to reply to it with a "Defence of Poetry," ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... it from his own lips that the perils of the way made him see the poetry of it all, and he said to himself that here was the theme for that great epic, which would be the chef d'oeuvre of his literary life. It is to be written in blank verse, with the hymns and secular songs he sang at each stop given in an appendix, and he confidently hopes that it will stand out as something conspicuous and ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... shone from his eyes. His friends had flocked in, and he had already begun to tell again at full length the story of the Lieutenant-Governor's visit with still further adornments of a most fantastic kind. The interview was already becoming an epic, both in ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... variously designated than Comus. Milton himself describes it simply as "A Mask"; by others it has been criticised and estimated as a lyrical drama, a drama in the epic style, a lyric poem in the form of a play, a phantasy, an allegory, a philosophical poem, a suite of speeches or majestic soliloquies, and even a didactic poem. Such variety in the description of the poem is explained partly by its ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... the sequel to La Curee and deals with financial scandals. It was inspired by the failure of the Union Generale Bank a few years before, and is a powerful indictment of the law affecting joint-stock companies. To L'Argent there succeeded La Debacle, that prose epic of modern war, more complete and coherent than even the best of Tolstoi. And to end all came Le Docteur Pascal, winding up the series on a note of ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... Increase of British responsibilities, and of the air force. The temper of the air force. The Epic of Youth. ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... Xaquixaguana, both died within a year after Pizarro. Hinojosa was assassinated but two years later in La Plata; and his old comrade Valdivia, after a series of brilliant exploits in Chili, which furnished her most glorious theme to the epic Muse of Castile, was cut off by the invincible warriors of Arauco. The Manes of Pizarro were amply ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... draw his chariot, or puts fragments of similar bombast into the mouth of Pistol. According to Coleridge, on the other hand, this idea is 'below criticism.' No sort of ridicule was intended. 'The lines, as epic narrative, are superb.' It is true that the language is 'too poetical—the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the drama'; but this is due to the fact that Shakespeare had to distinguish the style of the speech from that ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... epic, where heroic deeds, or other events of thrilling interest, are the theme of song, and the personal emotion of the bard is out of sight through his absorption in the subject. Description flows on, the narrator himself being in the background. This epic poetry culminates in the Iliad and Odyssey (900-700 B.C.). Their verse is the hexameter. These poems move on in a swift current, yet without abruptness or monotony. They are marked by a simplicity and a nobleness, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... tributes to the efficiency of our Regular Army, writing down in their histories of war that this was the model of all armies, the most perfectly trained... It was spent by the spring of '15. Its memory remains as the last epic of those professional soldiers who, through centuries of English history, took "the King's shilling" and fought when they were told to fight, and left their bones in far places of the world and in many fields in Europe, and won for the British soldier ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... effect either upon his own words or those of others. But when once we have paid tribute {138} to the fine, positive qualities which are implied by his accomplishment, we must hasten to recognize the extraordinary value of his writings as an index to his mind and soul. His narrative is not an epic of disaster. It is a plain and even statement of great dangers calmly met and treated as a matter of course. Largely it is a record of achievement. At points where it is a record of failure Champlain accepts the inevitable gracefully and conforms his emotions to the will of God. The Voyages ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... which was even more popular than The Traveller; nor has this popularity flagged from that time down to the present day. It is full of exquisite pictures of rural life and manners. It is what it claims to be,—not an attempt at high art or epic, but a gallery of cabinet pictures of rare finish and detail, painted by the poet's heart and appealing to the sensibility of every reader. The world knows it by heart,—the portraiture of the village schoolmaster and his school; the beautiful ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... that the Inspector-General became a sort of comedy-epic in the land of the Czars, the land where each petty town-governor is almost an absolute despot, regulating his persecutions and extortions according to the sage saying of the town-governor in the play, "That's the way God made the world, ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... confirmed Balzacian?—to employ a former expression of Gautier in Jeune France on the morrow following the appearance of that mystic Rabelaisian epic, The Magic Skin. Have you experienced, while reading at school or clandestinely some stray volume of the Comedie Humaine, a sort of exaltation such as no other book had aroused hitherto, and few have caused since? ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... Oriental experiences in an epic of fresh and thrilling sensations has written,—"If a man be not born of his mother with a natural Chifney bit in his mouth, there comes to him a time for loathing the wearisome ways of society,—a time for not liking tamed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... borrowed fourpence of the operatic villain. Then he took the 'bus for Scotland Yard. There was a not ill-looking servant girl in the 'bus. The rhythm of the vehicle shaped itself into rhymes in his brain. He forgot all about his situation and his object. He had never really written an epic—except "Paradise Lost"—but he composed lyrics about wine and women and often wept to think how miserable he was. But nobody ever bought anything of him, except articles on bacon-curing or attacks on vestrymen. He was a strange, wild ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... stand much obliged to him for giving us an Homer, yet had he doubled our obligation by giving us—a Pope. He had a strong imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few weeks before ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... frost; and there was the poetic dreamer Dartmore, with his large, dark eyes, and moonlight face, and manner of suffering serenity, on his way to put forth for fame, as he fondly believed, his manuscript epic on the "Sorrows of ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... which the benefit was given at Garrick's theatre, the holder of the copyright of Paradise Lost,—I think it was Tonson,—applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction against a bookseller who had published a cheap edition of the great epic poem, and obtained the injunction. The representation of Comus was, if I remember rightly, in 1750; the injunction in 1752. Here, then, is a perfect illustration of the effect of long copyright. Milton's works are the property of a single publisher. Everybody ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... character and talents lie upon the anvil and receive their temper during generations; but the very plot of our life's story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the biography of the man is only an episode in the epic of the family. ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Hinduism. It continued its development through the early centuries of the Christian era, and down even to the Middle Ages. Since then there has been disintegration instead of growth. The Brahmans have not only retained the Aryan deities, and extended Vishnu's incarnate nature over the epic heroes, but in the Puranas they have woven into the alleged lives of the incarnate gods the most grotesque mythologies and many ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... of his tact in swearing much has also been said. But there is one department of oath-making in which he stands unrivalled and unapproachable; I mean the alibi. There is where he shines, where his oath, instead of being a mere matter of fact or opinion, rises up into the dignity of epic narrative, containing within itself, all the complexity of machinery, harmony of parts, and fertility of invention, by which your ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... the chair and dreamed deliciously, and sometimes walked up and down over the black floor. Sometimes I acted within myself a whole drama, during one of these perambulations; sometimes walked deliberately through the whole epic of a tale; sometimes ventured to sing a song, though with a shrinking fear of I knew not what. I was astonished at the beauty of my own voice as it rang through the place, or rather crept undulating, like a serpent of sound, along the walls and ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... be never dismayed If they whisper your Epic—"Sir Eperon d'Or"— Is nothing but Tennyson thinly arrayed In a tissue that's taken from Morris's store; That no one, in fact, but a child could ignore That you "lift" or "accommodate" all that you do; Take heart—though your Pegasus' withers be sore— For the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... return to the exploits of the Emden, its mysterious disappearance and the narrative of its heroes—a great epic of the sea. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... has declared that "the public should see these pictures"; and Mr. Lloyd George, after witnessing a display of the film, sent forth the following thrilling message to the nation: "Be up and doing! See that this picture, which is in itself an epic of self-sacrifice and gallantry, reaches every one. Herald the deeds of our brave men to the ends of the earth. This ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... of Assyrian Literature is not confined to hymns, or even to inscriptions. A nameless poet has left in the imperishable tablets of a Babylonian library an epic poem of great power and beauty. This is ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... Samson heard that Yasmini was to be Utirupa's bride he was sufficiently disgusted, even to satisfy Yasmini, who was no admirer of his. Sita Ram's account of Samson's rage, as he explained the circumstance to Willoughby de Wing, was almost epic. ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... manuscript has circulated from one publisher's drawer to another until its initial pages are scarcely readable, while the ample residue retain all their pristine freshness of hue, you are welcome to your revenge! Your novel may be tedious beyond endurance; your epic a preposterous waste of once valuable foolscap; but your slashing review is sure to be ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... the hopeful emigrant. And in the stall- fed life of the successful ant-heap—with its regular meals, regular duties, regular pleasures, an even course of life, and fear excluded—the vicissitudes, delights, and havens of to-day will seem of epic breadth. This may seem a shallow observation; but the springs by which men are moved lie much on the surface. Bread, I believe, has always been considered first, but the circus comes close upon its heels. Bread we suppose to be given amply; ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there were none such there. What was now to be done? About the geography of my present abode I knew, perhaps, as much as the public at large know about the Coppermine river and Behring's straits. The world, it was true, was before me, "where top choose," admirable things for an epic, but decidedly an unfortunate circumstance for a very cold gentleman in search of a blanket. Thus thinking, I opened the door of my chamber, and not in any way resolved how I should proceed, I stepped forth into the long corridor, which ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... letter," he added, taking a cup of tea, "I assure you that when a noble and beautiful woman loves a poet she does not hide in the corner boxes, like a duchess in love with an actor; she feels that her beauty, her fortune, her name are protection enough, and she dares to say openly, like an epic poem: 'I am the nymph Calypso, enamored of Telemachus.' Mystery and feigned names are the resources of little minds. For my part ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... a polite bow, Jacques went down the staircase. As for Sir Asinus, in the excess of his rage he sat down and composed a whole canto of an epic—which luckily has not descended to our day. The ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... had any part in the tragic epic of Ypres will be interested in the news that the Church Army has taken over "Goldfish Chateau" as a hostel for pilgrims to the illimitable graveyards ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... romance, these monsters come by inimical attraction. Because the heavens are certainly propitious to true lovers, the beasts of the abysses are banded to destroy them, stimulated by innumerable sad victories; and every love-tale is an Epic Par of the upper and lower powers. I wish good fairies were a little more active. They seem to be cajoled into security by the happiness of their favourites; whereas the wicked are always alert, and circumspect. They let the little ones shut their eyes to fancy they are ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... knowledge of this system is derived from the works of Homer, He'si-od, and other ancient writers, who have gathered the floating legends of which it consists into tales and epic poems, many of them of great power and beauty. Some of these legends are exceedingly natural and pleasing, while others shock and disgust us by the gross impossibilities and hideous deformities which they reveal. Yet these legends are the spontaneous and the earliest growth of the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... manner, there is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in history as one consistent epic 7. Yet every student ought to know that mastery is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term to things unlike, insist that freedom is the ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... novel of Balzac's is often no more than an analysis of character, and while a novel of Zola's is a massive epic of human endeavor, a novel of Daudet's is a gallery of pictures, brushed in with the sweep and certainty of a master-hand,—portraits, landscapes with figures, marines, battlepieces pieces, bits of genre, views of Paris. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... 100 B.C., a member of the great Julian gens, which claimed descent from AEneas and Venus, the glories of which are celebrated in Vergil's immortal epic. Thus the future leader of the turbulent democracy, and the future despot who was to humble the nobles of Rome, was by birth an aristocrat of bluest blood. His life might easily have come to an untimely end in the days ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... did over and over again, with unflagging vehemence, with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers and thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; she calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in this tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is tortured to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. La recherche du terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en saveur, la ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and situation, has been also objected to by critics. The discovery is indeed purposely made to the audience, and supplies the want of a chorus. But to speak in Monsieur Brumos's own stile: "If Homer, in his Epic poem, found a Patroclus necessary to his Achilles, and Virgil an Achates to Aeneas, such examples may well justify the Dramatic Poets in calling in the assistance of associates, who generally appear of more ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... that fictitious history which ripened to the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and which, fostered by the genius of Boccaccio, produced the romance of the chivalrous days, and its last development, the novel - that prose-epic of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... expelled by Jupiter. But contrary to this pagan instinct, the Cumaean Sibyl stretched forward to a distant heaven of her aspirations and hopes—to a nobler future of the world, not sentimental and idyllic, but epic and heroic. She pictured the blessing or restoration of this earth itself as distinct from an invisible world of happiness. And in this respect she is more in sympathy with the Jewish and Christian religions than with her own. The golden age of the Hebrews was in the future, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Goa on 20th February 1847, taking as usual a pattymar, his mind vibrant with thoughts of his great hero, the "Portingall" Camoens, with whose noble epic all Western India, from Narsinga and Diu to Calicut is intimately associated. Passages from Camoens were frequently in his mouth, and in bitterest moments, in the times of profoundest defection, he could always find relief in the pages of him whom he reverently calls "my ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... with Victor Radnor among them, fronting the smoky splendours of the sunset. In April, the month of piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London, smoking royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray for possession of the portly dames. There is immensity, swinging motion, collision, dusky richness of colouring, to the sight; and to the mind idea. London presents it. If we can allow ourselves a moment ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... now will haunt us through all the years; Heaven and hell rolled into one, glory and blood and tears; Life's pattern picked with a scarlet thread, where once we wove with a grey To remind us all how we played our part in the shock of an epic day? ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... thought the work was likely to be less popular than many of the previous tales of Mr. Dickens, as well as rather more open to unfavorable criticism. Any prose fiction that is to take rank in the first class, must have what in epic poetry is called a fable,—some lesson of life embodied in a story that combines the utile and the dulce. This fable should not only please the reader by its succession of coherent events, and by the variety of its persons ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... strong was this impulse that, where the Highlands were concerned, men of sense gave ready credence to stories without evidence, and men of taste gave rapturous applause to compositions without merit. Epic poems, which any skilful and dispassionate critic would at a glance have perceived to be almost entirely modern, and which, if they had been published as modern, would have instantly found their proper place in company with Blackmore's Alfred and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sectarianism, reigns in it. A noble book! All men's book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem of man's destiny and God's ways with him here on this earth, and all in such free, flowing outlines, grand in its simplicity and its epic melody and repose of reconcilement! There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true every way; true eye-sight and vision for all things—material things no less than spiritual; the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... a picturesque village, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, is entitled to notice in the annals of literature, as the family seat of the MILTONS, ancestors of Britain's illustrious epic poet. Of this original abode, our engraving is an accurate representation. One of Milton's ancestors forfeited his estate in the turbulent times of York and Lancaster. "Which side he took," says Johnson, "I know not; his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... If he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit; Forgot his epic, nay, Pindaric art, But still I love the language of ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... possibilities of horror, the depths of shame and agony, are heaped upon these unhappy voyagers. The accumulation is mathematically complete and emotionally unforgettable. The tale has well been called the "imperishable epic of shipwreck." ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... years almost the only source of information in regard to this new growth is contained in the epic poetry of the time, with the help of a few additional facts from the law, and some side light from inscriptions. It is here that Vishnuism and Civaism are found as fully developed sectarian beliefs, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... to keep them out of mischief. As my taste and appetite were gratified in nothing else, I indemnified myself by becoming a glutton of books. Accordingly, I believe I read almost all the romances, old plays, and epic poetry in that formidable collection, and no doubt was unconsciously amassing materials for the task in which it has been my lot to be ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... displaying and recommending it most effectually to the attention of mankind. Let us endeavor, in the first place, to ascertain his meaning on this point. The British Constitution was to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on epic poetry. As the latter have considered the work of the immortal bard as the perfect model from which the principles and rules of the epic art were to be drawn, and by which all similar works were to be judged, so this great political critic appears to have viewed the Constitution of England ...
— The Federalist Papers
... rugged sterling sense and strength. He flashes-out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humour too, nay tender affection, nobleness, and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one. I call him a great Thinker; as indeed his greatness of heart already ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... they let go and sailed away to a hazard of new fortunes. The air was full of the tiny adventurers. As he stared up the street, Peter caught the glint of these invisible airships whisking away to whatever chance might hold for them. There was something epic in it. It recalled to the mulatto's mind some of Fabre's lovely descriptions. It reminded him of two or three books on entomology which he had left in his mother's cabin. He felt he ought to go after them while the spiders were migrating. He suddenly made up his mind he would go at once, as soon ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... Islam always was, a book-religion. But they were in some danger of treating Homer and Hesiod as inspired scriptures. To us it is plain that a long religious history lies behind Homer, and that the treatment of the gods in Epic poetry proves that they had almost ceased to be the objects of religious feeling. Some of them are even comic characters, like the devil in Scottish folklore. To turn these poems into sacred literature ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... still: that he may bear down every argument in favor of these poems, he triumphantly drags forward a passage, in his abomination with which he expects the reader to sympathise. It is the beginning of the epic poem 'Temora.' 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light; the green hills are covered with day; trees shake their dusty heads in the breeze.' And this—this gorgeous, yet simple imagery, where all is alive and panting with immortality—this, William Wordsworth, the author of ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... like a Parisian. King George the Second quite liked Voltaire, because Voltaire quite liked Lady Sandon, his mistress. Only a Frenchman could have successfully paid court to the King, Queen and Lady Sandon at the same time, as Voltaire did. His great epic poem, "Henriade," that he had been sandpapering for ten years, was now published, dedicated to the Queen. The King headed the subscription-list with more copies than he needed, at five guineas each, on agreement. Voltaire afterward ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... remote from each other in structure that the wildest imagination can scarcely fancy a transition between them. A comparison may make my meaning clearer as to the relative standing of these groups. The Epic Poem is a higher order of composition than the Song,—yet we may have an Epic Poem which, from its inferior mode of execution, stands lower than a Song that is perfect of its kind. So the plan of certain branches is more comprehensive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... interesting epic literature of Ireland remained practically inaccessible to English readers till within the last sixty years. In 1853, Nicholas O'Kearney published the Irish text and an English translation of "The Battle of Gabra," and since that ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... with rare skill and patience by Lyell, the dominant view of the past history of the earth was catastrophic. Great and sudden physical revolutions, wholesale creations and extinctions of living beings, were the ordinary machinery of the geological epic brought into fashion by the misapplied genius of Cuvier. It was gravely maintained and taught that the end of every geological epoch was signalised by a cataclysm, by which every living being on the globe was swept away, to be replaced by a brand-new creation when the world returned ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... made its appearance upon the threshold of the inner doorway: Potter, his face set with epic woe, gloom burning in his eyes like the green fire in a tripod at a funeral of state. His plastic hair hung damp and irregular over his white brow—a wreath upon a tombstone in the rain—and his garment, from throat to ankle, was a dressing-gown of dead black, ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... The road ran up and down as if our motor were a ship on a deep-sea swell; and such a sense of space and light was in the distances, such a veil of beauty over the whole world, that the vision of that army on the move grew more and more fabulous and epic. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... of her people whom he favoured—still an autocrat. The despotism of Dundas has been pictured, in colours we may well believe sufficiently strong, by Lord Cockburn and others bent on inditing the Epic of Whiggery, in which they and their friends should figure as heroes and martyrs. But whatever may be said against Dundas's regime, as a permanent (p. 144) system, it must be allowed that this was no time to remodel it when England was face to face with the French ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... I speak with perfect sincerity, the criticisms which, before yours, have appeared on my work, make me feel to a certain extent ashamed of the French. Have you observed that no one seems to have comprehended its design? That the rules of epic composition are so generally forgotten, that a work of thought and immense labour is judged as if it were the production of a day, or a mere romance? And all this outcry is against the marvellous! Would it not imply that I am the inventor of this style? that it has been hitherto unheard of, and ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and after a few ineffectual attempts at conversation goes to bed alone; the candles gutter, flicker, and die out; the room is filled of sacred silence. Once more the clock chimes forth the hour—the hour of fluted peace, of dead desire and epic love. Oh not for aye, Endymion, mayst thou unfold the purple panoply of priceless years. She sleeps—PRISCILLA sleeps—and down the palimpsest of age-old passion the lyres of night breathe forth their poignant praise. She sleeps—eternal Helen—in the moonlight ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... never write verse which has never been written before me. Other poets—I blush for them, Bill—may adore and repudiate in turn a Libitina, perhaps, or Pandemos; my Venus, you know, is Laverna. Nay, that epic of mine which begins from foundations the Bible is built on— "Of man's first disobedience"—I've heard it attributed, dammy, to Milton. Well, it's lucky for them that it's not worth my while, as I may say, to break ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... creep into their skins, I must need laugh, lest, like Beaumarchais, I should weep. What, after all, do I know of him? What is there in my armoury to pierce this impenetrable outer-man? Once, when I was Browning-mad, I began an epic. Yes, I, an epic! I pictured the hordes of civilisation sweeping over an immense and beautiful mountain, crushing, destroying, manufacturing, and the burden of their cry was a scornful text of Ruskin's—"We do not come here to look ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... hazarded in those legendary adventures. It was not AEneas's own life or private ambition that was at stake to justify his emotion. His tenderness, like Virgil's own, was ennobled and made heroic by its magnificent and impersonal object. It was truly an epic destiny that ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... again, has an arbitrary-enough origin; it is satira, from satur, mixed; and the application is as follows: each species of poetry had, among the Romans, its own special kind of versification; thus the hexameter was used in the epic, the iambic in the drama, etc. Ennius, however, the earliest Latin 'satirist,' first disregarded these conventionalities, and introduced a medley (satira) of all kinds of metres. It afterward, however, lost this idea of a melange, and acquired the notion of a poem 'directed against the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... November 21, 1877. It was a triumph alike for the author and the actors. Hernani had already been played ten years earlier, but Delaunay, who then took the part of Hernani, was the exact contrary of what this part should have been. He was neither epic, romantic, nor poetic. He had not the style of those grand epic poems. He was charming, graceful, and wore a perpetual smile; of middle height, with studied movements, he was ideal in Musset, perfect in ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... mother in France who has lost a son in the war could have seen that epic sight. They would have seen themselves revenged, and it would have been some consolation to them in ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... Hopkins, Barlow, and Humphreys published in the New Haven Gazette a series of satirical papers entitled the Anarchiad, suggested by the English Rolliad, and purporting to be extracts from an ancient epic on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night." The papers were an effort to correct, by ridicule, the anarchic condition of things which preceded the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789. It was a time ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or dallies by the south wall with the ruddy ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... movement and the fire of a successful translation in verse; it only gathers, as it were, the crumbs which fall from the richer table, only tells the story, without the song. Yet to a prose translation is permitted, perhaps, that close adherence to the archaisms of the epic, which in verse become mere oddities. The double epithets, the recurring epithets of Homer, if rendered into verse, delay and puzzle the reader, as the Greek does not delay or puzzle him. In prose he may endure them, or even care to study them ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... I could, my worthy sire! but skill And vigour lack, how great soe'er the will. Not every one can paint in epic strain The lances bristling on the embattled plain, Tell how the Gauls by broken javelins bleed, Or sing the ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... around the fire in the long winter nights, the Serbian peasants sang their glorious past, their dark present and their hopes for the future. There is a Serbian instrument called the gusle, more interesting than the Greek lyre, because more appropriate for the epic songs. It looks also like the Indian instrument tamboura. Well, as the ancient Greek bards sang their Achilles, using the lyre, and as the ancient Indian singers sang their Krishna with the help of the tamboura, so the Serbian epic singers accompanied with the ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... light. It does not stagger me to hear his disciples calling him, as HEGEL does, 'a man of a mighty mind,' or, as LAW does, 'the illuminated Behmen,' and 'the blessed Behmen.' 'In speculative power,' says dry DR. KURTZ, 'and in poetic wealth, exhibited with epic and dramatic effect, Behmen's system surpasses everything of the kind ever written.' Some of his disciples have the hardihood to affirm indeed that even ISAAC NEWTON ploughed with Behmen's heifer, but had not the boldness to ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... upon a time your poet launched a great epic in his mind. Alas, I was not careful, and it struck your ringing anklets and came to grief. It broke up into scraps of songs and lay scattered at your feet. All my cargo of the stories of old wars was tossed by the laughing waves and soaked in tears and sank. You ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... pounds sterling for the Revolution Book, with a "pathetic feeling" which brought "tears" to her eyes. From beyond the waters there is a hand held out; beyond the waters too live brothers. I would only the Book were an Epic, a Dante, or undying thing, that New England might boast in after times of this feat of hers; and put stupid, poundless, and penniless Old England to the blush about it! But after all, that is no matter; the feebler the well- meant Book is, the more "pathetic" is the whole transaction: ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... prose of everyday life! When Poetry is hounded from every other nook of the earth which the Maker of it meant should be one vast, sublime epic, she will find an inviolable retreat under the Lares and Penates guarding the ingleside, and crown as priestess forever the wife and mother who ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... opportunity were given to me. But I much fear at my time of life that my Tragedy of Nero must remain unwritten, as also my Novel of Charlotte Clopton, and that thrilling Handbook of the Marvellous; not to mention my abortive Epic of Home, and sundry essays, satires, and other lucubrations which, alas! may now be considered addled eggs. In a last word, I somewhat vaingloriously claim for ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... she was able to read Homer in the original, she came upon Pope's translation of the Iliad, and it took a rare hold upon her. She showed its influence and her own bent toward poetry by composing, before she was fourteen, an epic on the "Battle of Marathon," of which her father, to whom it was dedicated, thought so highly that he had it printed and circulated it among his friends. But she also showed the influence of her beloved Iliad in a much more childish ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... impossible it is to know the past. The past survives in human institutions, in the temperament of races, and in the creations of ideal art; but only in the last is it immortal. Custom and law are for an age: race after race is pushed to the sea, and dies; only epic and saga and psalm have one date with man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one silence at the last with them. Least of all does the past survive in the living memories of men. Here and there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue, the desert embalms some solitary city, a few ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... not wholly so. It often adopted the less harmful customs of the past, merging pagan festivals in its own, founding churches on the sites of the old cult, dedicating sacred wells to a saint. A saint would visit the tomb of a pagan to hear an old epic rehearsed, or would call up pagan heroes from hell and give them a place in paradise. Other saints recall dead heroes from the Land of the Blessed, and learn the nature of that ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... knowledge of the science of war seems to be conceded to him; he is allowed to be a good military critic; but all this is possible without his possessing any positive qualities of a great general, just as a literary critic may show the profoundest acquaintance with the principles of epic poetry without being able to produce a single stanza of an epic poem. Nevertheless, I shall not give up my faith in General McClellan's soldiership until he is defeated, nor in his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Spitteler. He asserts that he is guided in his choice of definite styles and definite forms by an absolutely clear purpose; that he has, for example, essayed every kind of metre which could possibly be suited to his "cosmic" epic, or that he has written a novelette solely in order to have once written a novelette. Although in these confessions, as well as in Edgar Allen Poe's celebrated Poet's Art, self-delusion and pleasure in the paradoxical ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Costanzo, contained within it the exotic and exquisite ideal passion of the "Vita Nuova" and Petrarch. With the bright, undulating stanza Spenser received from Ariosto and Tasso the richly coloured spirit of the Italian descriptive epic. With the splendid involutions of Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's prose Bacon learned their cool and disimpassioned philosophy. From the reading of Politian and Lorenzo dei Medici, from the sight of the Psyche of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... this system is derived from the works of Homer, He'si-od, and other ancient writers, who have gathered the floating legends of which it consists into tales and epic poems, many of them of great power and beauty. Some of these legends are exceedingly natural and pleasing, while others shock and disgust us by the gross impossibilities and hideous deformities which they reveal. Yet these legends are the spontaneous ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... The Elizabethan epic did not end a day too soon. There was no more life left in it; and God had something better in store for England. Raleigh's ideal was a noble one: but God's was nobler far. Raleigh would have made her a gold kingdom, like Spain, and destroyed ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... Finally, Martial exchanged the epic tirade for the epigram as the vehicle of his satire, and handled this lighter missile with unsurpassed brilliance and verve. Despite his sycophancy and his fulsome flattery of prospective benefactors, he displays more of the sober moderation and sane common-sense of Horace ...
— English Satires • Various
... that shadowy time. I see it—prehistory—as a swaying mass of ghostly multitudes, but always pressing on—on . . . as we shall appear, no doubt, ten thousand years hence if all histories are destroyed—as no doubt they will be. If I were an epic poet I might possibly find words and rhythm to fit that white vision, but it is wholly beyond the practical vocabulary and mental make-up of a newspaper man of the twentieth century. Some of us write very good poetry ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... settlements of the Aryans in India. We know that they brought with them a considerable measure of civilization, and soon erected cities. Indraprastha, built near the site of the present city of Delhi, and Hastinapore, some thirty miles from it, figure largely in the Mahabharut, the giant Hindu epic. Kunauj, lying east and south of Delhi, became some time afterwards the capital of a widely extended empire, which lasted, with vicissitudes, down to Muhammadan times. Benares is seen in the dim light of antiquity as a favourite abode ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... and they also consist of dancing, by which religious fervor is produced, and they give rise to music, romance, poetry, and drama. Thus it is that the esthetic arts have their origin in mythology. The epic poem and the symphony are lineal descendants of the dance, and the dance arises as the first form of worship, born of the mythic conception of the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... near Thame, in Oxfordshire, is entitled to notice in the annals of literature, as the family seat of the MILTONS, ancestors of Britain's illustrious epic poet. Of this original abode, our engraving is an accurate representation. One of Milton's ancestors forfeited his estate in the turbulent times of York and Lancaster. "Which side he took," says Johnson, "I know not; his descendant inherited no veneration for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... is a wonderful book.' Then I briefly explained what the great epic was, who the Greeks and who the Trojans were, the cause of the war between them, how nations fought in those days, what gods they worshiped, and added, 'Let me read ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... of Odin, which, by deducting the enmity of the Goths and Romans from so memorable a cause, might supply the noble groundwork of an epic poem, cannot safely be received as authentic history. According to the obvious sense of the Edda, and the interpretation of the most skilful critics, As-gard, instead of denoting a real city of the Asiatic ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... hurled like a thunderbolt on the enemy's right, driving it into the river and annihilating it in that cul-de-sac; the slaughter so great that at ten o'clock at night the bloody work was not completed, most wonderful of all the successes of the great imperial epic. And Wagram, where it was the aim of the Austrians to cut us off from the Danube; they keep strengthening their left in order to overwhelm Massena, who is wounded and issues his orders from an open carriage, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... piece of land is very curious. To a foreigner the entrance of Holland is like the first page of a great epic entitled, The Struggle with the Sea. In the Middle Ages it was nothing but a wide gulf with a few small islands. At the beginning of the sixteenth century this gulf was no longer in existence; four hundred ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... trained to the contemplation of aesthetic beauty in temples, in statues, and in pictures; and the great artist was rewarded with honors and material gains. The love of art is easier kindled than the love of literary excellence, and is more generally diffused. It is coeval with songs and epic poetry. Before Socrates or Plato speculated on the great certitudes of philosophy, temples and statues were the pride and boast of their countrymen. And as the taste for art precedes the taste for letters, so it survives, when the literature has lost its life and freshness. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... a man shall admire and almost adore the Epic poems of the Ancients, and yet despise and execrate the ancient Romances, which ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... seen: in other words, that feeling should take a concrete shape. Once this condition is fulfilled, they can focus their own impressions and render them with unsurpassable skill. We shall find in them nothing epic, nothing inventive on a grand scale: the transfiguring, ennobling vision of the greatest creators was denied them. But they remain consummate masters in their own restricted province: delicate observers of externals, noting ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... with by people who had sympathies with some form of dualism which was already developing in the later days of the Upani@sads, as evidenced by the dualistic tendencies of such Upani@sads as the S'vetas'vatara, and the like. The epic S'a@mkhya was also the result of this ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... and seeing the disillusionment of his public. With true artistic spirit he omitted all mention of confining house or cage and bestowed the gift of speech upon all the characters, whether brute or human, in his epic. The merry-go-round he combined with the menagerie into a whole which was not to ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... acquired a taste for chatting, and I loved to hear the recital of his adventures in the polar seas. He related his fishing, and his combats, with natural poetry of expression; his recital took the form of an epic poem, and I seemed to be listening to a Canadian Homer singing the Iliad of the regions ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... at the play as a whole, I should have very great hesitation in allowing it to be Marston's. My impression is that Chapman had the chief hand in it. The author's trick of moralising at every possible opportunity, his abundant use of similes more proper to epic than dramatic language, the absence of all womanly grace in the female characters,—these are points in which the present play may be compared with Chapman's published tragedies. Orlando's speech at the beginning of Act ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... Chief finds time To stun the first sensation of his crime, And raise it in his followers—"Ho! the bowl!"[357] Lest passion should return to reason's shoal.[fb] 100 "Brandy for heroes!"[358] Burke could once exclaim— No doubt a liquid path to Epic fame; And such the new-born heroes found it here, And drained the draught with an applauding cheer. "Huzza! for Otaheite!"[359] was the cry. How strange such shouts from sons of Mutiny! The gentle island, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... humorous and descriptive poem of "The Siller Gun," which, in the opinion of Sir Walter Scott, surpasses the efforts of Ferguson, and comes near to those of Burns,[21] Mayne published another epic production, entitled "Glasgow," which appeared in 1803, and has passed through several editions. In the same year he published "English, Scots, and Irishmen," a chivalrous address to the population of the three kingdoms. To the literary journals, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Holland, Poland, and other countries, including W. Benjamin Smith, the American author of The Pre-christian Jesus (1906), and P. Jensen in Das Gilgamesch Epos in den Welt-literatur (1906), who makes the Jesus-story a variant of the Babylonian epic, 2000 B.C. A pretty strong list! (2) "But," continues Drews, "ordinary historians still ignore all this." Finally, he dismisses Jesus as "a figure swimming obscurely in the mists of tradition." Nevertheless I need hardly ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... Russia and in the other states of the former Soviet bloc. I applaud the bipartisan support this Congress provided last year for our initiatives to help Russia, Ukraine and the other states through their epic transformations. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the benumbing and desiccating effect of that old system of education! Chalk and chalk-dust! The Mediterranean a tinted portion of the map, Italy a man's boot which I drew painfully, with many yawns; history no glorious epic revealing as it unrolls the Meaning of Things, no revelation of that wondrous distillation of the Spirit of man, but an endless marching and counter-marching up and down the map, weary columns of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... could be seen of men, but were frequently found in quiet and secluded villages, nestled among pastoral solitudes, far away from the gaze and admiration of the world. Though the spire of Salisbury was, perhaps, an epic in Masonic poetry, yet in humble hamlets of England, beyond her most distant hills, and amid many an unnamed "sunny spot of greenery," were idyls sung no less exquisite than this. Many a village-spire, of conception no less beautiful, arose above the tree-tops ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... as the Gostinny Dvor,—"Guests' Court,"—a name which dates from the epoch when a wealthy merchant engaged in foreign trade, and owning his own ships, was distinguished from the lesser sort by the title of "Guest," which we find in the ancient epic songs of Russia. Its frontage of seven hundred feet on the Prospekt, and one thousand and fifty on Great Garden and the next parallel street, prepare us to believe that it may really contain more than five hundred shops in the two stories, the lower surrounded by a vaulted arcade ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... his control of its action and direction was incomplete owing to bodily fatigue. Hence it lay open to assault, at the mercy of a thousand and one crowding thoughts and perceptions. And over these he desired to gain ascendency—to drive, rather than be driven by them. The epic of his three-score years, from its dim, illusive start to this dramatic and inexorable finish—but instantly disclosed to him in the reluctant admissions of the good-hearted Irish doctor—flung by at a double, in coloured yet incoherent progression, so to speak, now marching ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... at night; it turns the mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun, as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... natural outlet for her repressed emotions. Into its pages she had poured all her passion, all her yearning, and she had written with an intimate understanding of O'Neil's ambitions and aims which later gave the story its unique success as an epic of ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... to his feet, putting down his still half-full glass. "I'll make this epic story short, Max. As you said, the two actually valid methods of rising above the level in which you were born are in the Military and Religious Categories. Like you, even ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... yet exists only in the imagination. It would not work very satisfactorily to have a committee decreeing the issues, and the remuneration to be paid to each aspirant—ten thousand copies of Poppleton's Epic, and a cheque for a thousand pounds handed over out of the common stock, to begin with—half the issue, and half the remuneration for the Lyrics of Astyagus, as a less robust and manful production, but still a pleasant, murmuring, meandering, earnest little dream-book, fresh with the solemn ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... due investigation), to put my reader in possession of the facts so unfamiliar to the modern oracles of classical mythology! Briefly, it appears that in the best period of ancient Greece nine Muses were recognised, namely, Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry; Euterpe, of lyric poetry; Erato, of erotic poetry; Melpomene, of tragedy; Thalia, of comedy; Polyhymnia, of sacred hymns; Terpsichore, of choral song and dance; Clio, of history; and Urania, of astronomy. The last two seem to have very little in common with the addiction to singing ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... London has her epic poet, I think he will sing the omnibus; but the poet who sings the hansom must be of a lyrical note. I do not see how he could be too lyrical, for anything more like song does not move on wheels, and its rapid rhythm ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... modifies images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one.... There is the epic imagination, the perfection of which is in Milton; and the dramatic, of which Shakspeare is ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... account of; report, make a report, draw up a statement. detail; enter into particulars, enter into details, descend to particulars , descend to details,; itemize. Adj. descriptive, graphic, narrative, epic, suggestive, well-drawn; historic; traditional, traditionary; legendary; anecdotic[obs3], storied; described &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... my epic strain, I tremble as I show it, Lest this same Warrior-Drover Wayne Should ever ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... so natural and apparently easy—an epic in moleskin and human flesh, with only the little glimmer of oil-lamps, which darted from side to side in a mad mazurka of toil, crossing and recrossing, swinging and halting, the flames flattening out with every heave of their owners' bodies, then ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... of botanists replaced them on the tri-di screen, the major theme of their epic being that an astonishing proportion of the plant forms bore edible fruit, nuts, seeds, leaves, stems, roots, flowers. A choir of zoologists joined their voices here to point out the large number of small meat animals, fish, and crustaceans—with the ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... perhaps, from their contrast with the usual occupations of his mind. He took particular pleasure in works of devout Christian speculation, without, however, neglecting a due proportion of strictly devotional literature. These he varied by a constant recurrence to the great epic and dramatic masters, and occasional reading of the earlier and the living novelists, tales of wild romance and lighter fiction, voyages and travels, biographies and letters. Nor was he without a strong interest in the current politics of his own country and of ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... the water having been swallowed by a gigantic frog or toad which was compelled, by queer stratagems, to regurgitate it. These are little children's imaginings. Among the Hindoos the same myth takes the form of an alluring epic—the dragon watching over the celestial waters, of which he has taken possession, is wounded by Indra after a heroic battle, and restores them ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... speak chiefly of the moderns. For the antients, though it has not been attended to, had some peculiar advantages over us in this respect, resulting from the principles and practices of those times. For, as it hath been observed of the ancient epic Muse, that she borrowed much of her state and dignity from the false theology of the pagan world, so, I think, it may be justly said of the ancient tragic, that she has derived great advantages of probability from its mistaken moral. If there be truth in ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... priests (A-shi-wa-ni) of Zuni that not only these, but all true fetiches, are either actual petrifactions of the animals they represent, or were such originally. Upon this supposition is founded the following tradition, taken, as are others to follow, from a remarkable mythologic epic, which I ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... writers of the English tongue. Prescott, in the sphere of history, paralleled the achievement of Cooper in fiction, by giving literary form to the romance of the New World; while Motley was inspired (too ardently, perhaps) by the spirit of free America in writing the great epic of religious and political freedom in Europe. Finally, it must not be forgotten that in Uncle Tom's Cabin, a tragically American production, Mrs. Beecher Stowe added to the literature of the English language the most potent, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Old expert Allen,[45] loyal all along, Famed for his action on the Smyrna fleet: And Holmes, whose name shall live in epic song, While music numbers, or while ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... wives in excess of tenderness had provided them with every known toilette luxury filled into silver-topped cut crystal bottles. The sight of these afflicted men carrying their heavy burdens from the station to the prison at Pretoria was both amusing and dramatic. At times their speech reached the epic. ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... realized. From behind the overhanging rock came a noise and rush like that of a railway train; and a great motor car appeared. It topped the crest of cliff, black against the sun, like a battle-chariot rushing to destruction in some wild epic. March automatically put out his hand in one futile gesture, as if to catch a falling ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... through them; here it is only Io, daughter of Inachus, loved by Zeus and hunted by the gadfly, who fled outcast through the East. Her story is told in Aeschylus' Prometheus and in a magnificent chorus of his Suppliant Women. (See Rise of the Greek Epic, pp. 247 ff.) ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... in the Grettissaga, Flateyjarbk, and Egilssaga to which counterparts are found in Beowulf, he believes to have been acquired by contact either with the Beowulf legend or, perhaps, with the Anglo-Saxon epic itself.[22] ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... playing beside him hurriedly get up; one sees that in a moment they, too, will be terror-stricken. Salome watches the scene; it is very simple and very dramatic. The bas-relief of St. George releasing Princess Sabra, the Cleodolinda of Spencer's Faerie Queen, is treated as an epic, the works having a connecting bond in the figures of the girls, who closely resemble each other. Much as one admires the elan of St. George slaying the dragon, this bronze relief of Siena is the finer of the two; it is more perfect in its way, and ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... much admired by competent critics. A beautiful little volume of verse, recently published, is The Fall of Cetewayo. Possibly the line may be in that book.—P.S.—Is not 76 10s. 6d. too high a price to charge for bringing out an Epic Poem of 8000 lines, even if, as is asserted, there have ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... (on the Consulate of Honorius), and inveighing against Rufinus and Eutropius, the rivals of Stilicho. Of poems on other subjects, 'his three books of the unfinished Rape of Proserpine are among the finest examples of the purely literary epic.' —Mackail. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... could read them whenever they pleased. Until then these poems had only been recited, and no written copy existed. Pisistratus, therefore, did a very good work in thus keeping for our enjoyment the greatest epic poems ever composed. ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... of Pausanias,[1] as "the indiscriminate chronicler of legitimate tradition and legendary trash," considering that he praises "the scrupulous diligence with which he examined what fell under his own eye." He recommends to the epic or dramatic artist the study of the heroics of the elder, and the Eicones or Picture Galleries of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... ideal book-lover: knowing Dante, Boccaccio, and in some degree "Franceys Petrark, the laureat poete," who "enlumined al Itaille of poetry," Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Ovid—his favourite author—and Boethius; as well as Guido delle Colonne's prose epic of the story of Troy, the poems of Guillaume de Machaut, the Roman de la Rose, and a work on the astrolabe by Messahala.[1] We have some excellent pictures of Chaucer's habit of reading. When his day's work is done he goes home and buries himself ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... the public laugh, by the narrative of nascent odes, epics, and didactics crying aloud on obsolete muses from childish lips. The Greeks were my demi-gods, and haunted me out of Pope's Homer, until I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of Moses the black pony. And thus my great "epic" of eleven or twelve years old, in four books, and called "The Battle of Marathon," and of which fifty copies were printed because papa was bent upon spoiling me—is Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone; for, although a curious production for a child, it gives evidence ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... of his own invention; and the form which he has given to the telling makes the tale his own, even tho' the original story had been the same. But this proves, however, that Homer taught Virgil to design; and if invention be the first virtue of an epic poet, then the Latin poem can only be allow'd the second place. Mr. Hobbes, in the preface to his own bald translation of the Ilias (studying poetry as he did mathematics, when it was too late)—Mr. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... in general terms; all effort must go toward getting done the immediate thing. The lift and tension of the time sloughed off the immaterial weak act or thought. There were present a heroic simplicity, a naked verity, a full cup of service, a high and noble altruism. The plane was epic, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... seems to cure the poet rather than drown his faith in hopelessness. As a critic, he encourages every initiate of the cause. As a "soldier of the verse," he himself fights his battles of song in every field. In short story, in drama, in epic poetry, and above all in lyrics, he creates work after work. From the Songs of my Country, the Hymn to Athena, the Eyes of my Soul and the Iambs and Anapaests, he rises gradually and steadily to the tragic drama of the Thrice ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... of Mr. LOONEY, the writer of the recently-published and final work on the authorship of the plays. MILTON will be presented in both verse and prose, Mr. MASEFIELD having promised to re-write his epic in six-lined rhymed stanzas, shorn of Latinisms; while a famous novelist, who does not wish her name to appear at present, has consented to recast it in the form of a romance under the title ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... of Ravana is told in the Ramayana, which with the Mahabarata form the two great epic poems of the Hindoos; the latter was written by Vyasa, ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... bring his name before Maecenas, the confidential adviser and minister of Octavius, in whom he had himself found a helpful friend. This was followed up by the commendation of Varius, already celebrated as a writer of Epic poetry, and whose tragedy of "Thyestes," if we are to trust Quintilian, was not unworthy to rank with the best tragedies of Greece. Maecenas may not at first have been too well disposed towards a follower of the republican party, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... due the praise of having first refined the Roman taste in dramatic poetry, as Ennius had but a short time before done in Epic, by introducing the Greek model, as the standard of literature. Both were, according to Suetonius, half Greeks, and were masters of both languages. The taste for tragedy, however, held its ground but for a short time; for the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... powerful an influence upon the progress of our own, was at last opened to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain undecided. Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio—both his epic poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which Petrarch praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were mingled with others of undeniable jocoseness—the immortal "Decamerone." He could examine the refined gold of Petrarch's own verse with its ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Ballad and Epic. In Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature. Vol. xi. ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... hide, on or under which a dying man could lie: therefore it cannot have been made into a book. Yet Imtheacht na Tromdhaimhe (p. 124 of the printed text) tells us, for what it may be worth, that Ciaran wrote the great epic tale called Tain Bo Cualnge upon the hide of the Dun Cow. There is actually a copy of this tale in the existing book; but the book was written not long after the time when our homilists were describing the relic as an unbroken hide. Either there were two ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... carried through Latin translations to the West, through Armenian and Syriac versions to the East. It became widely popular during the middle ages, and was worked into poetic form by many writers in French and German. Alberich of Besancon wrote in Middle High German an epic on the subject in the first half of the twelfth century, which was the basis of the German "Pfaffe" Lamprecht's "Alexanderbuch," also of the twelfth century. The French poets Lambert li Court and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... gray light the strangely weathered mesas were ruined castles, stupendous in bulk; the mighty buttes and crumbled peaks were colossal cities overthrown by the cataclysm of time. It seemed to Enoch, that nowhere else in the world could one behold such epic loneliness. The excitement that had buoyed him up since Diana's arrival suddenly departed, and his life with all its ugly facts was vividly in his ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the novel is told in a very charming love story which has 'Barbara Worth' for its inspiration. With her winning the author has deftly interwoven an epic of national reclamation work and present-day good ...
— The Uncrowned King • Harold Bell Wright
... this in the most excellent degree; it is not without reason, therefore, that the philosopher, in the twenty-second chapter of his Poeticks, mentions him by no other appellation than that of the Poet. He was the father of the drama as well as the epic; not of tragedy only, but of comedy also; for his Margites, which is deplorably lost, bore, says Aristotle, the same analogy to comedy as his Odyssey and Iliad to tragedy. To him, therefore, we owe Aristophanes as well as Euripides, Sophocles, and my poor Aeschylus. But if you ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... admiration for its predecessors, and despite our inherent inclination toward modest conservatism, we unhesitatingly record the conviction that "The Cruise of the Kawa" stands preeminent in the literature of modern exploration—a supreme, superlative epic ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... productions of poetic genius, especially of the epic and dramatic kind, there is, apart from Beauty, another quality which is ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... financial scandals. It was inspired by the failure of the Union Generale Bank a few years before, and is a powerful indictment of the law affecting joint-stock companies. To L'Argent there succeeded La Debacle, that prose epic of modern war, more complete and coherent than even the best of Tolstoi. And to end all came Le Docteur Pascal, winding up the series on a note ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... came German generals paid ungrudging tributes to the efficiency of our Regular Army, writing down in their histories of war that this was the model of all armies, the most perfectly trained... It was spent by the spring of '15. Its memory remains as the last epic of those professional soldiers who, through centuries of English history, took "the King's shilling" and fought when they were told to fight, and left their bones in far places of the world and in many fields in Europe, and won for ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... possible further revelation some day—towards some ampler vision, which [220] should take up into itself and explain this world's delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till then but half-understood, might be taken up into the text of a lost epic, recovered at last. At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its height; the house ready for the possible guest; the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever divine fingers might choose to write ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... own lips that the perils of the way made him see the poetry of it all, and he said to himself that here was the theme for that great epic, which would be the chef d'oeuvre of his literary life. It is to be written in blank verse, with the hymns and secular songs he sang at each stop given in an appendix, and he confidently hopes that it will stand out as something conspicuous and distinct ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... never did hang easy in the old shipmaster's stiff fingers. The mental travail of this unwonted literary effort wrung his brain. An epic poet struggling with his masterpiece could not have been more rapt. And his nerves were correspondingly touchy. Constable Zeburee Nute, emerging at a brisk trot from the town office, had a warning word of counsel for ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... with a polite bow, Jacques went down the staircase. As for Sir Asinus, in the excess of his rage he sat down and composed a whole canto of an epic—which luckily has not descended to our day. ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... as the acquirement seems only valued by its possessor as it may delight others, so the dress seems worn, not so much to gratify her own vanity as to please her friends' tastes. Genius is her idol; and with her genius is found in everything. She speaks in equal ruptures of an opera dancer and an epic poet. Her ambition is to converse on all subjects; and by a judicious management of a great mass of miscellaneous reading, and by indefatigable exertions to render herself mistress of the prominent points of the topics of the day, she appears ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... less attention than Greek politics. The Homeric problem continues to exert an irresistible attraction. Every expert from Wilamowitz to Gilbert Murray and Walter Leaf adds to our comprehension of the epic; but no positive results have been established, and Holm uttered the gloomy prophecy that we shall never know whether Homer existed, who he was, or what he wrote. On the other hand we have gained a deeper ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... not stopped to pother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature—art can go no further. So the cunning son of Jupiter and Callisto built the old Arcadia; and in this, as in that, the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... liberal accomplishments flourished, having been first introduced by the Bards, the Eubages,[49] and the Druids. The Bards were accustomed to employ themselves in celebrating the brave achievements of their illustrious men, in epic verse, accompanied with sweet airs on the lyre. The Eubages investigated the system and sublime secrets of nature, and sought to explain them to their followers. Between these two came the Druids, men of loftier genius, bound ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... battle; and the late commanding general of the Army of the Potomac under whom so many of us have fought. If the whole and comprehensive plans of our great lieutenant-general have marked him as the Ulysses of a holier and mightier epic than Homer ever dreamed, in the presence of the great captain who fairly turned the tide of the rebellion on the hills above Gettysburg, we shall not have to ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... said Alfred. "I think that rather an arbitrary and peevish canon of friend Horace. The AEneid, you know, begins just as he says an epic ought not to begin; and the AEneid is the greatest Latin Epic. In the next place the use of Modesty is to keep a man from writing an epic poem at all but, if he will have that impudence, why then he had better have the courage to plunge into the Castalian stream, like Virgil ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... SOUTHEY! You're a poet—Poet-laureate, And representative of all the race; Although 't is true that you turned out a Tory at Last,—yours has lately been a common case; And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at? With all the Lakers, in and out of place? A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye Like "four and twenty Blackbirds in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... friend's intrusion. Cattle-food, indeed! As if beans, oats, warm mashes, and a ball, are to be pushed down a man's throat just as he is meditating on the great social problem, or (for I think it was my epic I was going to touch up) just as he was about to soar to the height ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... debt was a heavy one. He had come to her aid in an hour when hope seemed dead. He had come single-handed—save for his man Rabecque; and in a manner that was worthy of being made the subject of an epic, he had carried her out of Condillac, away from the terrible Dowager and her cut-throats. The thought of them sent ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... "the marriage-register of science and verse, written by a Gascon Moses, who, to the minuteness of a Walt Whitman and the unction of a parish-clerk, added an occasional dignity superior to anything attained by the abortive epic of his master." ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... Epitome of the Chrestomathy of Proclus: The Epic Cycle begins with the fabled union of Heaven and Earth, by which they make three hundred-handed sons and three Cyclopes ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... we fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders of them are unlike other wonders. If we do not see in them the saga and epic, how shall ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... anonymous author of a description of Constantinople, who was a cotemporary of Zonaras. The other is John Tzetzes, who wrote a rambling work consisting of mythological and historical notices in Greek political, civil, or profane verse, as it may be called, (versus politici)—the epic poetry of modern Greece; correctly compared by Lord Byron to the heroic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... same time there might be a great future before any artist who could discover a new medium of utterance. It seems at present, to take literature, as if every form of human expression had been exploited. We have the lyric, the epic, the satire, the narrative, the letter, the diary, conversation, all embalmed in art. But there is probably some other medium possible which will become perfectly obvious the moment it is seized upon and used. To take ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... scornful impatience: Carry Fisher, with her shoulders, her eyes, her divorces, her general air of embodying a "spicy paragraph"; young Silverton, who had meant to live on proof-reading and write an epic, and who now lived on his friends and had become critical of truffles; Alice Wetherall, an animated visiting-list, whose most fervid convictions turned on the wording of invitations and the engraving of dinner-cards; ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... Second quite liked Voltaire, because Voltaire quite liked Lady Sandon, his mistress. Only a Frenchman could have successfully paid court to the King, Queen and Lady Sandon at the same time, as Voltaire did. His great epic poem, "Henriade," that he had been sandpapering for ten years, was now published, dedicated to the Queen. The King headed the subscription-list with more copies than he needed, at five guineas each, on agreement. Voltaire afterward said that he would not be expected ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... estimation. Weber himself, however, was by no means a man to disregard the tenor of the words and characters he was to associate with his music, and was greatly charmed with his English coadjutor's operatic version of Wieland's fairy epic. He was invited to come over to London and himself superintend the production of his ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the Wandering Jew, an epic, the joint production of himself and Captain Medwin, a school-boy production, St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, and his first story, Zastrozzi, are the first books of the poet; and their history is detailed with more or less interest in the letters which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... Marie—chansons of two hundred years ago mark the strokes of labour as of the evening hour when the professional village story-teller cries "cric-crac" and begins his tale of the loup-garou, or rouses the spirit of a pure patriotism by a crude epic of some valiant atavar; when the parish fiddler brings them to their feet with shining eyes by the strains of O Carillon. They are not less respectful to the British flag, nor less faithful in allegiance because they ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... on well-bred tongues prevail, And I the little hero of each tale. Sick with the love of fame, what throngs pour in, Unpeople court, and leave the senate thin! My glowing subject seems but just begun, And, chariot-like, I kindle as I run. Aid me, great Homer! with thy epic rules, To take a catalogue of British fools. Satire! had I thy Dorset's force divine, A knave or fool should perish in each line; Tho' for the first all Westminster should plead, And for the last, all Gresham intercede. ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... story which shows him to have been at Hastings by the side of Harold, to have won fame there, to have continued the fight for English liberty as leader of the English patriots, and to have earned a place in the unsung English epic. ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... of this epic was not sufficiently inevitable. It hadn't, she lamented, a quite logical ending; and the plot of it, in ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... the protection of the powerful Uguccione, lord of Pisa, while he wrote the Purgatorio. The second part of his epic dealt with the region lying between the under-world of torment and the heavenly heights of Paradise itself. Here the souls of men were to be cleansed of their sins that they might be pure in ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... as brave as any rover described in gay, romantic screeds, but, when my fitful life is over, no epic will narrate my deeds. Condemned to silent heroism, I go my unmarked way alone, and no one hands me prune or prism, as token that my deeds are known. But yesterday my teeth were aching, and to the painless dentist's lair I took my way, unawed, unquaking, and sat down in the ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... epithets, and variety of metaphors, tropes, and figures were uttered between these well-matched opponents, that an epic bard would have found his account in listening to the contest; which, in all probability, would not have been confined to words, had it not been interrupted for the sake of a young woman of an agreeable countenance and modest carriage; who, being shocked at some of their flowers of ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... the disaffected, ran full tilt towards the solemn equipage of the Duke, which the projecting lance threatened to perforate from window to window, at the risk of transfixing as many in its passage as the celebrated thrust of Orlando, which, according to the Italian epic poet, broached as many Moors as a ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to enjoy, without envying, the superior privileges of his guests. By age and by education he belonged to the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit of thought had been formed in the days of the epic struggle between physics and metaphysics. But he had been, then and always, essentially a spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety show of life, slipping out of his seat now and then for a brief dip into the convivialities at the back of the house, but never, as far ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... of Beowulf, the earliest and the greatest epic, or heroic poem, in our literature. It begins with a prologue, which is not an essential part of the story, but which we review gladly for the sake of the splendid poetical conception that produced Scyld, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... bushel of silence. There was the Honorable Poultry Tickletoe, the historian, whose articles on the shoddy quality of the modern Panama hat have created such a stir throughout the hat trade; Mr. William Darlington Ponkapog, the poet, whose epic on the "Reign of Gold" is one of the longest, and some writers say the thickest, in the English language; James Whistleton Potts, the eminent portraitist, whose limnings of his patients have won him a high place among the caricaturists of the age, Robert Dozyphrase, the ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... Geste a great discovery has been made since my essay was written; the Chanun de Willame, an earlier and ruder version of the epic of Aliscans, has been printed by the unknown possessor of the manuscript, and generously given to a number of students who have good reason to be grateful to him for his liberality. There are some ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... apt bits of poetry and other quotations adding to the pleasure of hearing his accounts rendered. He gave us modern versions of the Greek myths and hero legends, of Cadmus and Thebes, of Jason and the Golden Fleece, of the Trojan epic, of the Delphic ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... Chafe of the million-crowd, To this you are all subdued In the murmurous, sad night-air! Yet whether you thunder aloud, Or hush your tone to a prayer, You chant amain through the modern maze The only epic ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... to answer questions about storks and their habits. He had tired of them in a moment, and was passionately interested in mules. "There ought to be an epic written about the mules of North Africa!" he exclaimed. "I tell you, it's a great subject. Look at those poor brave chaps struggling to pull carts piled up with casks of beastly Algerian wine, through that sea of mud, which probably goes all the ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of Grady, which I only outline, came as a counterpart to the triumphant epic of General Sherman. The effect was electric, and beyond almost any that have ever occurred in New York or anywhere, and Grady sprang ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... in charge," Ludovick asked, "and whence did you come?" Fearing he might seem motivated by vulgar curiosity, he explained, "I am doing research for an epic poem." ...
— The Blue Tower • Evelyn E. Smith
... Impressions of a Geographer in the Argentine Pampas," and they could hear him repeating elegant periods aloud before committing them to the white pages of his day-book; and more than once, unfaithful to Clio, the muse of history, he invoked in his transports the divine Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Sir Robert Peel to read, in order to convince him that Tennyson's work merited official recognition. His treatment of the hero is as far from the classical spirit as anything which William Morris wrote. He preserves little of the directness or fierce temper of the early epic. Rather does his Ulysses think and speak like some bold adventurer of the Renaissance, with the combination of ardent curiosity and reflective thought which was the mark of that age. Even so Tennyson himself, as he passed from ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... family friends, exchange arms, and vow to avoid each other henceforth in the fray. (N.B. and this in the tenth year of the war!) After this comes, you know, the meeting of Hector and Andromache, which we read together; altogether a truly Epic canto indeed. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... the "Venus" and the "Lucrece," said finely of Shakespeare "Shakespeare could not have written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought." This prodigality of nature is exemplified equally in his Sonnets. The copious selection here given (which from the wealth of the material, required greater consideration ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of Job is an epic poem, an allegory, to show the grand elements in human nature, enabling mortals to rise superior to all trials and temptations, to the humiliations of the spirit, and to prolonged suffering in the flesh. Though illustrated in the personality of a man, yet the principle ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... "Most epic poets plunge in medias res, (Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road), And then your hero tells, whene'er you please, What went before—by way ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... can be confounded with poetic genius and make one with it in a moral epistle, it cannot be the same thing as the genius, so varied and so diversely creative in its expression of the passions, of the drama or the epic. Where will you find reason in the fourth book of the AEneid and the transports of Dido? Be that as it may, the spirit which prompted the theory, caused writers who ruled their inspiration, rather than those who abandoned themselves to it, to be placed in the first rank ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... single periodical print which has appeared for forty-three years since, to which I did not make some application. I have by me essays and fugitive pieces in fourteen trunks, seven carpet bags of trifles in verse, and a portmanteau with best part of an epic poem, which it does not become me to praise. I have no less than four hundred and ninety-five acts of dramatic composition, which have been rejected even ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... Mary told him, smiling, "between your cooking and Susan Jenks' is the difference between an epic—and a nursery rhyme. They're both good, but ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... Orion or Merodach. Jensen identifies Sirius with the Bow-star, but considers that the Lance-star was Antares; Hommel, however, identifies the Lance-star with Procyon. In the fifth tablet of the Babylonian Creation epic as translated by Dr. L. W. King, there is an interesting account of the placing of the Bow-star in the heavens. After Merodach had ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... think that rather an arbitrary and peevish canon of friend Horace. The AEneid, you know, begins just as he says an epic ought not to begin; and the AEneid is the greatest Latin Epic. In the next place the use of Modesty is to keep a man from writing an epic poem at all but, if he will have that impudence, why then he had better have the courage to plunge into the Castalian stream, like ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... rationalism will be obvious. It becomes us to speak with reverence of the writings of a man whose labours have been the means of turning many to Christ. Though lacking form as works of art, yet, if they be compared with works of grander type, where church history has been treated as an epic, we cannot help feeling that the depth of spiritual perception and of psychological analysis compensates for the artistic defects. We are conducted by them from the outside to the inside; from things to thoughts; from institutions to doctrines; from the accidents of Christianity ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... deadly, extended over all Europe, and bathed the civilized world in blood. England stood forth as the centre of opposition against Philip, and under the unwilling leadership of Elizabeth entered on its epic period of heroism, was stimulated to that remarkable outburst of energy and intellect and power which we ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... and essential things will never, anywhere, wholly cease, while mankind lasts. And thus it is that Brown's Ode to the Steam Plough, Jones' Sonnet Sequence on the Automatic Reaping Machine, and Robinson's Epic of the Piscicidal Dynamo, leave unstirred the deeper depths of emotion in us. The subjects chosen by these three great poets do not much impress us when we regard them sub specie aeternitatis. Smith ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... him; and after some further discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say about Paradise found?" Whereupon the poet wrote his second epic. ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... he said little save to guide Beatrice and warn her of unusual difficulties, felt the somber magic of the place. No poet, he; only a man of hard and practical details. Yet he realized that, were he dowered with the faculty, here lay matter for an Epic of Death such as no Homer ever dreamed, no Virgil ever ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... friend, Mr. Caryll, suggested to him that a mock heroic treatment of the resulting quarrel might restore peace, and Pope wrote a poem in two cantos, which was published in a Miscellany in 1712, Pope's age then being twenty-four. But as epic poems required supernatural machinery, Pope added afterwards to his mock epic the machinery of sylphs and gnomes, suggested to him by the reading of a French story, "Le Comte de Gabalis," by the Abbe Villars. Here there were sylphs of the air and gnomes of the earth, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... scandals. It was inspired by the failure of the Union Generale Bank a few years before, and is a powerful indictment of the law affecting joint-stock companies. To L'Argent there succeeded La Debacle, that prose epic of modern war, more complete and coherent than even the best of Tolstoi. And to end all came Le Docteur Pascal, winding up the series on a ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... Revolution had left in men's veins. And they were not exhausted, for the very last fight which the French fought was the finest of all. Proud as we are of our infantry at Waterloo, it was really with the French cavalry that the greenest laurels of that great epic rested. They got the better of our own cavalry, they took our guns again and again, they swept a large portion of our allies from the field, and finally they rode off unbroken, and as full of fight as ever. ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... later he was pointed out to strangers by the people of Sweetwater Springs. "That is Richard Clement, the sole owner of 'The Witch,' a mine valued at three millions of dollars." This in itself was truly an epic. ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... opened to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain undecided. Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio—both his epic poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which Petrarch praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were mingled with others of undeniable jocoseness—the immortal "Decamerone." He could examine the refined gold of Petrarch's own verse with its exquisite ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... crudities of expression, inaccuracies of rhythm, faults of arrangement, and violations of dramatic law met us from time to time, the earnest purpose of the writer carried us over them all. The book has a fine flavor of the Elizabethan age,—a sustained epic rather than dramatic character, an affluence of quaint, original images; yet the construction was frequently that of a school-boy. In opulence and maturity of ideas, and poverty of artistic skill, the work stands almost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... corners his best friends. Then he is hopeless, and to live elsewhere would be death. The Bowery will be his romance, Broadway his lyric, and the Park his pastoral, the river and the glory of it all his epic, and he will look down pityingly on all the rest ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... in them already, as designed work, that spirit of reasonable order, that expressive congruity in the adaptation of means to ends, of which the fully developed admirableness of human form is but the consummation— a consummation already anticipated in the grand and animated figures of epic poetry, their power of thought, their laughter and tears. Under the hands of that younger people, as they imitate and pass largely and freely beyond those older craftsmen, the fire of the reasonable soul will kindle, little by ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... of Nicanor, when hearing it suddenly at night in the death-shout. Lycidas, with all the enthusiastic admiration which noble deeds inspire in a poetic and generous nature like his, had regarded the career of the Hebrew hero. The history of Maccabeus was to the Greek an acted epic; in character, in renown, Judas, in his estimation, towered like a giant above all other men of his generation. Lycidas had met the chieftain but once; but in that one meeting had received impressions which made him idealize Maccabeus into a being more like the ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... the wild buffalo is morose and uncertain, and such is its strength and courage that in the Hindu epic of the Ramayana its onslaught is compared to that of the tiger.[1] It is never quite safe to approach them, if disturbed in their pasture or alarmed from their repose in the shallow lakes. On such occasions they hurry into line, draw up in defensive array, with a few of the oldest bulls in advance; ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... book could belong exclusively to noble spirits, preserved like yours from worldly pettiness by solitude! THEY would know how to give to it the melodious rhythm that it lacks, which might have made it, in the hands of a poet, the glorious epic that France still awaits. But from me they must accept it as one of those sculptured balustrades, carved by a hand of faith, on which the pilgrims lean, in the choir of some glorious church, to think upon ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... feelingly introduces it by saying, that "the poem has now for several years been scarce, and is at present but little known; and hence a very small portion of it will no doubt be highly acceptable to the cultivated reader; especially as this noble epic is written with great felicity of expression and the sweetest delicacy ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... to weeping! And the tear was so genuine, so convincing, so majestic that it induced in Edwin a blank humility. He was astounded, mystified; but he was also humbled. He himself was never told, and he never learnt, the explanation of that epic tear. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the oldest poem in the English language. It is our "old English epic"; and, like much of our ancient verse, it is a war poem. The author of it is unknown. It was probably composed in the fifth century— not in England, but on the Continent— and brought over to this island— not on paper or on parchment— ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... leaving behind him a trail of glory, shining like the sun; in the path of which, freed through the mandate of his great soul, MARCHED FOUR MILLION NEGROES, now swollen to twelve, their story, the saddest epic of the ages, of whom and in behalf of whom their children; the generation now and those to come, this History was collated and arranged. It is an EVANGEL proclaiming to the world, their unsullied patriotism; their rapid fire loyalty, that through all the years of the nation's life, ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... considered our reasonable service. Life is not so low-pitched as that. The best work of man does not admit of being put into an equation with cash. The greatest feat, to my mind, an Englishman ever performed was the writing of Paradise Lost. How much did John Milton get in money for his incomparable epic during his lifetime? Five Pounds: and if he had got five million pounds, the recompense would have been absolutely inadequate. History, however, has indemnified Milton for the neglect and poverty he endured. He has shot up into stature while those of his contemporaries who bulked ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... no doubt, the garden scent Brings back some brief-winged bright sensation Of love that came and love that went,— Some fragrance of a lost flirtation, Born when the cuckoo changes song, Dead ere the apple's red is on it, That should have been an epic long, Yet scarcely served to fill ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... series of lays of the Icelandic Edda. A matchless warrior, a Dragon-killer and overthrower of Giants, who possesses a magic sword, he conquers the northern Nibelungs and acquires their famed gold hoard. In the great German epic he is the son of Siegmund and Siegelinde, who rule in the Netherlands. Going Rhine-upward to Worms, to Gunther, the King of the Burgundians, he woos and wins Kriemhild, the beautiful sister of that king, after having first ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... opposite, form, is also within the poem. I am not criticizing this antithesis at present, but evidently it is quite different from the other. It is practically the distinction used in the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama, and it flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison, for example, in examining Paradise Lost considers in order the fable, the characters, and the sentiments; these will be the substance: then he considers the language, that is, the style and numbers; this will ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... art of the thirteenth century, a development full of incidents and experiments and variety. I have called the early form rude, but the phrase is not very happy, as those who know either the early mosaic or the early epic will understand. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... another pen.[Footnote: Oedipe, written in 1718. "Nos pretres ne sont point ce qu'un vain peuple pense; Notre credulite fait toute leur science." Act IV., Scene I.] For several years Voltaire went on writing, with increasing reputation. In 1723, his great epic poem, "La Henriade," was secretly circulated in Paris.[Footnote: Desnoiresterres, Jeunesse, 297.] The author was one of the marked men of the town. At the same time his reputation must have been to some extent that of a troublesome fellow. And in December of that year ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... greatness: it was the genius of Luis de Camoens. If Spenser, instead of losing himself in mazes of allegoric romance, had sung of Crecy and Agincourt, of Drake, Frobisher, and Raleigh, he might have given us a national epic in the same sense in which the term applies to The Lusiads. With such a history, so written in stone and song, what wonder if pride of race is one of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... here was a pivotal point in his life. Had not Washington persuaded him to remain "just for the present" in America, he might have played a part in Carlyle's best book, that book which is not history, but more—an epic. So, among the many obligations that America owes to Washington, must be named this one of pushing Thomas Jefferson, the scholar and man of peace, into the political embroglio and shutting the ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... fleece, And Argo, manned with all the flower of Greece? Of Thebes' fell brethren, Theseus, stern of face, And Peleus' son, unrivalled in the race, AEneas, founder of the Roman line, And William, glorious on the banks of Boyne? Who has not learned to weep at Pompey's woes, And over Blackmore's epic page to doze? 'Tis I, who dare attempt unusual strains, Of hosts unsung, and unfrequented plains; The small shrill trump, and chiefs of little size, And armies rushing down the darkened skies. Where India reddens to the early dawn, Winds a deep vale from vulgar eyes withdrawn: ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... we understand how Browning, no friend of the conventions of poetic art, entered on and closed his giant task with an invocation to the "Lyric Love," as it were the Urania, or heavenly Muse, of a modern epic. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... not reciting an epic poem of which she was the heroine and Harcourt the hero? The true epics of the world are generally told ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders of them are unlike other wonders. If we do not see in them the saga and epic, how ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... great Sanskrit epic, King Santanu is said to have walked by the side of the river one day, where "he met and fell in love with a beautiful girl, who told him that she was the river Ganges, and could only marry him on condition he never questioned her conduct. To this he, with a truly royal gallantry, ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... fictitious history which ripened to the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and which, fostered by the genius of Boccaccio, produced the romance of the chivalrous days, and its last development, the novel - that prose-epic of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... valuable fruits of morals and criticism; but the steeps of Parnassus few, comparatively, have attempted to scale with success. And when it is considered, that many languages, and many sciences, must contribute to the perfection of poetical composition, it will appear less strange. The lofty Epic, the pointed Satire, and the more daring and successful flights of the Tragic Muse, seem reserved for the bold adventurers ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... it. A noble Book; all men's Book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending Problem,—man's destiny, and God's ways with him here in this earth. And all in such free flowing outlines; grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity; in its epic melody, and repose of reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true everywhere; true eyesight and vision for all things; material things no less than spiritual; the Horse,—'hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?'—he ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... told legends of Ireland's epic hero Fionn. A book for the boy or girl who loves the old romances, and a book for story-telling or reading aloud. "Stories of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France," ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... Despite all the geographical and historical research that Tolstoi imposed on himself as a preliminary to the writing of "War and Peace," he did not write the history of that epoch, nor would a genuine student quote him as in authority. He created a prose epic, a splendid historical panorama, vitalised by a marvellous imagination, where the creatures of his fancy are more alive than Napoleon and Alexander. Underneath all the march of armies, the spiritual purpose of the author is clear. The real greatness of man ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... the songs of the Brahmin muse, with as keen a relish as the most devout Christian does the hymns of Dr. WATTS. Melody comes of Heaven, and is a gift vouchsafed to all generations, and all kinds of men. In proof of this, let us adduce a single extract from the great epic of the Hawaiian poet, POPPOOFI, entitled ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... The first is Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, the simple and straightforward personal narrative of one whom all must now concede to have been a very great man; the other is that human and poignant epic of the stranger from Denmark who became one of us and of whom we as a people are tenderly proud. The Making of an American is in some ways a unique book; concrete, specific, self-revealing and yet dignified; a book that one could wish ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... Pharaoh Amasis to Cambyses as a wife, and who became the innocent cause of the war through which the kingdom of the Pharaohs lost its independence, would not bear criticism, but it was certainly usable material for a dramatic or epic poem. And this material ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear Miss Mitchell's joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn's wild oats? Awfully clever, isn't it? They remind one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever sketches. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... in the soothing throes of literary composition. Some time ago he had thought it would be a mighty fine thing to be a poet, and had tried his hand at verse. Finding he possessed some facility, he decided that he was a poet, and at once started an epic poem in rhyme on the Life of Nelson, the material being supplied by Southey. This morning he did the Battle ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... from Bulwer's learned and ornate epic of King Arthur, the dire severity of the Etruscan doctrine of a future life is well indicated, with the local imagery of some parts of it, and the impenetrable obscurity ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Prayer Book. But when I speak of the rareness and preciousness of prayers, I mean such prayers as contain three conditions—permanence, capability jot being really prayed, and universality. Such prayers primates and senates can no more command than they can order a new Cologne Cathedral or another epic poem."—The Bishop of Berry's Hampton ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... cotemporary of Zonaras. The other is John Tzetzes, who wrote a rambling work consisting of mythological and historical notices in Greek political, civil, or profane verse, as it may be called, (versus politici)—the epic poetry of modern Greece; correctly compared by Lord Byron to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... somewhat obscure Finn episode in Beowulf appears to be part of a Finn epic, of which only the merest fragment, called the Fight at Finnsburg, is extant. The following conjectured outline of the whole story is based on this fragment and on the Beowulf episode; Finn, king of the Frisians, had carried ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... bookseller. Within a few months of the day on which the benefit was given at Garrick's theatre, the holder of the copyright of Paradise Lost,—I think it was Tonson,—applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction against a bookseller who had published a cheap edition of the great epic poem, and obtained the injunction. The representation of Comus was, if I remember rightly, in 1750; the injunction in 1752. Here, then, is a perfect illustration of the effect of long copyright. Milton's ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this unfavourable account of the corporation is an epic poem entitled the Londeriad. This extraordinary work must have been written very soon after the events to which it relates; for it is dedicated to Robert Rochfort, Speaker of the House of Commons; and Rochfort ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... political in scope, being designed to supply a thread of union between the various worships of groups, originally distinct, which have been united into one social or political organism; or, finally, they are due to the free play of epic imagination. But philosophy, politics, and poetry are something more, or something less, than ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... art in fiction. Among younger authors called untimely from their labors, it is hard to resist the temptation to linger over such a figure as that of Frank Norris, whose vital way of handling realistic material with epic breath in his unfinished trilogy, gave so great promise for ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... "Not to know me argues yourself unknown." He was very angry with Lord Byron for designating him as a Mr. Landor. He thought it should have been the. You ought to have forewarned such readers that the Mr. Landor, now your Walter Savage, is the learned author of an epic poem called Gebir, composed originally in Egyptian hieroglyphics, then translated by him into Latin, and thence done into English blank verse by the same hand. It is a work of rare occurrence even ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... vision, which [220] should take up into itself and explain this world's delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till then but half-understood, might be taken up into the text of a lost epic, recovered at last. At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its height; the house ready for the possible guest; the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever divine fingers ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... conduct, contrasted with that of the disinterested Gael, who, like Lear, gives his kingdom away, and is content to become a pensioner upon his own issue for a beggarly pittance!—Open this far-famed Book!—I have done so at random, and the beginning of the 'Epic Poem Temora,' in eight Books, presents itself. 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light. The green hills are covered with day. Trees shake their dusky heads in the breeze. Grey torrents pour their noisy streams. Two green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The blue course of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... should humbly acquiesce in the judgment of a learned nation; yet I may hope or presume, that the Italians do not compare the tedious uniformity of sonnets and elegies with the sublime compositions of their epic muse, the original wildness of Dante, the regular beauties of Tasso, and the boundless variety of the incomparable Ariosto. The merits of the lover I am still less qualified to appreciate: nor am I deeply interested in a metaphysical passion for a nymph so shadowy, that her existence has ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... to paint at the Arrakan Pagoda to-day, but a pleasant looking man came on board with a chitsaya harp; I had to try and make a jotting of him. G. and Captain Turndrup brought him. He sat and played tunes for hours—epic tunes, which I'd have given anything to remember. His boat-shaped harp of thirteen strings was tuned in minor thirds, so you could readily pick out Celtic tunes on it. I am told Sir Arthur Sullivan came here and listened to his music and made many ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... gave him an opportunity for a brilliant series of word-pictures describing the life and character of the parts of Italy he had visited. Apart from his world-famous fairy tales, by which he set no great store, being ambitious of fame as a novelist, he wrote several successful plays, epic poems and novels. His fairy tales have been translated practically into every language. Hans Andersen died at the age of seventy, in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... feet, putting down his still half-full glass. "I'll make this epic story short, Max. As you said, the two actually valid methods of rising above the level in which you were born are in the Military and Religious Categories. Like you, even I couldn't stomach ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the interests of men. The Christian tradition did not survive because of Aquinas or fall before the Higher Criticism, nor will it be revived because someone proves the scientific plausibility of its doctrine. What we need to know about the Christian epic is the effect it had on men—true or false, they have believed in it for nineteen centuries. Where has it helped them, where hindered? What needs did it answer? What energies did it transmute? And what part of mankind did it neglect? Where did it begin to ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... main hall. This large room was the place where the lord and his companions were accustomed to sit at the great feasts after their return from a successful expedition. This is the "beer hall" that we read so much about in song, epic, and legend. Here the beer and the mead were passed; here arose the songs and the mirth of the warriors. On the walls of the hall might be seen the rude arms of the warrior, the shield and the spear, or decorations composed of the heads and the skins of wild beasts—all of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the Florentines whose work was {229} coveted afar. Pictures of wondrous beauty have been defaced and stolen, statuary has crumbled into the dust that lies thick upon the tombs of great men who have fallen. But the words of the Divine Comedy will never be forgotten, and the glory of an epic rests always with Italian literature. All the cold and passionless intellect of the Renaissance can be personified in Lorenzo the Magnificent, who encouraged the pagan creeds that the Prior of San Marco yearned to overthrow. Enemies in life, they serve as opposing types of ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... Love, and shows us the Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus—that wearisome imitation of the similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea—the sumptuously attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)—sits at the fountain in unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and holding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs. She will not yield to her new-born love for ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... affectation, rich in noble imagery. How far the applause of critics has rewarded the author of Orion I do not know, but I think the pleasure he enjoyed in its composition must have been a bounteous meed in itself. You could not, I imagine, have written that epic without at times deriving deep happiness from ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... fresh expectancy. So, when Palermo made high festival, The joy of matrons and of maidens all Was the mock terror of the tournament, Where safety, with the glimpse of danger blent, Took exaltation as from epic song, Which greatly tells the pains that ...
— How Lisa Loved the King • George Eliot
... days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could bring to that one simple phrase What were not rather loss than gain; That elegy so briefly fine, That epic writ in half a line, That little which so much conveys, Whose silence is a hymn of praise And throbs with ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... died, and then his children one after another until only one now remains, he worked and he saved. He bought a lot and built a house to rent; then he built another house; then he bought the land where his shop stands and rebuilt the shop itself. It was an epic of homely work. He took part in the work of the church and on election days he changed his coat, and went to ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... the national epic grew up it had the same origin and line of development. First there was the historical hero. His deeds were related by the traveling gleeman or minstrel—in brief chapters or ballads. Gradually mythical and supernatural elements came in; the number of achievements ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... as the goal of poetic endeavour the idea of the heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country what Vergil had intended to do for Rome in the Aeneid, to celebrate it—its origin, its prowess, its greatness, and the causes of it, in epic verse. Milton, three-quarters of a century later, turned over in his mind the plan of an English epic on the wars of Arthur, and when he left it was only to forsake the singing of English origins for the more ultimate theme of the origins of mankind. Spenser designed ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... shall admire and almost adore the Epic poems of the Ancients, and yet despise and execrate the ancient Romances, which are ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... the first, as he was not the only one, to collect the old epic materials of Persia. In the Avesta itself, with its ancient traditions, much can be found. More than this was handed down and bandied about from mouth to mouth. Some of it had even found its way into the Kalam of the Scribe; to-wit, the "Zarer, or Memorials of the Warriors" (A.D. ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... him by means of a light chain and hoop that locked around his waist to a staple set in the floor near one wall. The other prisoners regarded him as a hero, for since the day of the epic fight the mate had kept away, and they had been treated with tolerable decency. Quirl was able to cheer them up with predictions that the most of them would be eligible to ransom. But as he looked at the pale beauty of Lenore he felt grave misgivings, for he knew that ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most thrilling of occupations, but I question whether any biographer has ever had a better time gathering his material than I have had. Amid the old scenes, the old epic life of the frontier has been re-created for me by the men who were the leading actors in it. But my contact with it has not been only vicarious. In the course of this most grateful of labors I have myself come to know something of the life that ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... been expelled by Jupiter. But contrary to this pagan instinct, the Cumaean Sibyl stretched forward to a distant heaven of her aspirations and hopes—to a nobler future of the world, not sentimental and idyllic, but epic and heroic. She pictured the blessing or restoration of this earth itself as distinct from an invisible world of happiness. And in this respect she is more in sympathy with the Jewish and Christian religions than with her own. The golden age of the Hebrews was in the ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... another golden age, The rise of empire and of arts, The good and great inspiring epic rage, The wisest ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in history as one consistent epic.[7] Yet every student ought to know that mastery is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term to things unlike, insist that freedom is the primitive condition of the ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... twelve enormous volumes bound in parchment. They constituted the Talmud. There were also the "Ozarha-Kabod," a work written by one of Isaak's ancestors—that Todros Halevi who was the first Talmudist to believe in the Kabala; "Toldot-Adam," an epic poem, telling the history of the first man and his exile; "Sefer-Jezira," (Book of Creation), telling by pictures of the origin of the world; "Ka-arat Kezef," in which Ezobi warns the Israelites against the pernicious ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... chiefly of the moderns. For the antients, though it has not been attended to, had some peculiar advantages over us in this respect, resulting from the principles and practices of those times. For, as it hath been observed of the ancient epic Muse, that she borrowed much of her state and dignity from the false theology of the pagan world, so, I think, it may be justly said of the ancient tragic, that she has derived great advantages of probability from its mistaken moral. If ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... think the most American thing in that great American epic is Tom Sawyer's elaboration of an extremely difficult and romantic scheme, taking days to carry out, for securing the escape of the nigger Jim, which could have been managed quite easily in twenty minutes. You know how fond they are of lodges and brotherhoods. Every college ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... before peace came German generals paid ungrudging tributes to the efficiency of our Regular Army, writing down in their histories of war that this was the model of all armies, the most perfectly trained... It was spent by the spring of '15. Its memory remains as the last epic of those professional soldiers who, through centuries of English history, took "the King's shilling" and fought when they were told to fight, and left their bones in far places of the world and in many fields in Europe, and won for the British soldier universal fame as a terrible warrior. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... with the useful, then is the writer said to have succeeded in every point. Pleasantry (as the ingenious author of Clarissa says of a story) should be made only the vehicle of instruction; and thus romances themselves, as well as epic poems, may become worthy the perusal of the greatest of men: but when no moral, no lesson, no instruction, is conveyed to the reader, where the whole design of the composition is no more than to make us laugh, the writer comes very near to the character ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... sit all day by the fire, inscribing "ideas" every now and then in a pocket-book. I think he was writing an epic poem, and I think he was happy in an ineffectual way. He had thin red hair, untidy for want of a valet, a shining, delicate, hooked nose, narrow-lidded blue eyes, and a face with the colour and texture of a white-heart cherry. He used to spend his days in a ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... had so checkered and diversified a career," says Henry Wilson, "so it may at least be plausibly claimed that no man represents in himself more conflicting ideas and interests. His life is, in itself, an epic which finds few to equal it in the realms of either romance or reality." It was, after all, no misfortune for humanity that Frederick Douglass felt the iron hand of slavery; for his genius changed the drawbacks of color ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... the Calmuck Tartars; they hold (see Bergmann's 'Streifereien') that their 'Dschangariade' is the finest of all epic poems, past or coming; and, therefore, the Calmuck Lives of the Poets will naturally be inimitable. But confining our view to the unhappy literatures of Europe, ancient or modern, this is what we think of Dr. Johnson's efforts as a biographer. Consequently, we ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... nose, in allusion to the fate which here overtook the demon Shurpanakhi. It is altogether too savage an appellation for a city whose purity was established in the "Krita Yuga," and whose fame is coeval with that of the great protagonists of Hindu myth and epic. The great city of religion in the West stood upon seven hills, the holy city of the East stood upon nine; and the famous rivers which flow past them whisper in each case of a heritage of undying ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... and similar authors in Holland, Poland, and other countries, including W. Benjamin Smith, the American author of The Pre-christian Jesus (1906), and P. Jensen in Das Gilgamesch Epos in den Welt-literatur (1906), who makes the Jesus-story a variant of the Babylonian epic, 2000 B.C. A pretty strong list! (2) "But," continues Drews, "ordinary historians still ignore all this." Finally, he dismisses Jesus as "a figure swimming obscurely in the mists of tradition." Nevertheless I need hardly remark that, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... over it. In face and turn of genius he differs in every respect from his successor, Spenser; and in truth, in Chaucer and Spenser we see the fountains of the two main streams of British song: the one flowing through the drama and the humourous narrative, the other through the epic and the didactic poem. Chaucer rooted himself firmly in fact, and looked out upon the world in a half-humourous, half-melancholy mood. Spenser had but little knowledge of men as men; the cardinal ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Critic! whose dog-eared manuscript has circulated from one publisher's drawer to another until its initial pages are scarcely readable, while the ample residue retain all their pristine freshness of hue, you are welcome to your revenge! Your novel may be tedious beyond endurance; your epic a preposterous waste of once valuable foolscap; but your slashing review is sure to be ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Dorothea was just then under way—Goethe and Schiller interchanged views by letter on the subject of epic poetry in general and the ballad in particular. As they had both written ballads in their youth, it was but natural that they should be led to fresh experiments with the species. So they both began to make ballads for next year's Musenalmanach. Schiller contributed five, among them the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... doubled our obligation by giving us—a Pope. He had a strong imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
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