|
|
|
More "Lyric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the disturbance of the state, an absolute government will certainly more effectually prohibit them from, or punish them for publishing such thoughts, than a free one could do. But how does that cramp the genius of an epic, dramatic, or lyric poet? or how does it corrupt the eloquence of an orator in the pulpit or at the bar? The number of good French authors, such as Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, and La Fontaine, who seemed to dispute it with the Augustan age, flourished under the despotism of Lewis ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... told him in Rome, the young man was a Sentimentalist with no exact vision of life. His heart was perpetually distorting whatever his mind told him was fact. This woman, with her beauty, her love of music, had touched him at the lyric moment of life, when reality was but the unstable foundation for dream. Life as might be, glowing, colored, and splendid,—life as it was within him, not as this hideous maelstrom all about him reported. And why not the I, the I! cried the spirit of youth, the egotistic spirit of the age. For ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... illustrated the annals of England! The divine conceptions of Milton, the luxuriant fervour of Thomson, the vast discoveries of Newton, the deep wisdom of Bacon, the burning thoughts of Gray, the masculine intellect of Johnson, the exquisite polish of Pope, the lyric fire of Campbell, the graphic powers of Scott, the glowing eloquence of Burke, the admirable conceptions of Reynolds, the profound sagacity of Hume, the pictured page of Gibbon, demonstrate how mighty and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... last fashion, friend, that hook? To hang your hat on? 'Tis a useful crook!' Emphatic: 'No wind, O majestic nose, Can give THEE cold!—save when the mistral blows!' Dramatic: 'When it bleeds, what a Red Sea!' Admiring: 'Sign for a perfumery!' Lyric: 'Is this a conch?. . .a Triton you?' Simple: 'When is the monument on view?' Rustic: 'That thing a nose? Marry-come-up! 'Tis a dwarf pumpkin, or a prize turnip!' Military: 'Point against cavalry!' Practical: 'Put it in a lottery! Assuredly 'twould be ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... say no more of them; but there are other worthy deeds of which no poet has worthily sung, and which are still wooing the poet's muse. Of these I am bound to make honourable mention, and shall invoke others to sing of them also in lyric and other strains, in a manner becoming the actors. And first I will tell how the Persians, lords of Asia, were enslaving Europe, and how the children of this land, who were our fathers, held them back. Of these I will speak first, and praise ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... that Galds lacks the lyric flame which touches with poignant emotion the common things of life. He did not entirely escape the rhetoric of his race. And he was curiously little interested in the passions of sex—too little to be altogether human, perhaps. ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe. This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play-writers be; and show them what religious, what glorious ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... sounds, the song of crickets, coming in full choir upon the wind, and fancied that, if moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that. Finally, he took a draught at the Shaker spring, and, as if it were the true Castalia, was forthwith moved to compose a lyric, a Farewell to his Harp, which he swore should be its closing strain, the last verse that an ungrateful world should have from him. This effusion, with two or three other little pieces, subsequently written, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 and dancing characteristic ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... Poets and critics have been unanimous in their praise of this exquisite lyric, which, had she written nothing more, would alone have been amply sufficient to vindicate Aphara Behn's genius and immortality. It was a great favourite with Swinburne, who terms it 'that melodious and magnificent song'; Mr. Bullen is warm in its praise, whilst Professor Saintsbury ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... first Gipsy lyric then came another to which the captain especially directed my attention as being what Sam. Petalengro calls 'The girl in the red chemise'—as well as I can recall his words. A very sweet song, with a simple but spirited chorus, and as the sympathetic electricity of excitement seized ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... brazen solution of his own wicked and brazen conundrum. France, such was the proposition, had worked a miracle upon English ground; as if with some magician's rod, she had called up spawn innumerable of authors, lyric, epic, dramatic, pastoral, each after his kind. But by whom had France moved in this creation as the chief demi-urgus? By whom, Mr. Pope? Name, name, Mr. Pope! 'Ay,' we must suppose the unhappy man to reply, 'that's the very question which I was going to answer, if you wouldn't ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... May Century pictured brave.) It was a miracle of rare device, Costing "a pile," but cheap at any price! A damsel with a five-stringed "Jo" In a vision once I saw; It was an Alabama maid, And on her banjo light she played, Singing of sweet Su-san-nah! Could I revive within me Amphion's lyric song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me As the music loud and long That sure did raise this dome in air, That mighty dome!—those halls of price! COLUMBIA'S magic set them there, And all who see cry, "Rare! O rare! This beats great KUBLA KHAN'S device! Chicago outsoars Xanadu! COLUMBIA'S World's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various
... she like? Does tragedy or comedy favor her most? You see," he added apologetically, "when people begin to talk about anybody, we Grubstreet hacks thrive on the gossip. It is deplorable"—with regret—"but small talk and tattle bring more than a choice lyric or sonnet. And, heaven help us!"—shaking his head—"what a vendible article a fine scandal is! It sells fast, like goods at a Dutch auction. Penny a line? More nearly six pence! If I could only bring myself to deal in such merchandise! If I were ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... poet-like, even by sorrow,—he lives and loves, and chants the deep, homely beauty of his lays. He is as genuine, as wholesome and real as sweet-flag and clover. Even when he utters pure sentiment, as in that perfect lyric, "My Psalm," or in the intrepid, exquisite humility—healthful and sound as the odor of new-mown hay or balsam-firs—of "Andrew Rykman's Prayer," he maintains the same attitude of realism. He states God and inward experience as he would state sunshine and the growth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... no rhyme that is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat; There is no metre that's half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; And the loveliest lyric I ever heard Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.— If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful parts of speech. And the natural art that they say these with, My soul would sing of beauty and ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... the greatest poet of Poland during its existence as an independent kingdom. His Laments are his masterpiece, the choicest work of Polish lyric poetry ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... or to admit so much as this, however, is not to say the last word. The question is whether Wordsworth, however unequal to Shelley in lyric quality, to Coleridge or to Keats in imaginative quality, to Burns in tenderness, warmth, and that humour which is so nearly akin to pathos, to Byron in vividness and energy, yet possesses excellences of his own which place him in other respects above these master-spirits ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... was often irregularly used for 'song' or 'poem.' A proper sonnet in Clement Robinson's poetical anthology, A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, 1584, is a lyric in ten four-line alternatively rhymed stanzas. Neither Barnabe Googe's Eglogs, Epyttaphes, and Sonnettes, 1563, nor George Turbervile's Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French word 'quatorzain' was ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... the witness of her contemporaries. Sappho was at the height of her career about six centuries before Christ, at a period when lyric poetry was peculiarly esteemed and cultivated at the centres of Greek life. Among the Molic peoples of the Isles, in particular, it had been carried to a high pitch of perfection, and its forms had become the subject of assiduous study. Its ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... Esq. a young Irish gentleman, of whom Lord Charlemont had become the friend and patron. He afterwards published "Thoughts on Lyric Poetry, with an Ode to the Moon;" an "essay on Ridicule, Wit, and Humour;" and a translation of the Argonautics of Appollonius Rhodius. He died ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... which the Literary Opinion had copied; and he was the greatest possible success. Most of it I feel sure the school didn't understand. But just as he finished the last two lines—those lines the magazine had called "as perfect in winged lyric quality as any lines in the English language could be"—the Byrd, whom Sam had groomed carefully and brought in from the brier-patch for the occasion, rose, and, with his freckles black with the intensity of his comprehension of the poem, spread his ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... prefer the more beautiful to the better attested reading. I have often excised weak or superfluous stanzas when sure that excision would improve; and have not hesitated to extract a few stanzas from a long poem when persuaded that they could stand alone as a lyric. The apology for such experiments can only lie in their success: but the risk is one which, in my judgement, the anthologist ought to take. A few small corrections have been made, but only ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... the people; song was on their lips. The early spring of Italy came later to the northern latitudes, but when it did come, it brought with it Marot and Ronsard in France, Wyatt and Surrey in England. More significant than the output of the greater poets was the wide distribution of lyric talent. Not a few compilations of verses offer to the public the songs of many writers, some of them unknown by name. England, especially, was "a nest of singing birds," rapturously greeting the dawn, and the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... For the lyric poets the cuckoo is "companion of the spring," "darling of the spring;" coming with the daisy, and the primrose, and the blossoming sweet-pea. Where the sound came from I could not tell; it puzzled Wordsworth, with younger eyes than ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to the tune. Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, which records a piece of Scottish news of no importance whatever, has become an English nursery rhyme. In Jamie Douglas an historical fact has been interwoven with a beautiful lyric. Indeed, the chances of corruption ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... joy that one gets watching a handicraftsman at his work, a goldsmith hammering out his gold into those thin plates as delicate as the petals of a yellow rose, or drawing it out into the long wires like tangled sunbeams, so perfect and precious is the mere handling of it; or the little lyric interludes that break in here and there like the singing of a thrush, and are as swift and as sure as the beating of a bird's wing, as light and bright as the apple-blossoms that flutter fitfully down to the orchard grass after a spring shower, and look the lovelier for the rain's ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... the pieces in the Shih are ballads, some are songs, some are hymns, and of others the nature can hardly be indicated by any English denomination They have often been spoken of by the general name of odes, understanding by that term lyric poems that were ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... encounters in this degenerate age. Well, her next essay in creative composition is my supper, which will be an equally spirited impromptu. To-morrow she will darn and sew me an epic; and her desserts will continue to be in the richest lyric vein. Such, sir, are the poems of Lisa, all addressed to me, who came so near to gallivanting ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... Gabriel Maxenius, however, was the first to publish a work on Finnish national poetry, which brought to light the beauties of the Kalevala. It appeared in 1733, and bore the title: De Effectibus Naturalibus. The book contains a quaint collection of Finnish poems in lyric forms, chiefly incantations; but the author was entirely at a loss how to account for them, or how to appreciate them. He failed to see their intimate connection with the religious worship ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... sarcastic. His people, a people among whose many fine qualities moderation in prosperity cannot be reckoned, seemed for a time to be drunk with pride. Even Boileau, hurried along by the prevailing enthusiasm, forgot the good sense and good taste to which he owed his reputation. He fancied himself a lyric poet, and gave vent to his feelings in a hundred and sixty lines of frigid bombast about Alcides, Mars, Bacchus, Ceres, the lyre of Orpheus, the Thracian oaks and the Permessian nymphs. He wondered whether Namur, had, like ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... eminently just. For Camoens was his model; not the Camoens of the epic, but the Camoens of the lyrics and the sonnets, where the passion of tenderness finds its supreme utterance. Braga has noted five stages of development in Joao de Deus's artistic life—the imitative, the idyllic, the lyric, the pessimistic and the devout phases. Under each of these divisions is included much that is of extreme interest, especially to contemporaries who have passed through the same succession of emotional experience, and it is highly probable that Caturras and Gaspar, pieces as witty as anything ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... the concertina played "Matamoras," Jones continued his lyric, when two Mexicans leaped at each other, and the concertina stopped ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... long ago in a family, for one of the best and bravest whom this country has ever known. And more than one has brought back from the war a sorrowful narrative of a long farewell inclosed in as brief and touching words as those of the following lyric:— ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... fame, For still they soared unutterably high: I've looked on Ida with a Trojan's eye; Athos, Olympus, AEtna, Atlas, made These hills seem things of lesser dignity, All, save the lone Soracte's height displayed, Not NOW in snow, which asks the lyric Roman's aid ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... Scandinavian poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in professional and literary hands. The mediaeval minstrels and jongleurs (who may best be studied in Leon Gautier's Introduction ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... the Samson Agonistes are works which, though of very different merit, offer some marked points of resemblance. Both are lyric poems in the form of plays. There are perhaps no two kinds of composition so essentially dissimilar as the drama and the ode. The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the cluster that would have rotted on the tree, and bears it to the wine-press to change it into perfumed wine. Listen! there is, a dozen hours from Alexandria, towards the west, not far from the sea, a nunnery, the rules of which, a masterpiece of wisdom, deserve to be put in lyric verse and sung to the sound of the theorbo and tambourines. It may truly be said that the women who are there, submissive to these rules, have their feet upon earth and their faces in heaven. They desire to be poor, that Jesus may love them, modest, that He may gaze upon them; chaste that He ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... sometimes fell upon the earth And those who saw it wept with joy and fright. "Thou art Apollo, than the sun more bright!" They cried. "Our music is of little worth, But thrill our blood with thy creative mirth Thou god of song, thou lord of lyric might!" ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... containing the 'topmost note in the stupendous agony of the drama,' are rhymed. The management of rhyme is a difficult and very delicate art; it is an instrument that requires a first-class performer, like Mr. Swinburne, to bring out its potency; to this art the English lyric, the ode and the song, owe their musical perfection. Mr. Swinburne, in an essay upon Matthew Arnold's New Poems (1867), has said, truly, that 'rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in England'; and that 'to throw away the natural grace ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... one lays himself liable to the accusation of having forsaken democracy. For all that, "fundamental brainwork" is behind every respect-worthy piece of writing, whether it be a lightsome lyric that seems as careless as a redbird's flit or a formal epic, an impressionistic essay or a great novel that measures the depth of human destiny. Nonintellectual literature is as nonexistent as education without mental discipline, or as ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... I remember it, a most exquisite night—a white poem, a frosty, starry lyric of light. It was one of those nights on which one might fall asleep and dream happy dreams of gardens of mirth and song, feeling all the while through one's sleep the soft splendour and radiance of the white moon-world outside, as one hears soft, far-away music sounding ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... fall, its literary fortunes express themselves, when we try to generalise, in a series of curves, alternate rises and declines, which may be repeated again and again. In English literature out of the unknown past rose the Anglo-Saxon lyric and epic, Deor's Complaint, Beowulf, and the poems of Caedmon and Cynewulf. From the death-like sleep of our language which followed the Norman Conquest rose the heights of thirteenth-century romance. From the ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... publisht in three volumes. During his Sea and Land ministry he was brought in contact with seamen and this finds expression in his later works taking character from life on the sea. Many of his verses have found place in Christian hymnology, notably such a lyric as "Jesus, Savior, pilot me over life's tempestuous sea," with that sweet verse "as a mother stills her child Thou canst hush the ocean wild." Another hymn was "Wrecked and struggling in mid ocean, clinging to a ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... at the Lyric Theatre is | |written in accordance with Lord Wynlea's | |dictum quoted above. It is mannerly, well | |poised, ingratiating and deft. As a minor | |effort in the high comedy style it is | |welcome, ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... studied on that account. The Druid proper was governor, judge, philosopher, expounder, and executioner. The ovaidd, or ovates, were the priests, chiefly concerned in the study of theology and the practice of religion. The bards were heroic poets of rare lyric power; they kept the national traditions in trust, and claimed the second sight and the power of prophecy. Much has been said of their human sacrifices in colossal images of wicker-work—the "immani magnitudine simulacra" of Caesar—which were filled with human victims, and which crackled ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... and the short poems, especially Lycidas, were great favourites with her. One might have supposed that she would not like Wordsworth. As a matter of fact, she loved him and thoroughly understood him and his philosophy of life. She did not merely read the lyric and elegiac poems like Ruth, but had gone through and enjoyed The Excursion and many of the longer poems. Coleridge she loved, and Southey, and Crabbe, and Gray, and Dr. Johnson, and indeed the whole of English poetic literature. In modern poetry she read freely Tennyson ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... epos, a saying or oracle, the term "epic" is generally given to some form of heroic narrative wherein tragedy, comedy, lyric, dirge, and idyl are skilfully blended to form ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... fishermen have grown fewer, and the men who still swing the axes and haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and silent. "Labor" looms vast upon the future political and social horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric note. They have turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the swift and fierce insistence of the short story, illustrated by the Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... his long silence to some purpose. Those who remember his pre-war achievements in the field of polychromatic romanticism will hardly be prepared for his present development, which lifts him at a bound from the overcrowded ranks of lyric-writers to the uncongested heights whereon recline the great masters of epic poetry. And yet it was perhaps inevitable. The thunder and the reek of war (the last two years of which, we believe, were spent by Mr. Geek in the Egg Control Department) could scarcely have failed to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... story, "Erec et Enide," carries chiefly a moral of courtesy. His is poet-laureate's work, says M. Gaston Paris; the flower of a twelfth-century court and of twelfth-century French; the best example of an admirable language; but not lyric; neither strong, nor deep, nor deeply felt. What we call tragedy is unknown to it. Christian's world is sky-blue and rose, with only enough red to give it warmth, and so flooded with light that even its mysteries count ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... going—a matter of some seventy-nine verses. Seventy-eight were quite unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cowpunchers monstrously. They, knowing him to be a singular man, forebore ever to press him, and awaited his own humor, lest he should weary of the lyric; and when after a day of silence apparently saturnine, he would lift his gentle voice ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... lyric begins by wondering how and why the strangers have come: then come thoughts of the voyage and places they must have passed; the coast, where Phineus was haunted by the Harpies, the enchanted sea beyond the Symplegades, ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... the promise had come to him. Although his mission was not properly a prophetic one,—although, in the main, it belonged to him to describe poetically what had come to him through prophetic inspiration, yet prophetic inspiration and sacred lyric are frequently commingled in him. The man who is "the sweet psalmist of Israel" claims a [Hebrew: naM] in 2 Sam. xxiii. 1, and, in ver. 2, says that the Spirit of God spake by him, and His word was upon ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... friends? Of course we are. Old rivals too, In commerce and adventure the world over. From JOHN THE GREAT'S time to the present, you In Africa have been a daring rover; "The Rover's free"! Ah! that's good lyric brag— He is not free to trample ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... two forms of speech,—the one spoken in the northern part of the country. This, the langue d'oil, became at length the French language. But the langue d'oc, a soft and musical tongue, survived long enough to become the vehicle of lyric strains, mostly on subjects of love and gallantry, still familiar in mention, and famous as the songs of the troubadours. The flourishing time of the troubadours was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Provencal is an alternative name ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... on to singing and nearly brought down the roof of Pinoli's restaurant. Cholmeley, the awful being of whose classic taste in Greek iambics I once stood in awe, sang with great feeling a fragment of lyric literature of which the following was, as far as I ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... woman, lapsing, as she occasionally did lapse, into the easy Italian of the lyric stage. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... herself. Words seemed crowding to her tongue. She would not give them utterance; but her look spoke much at the moment. What, Yorke tried to read, but could not. The language was there, visible, but untranslatable—a poem, a fervid lyric, in an unknown tongue. It was not a plain story, however, no simple gush of feeling, no ordinary love-confession—that was obvious. It was something other, deeper, more intricate than he guessed at. He felt his revenge had not struck home. He felt that ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... was a lyric of merit. The words were non-sense, as befitted the play, but the music was worthy of something better. Delmars struck into it in a rich tenor that owned a quality that ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... by name, Your friend, little Cally, your wishes proclaim; Read this and you'll soon learn to know it, I'm not your papa the great lyric poet. ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... Liddell and Scott definition: "any art over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... all these difficulties in the way, there still remains a body of verse in Browning's work which will richly repay any reader. The lyrics and short poems like The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Pippa Passes, Prospice, O Lyric Love, The Last Ride, One Word More, How They Brought the Good News, Herve Riel, the epilogue to Asolando, The Lost Leader, Men and Women, and A Soul's Tragedy will give any reader a taste of the real Browning. If you like these poems, then try the more ambitious poems like A ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... that this lyric, except for its penultimate verse, soon to be quoted, does not seem to me what Mr. Chesterton calls it—"delightful." Nothing, plainly, did bring these two together; she may have looked jealously at his models, and ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... conveyed—by the way in which the writer has done his work, the subject chosen being only his vehicle. Where a man who has something to say looks about for means to say it worthily, he may select a tale, a philosophical disquisition, a familiar essay, a drama or a lyric poem. He may choose badly or well, but in any case it is ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... represent the three vices of Dutch literature—of losing themselves in the clouds, of creeping on the ground, of entangling themselves in the meshes of mysticism—are grouped a number of epic, comic, satiric, and lyric poets, most of whom flourished in the seventeenth and a few in the eighteenth century. Many of them are renowned in Holland, but none possesses sufficient originality to attract the attention of the ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... Madame George Sand must be gratified this time! Your article this morning upon her autobiography really did hit the bull's-eye, plumb! What fire! what enthusiasm! what lyric strains!" ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sundry more special denominations; the most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satyric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others; some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with; some by the sort of verse they like best to write in; for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that numerous ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... things of art we began, at the landmarks set by Leonardo and Michael Angelo; and are come now, not quite at random, to the lyric and elegiac loveliness of Andrea del Sarto. To praise him would need sweeter and purer speech than this of ours. His art is to me as the Tuscan April in its temperate days, fresh and tender and clear, but lulled ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... her friends, or producing good humour and happiness in the family circle. She had formed the acquaintance of Neil Gow, the celebrated violinist, and composed, at his particular request, the words to his popular tune "Farewell to Whisky,"—the only lyric from her pen which has hitherto been published. In all the collections of Scottish song, it appears as anonymous. In the present work, it is printed from a copy in one ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... not be aware, Miss Tazewell, that the lyric to which you have reference is celebrated, both for its antiquity, and the pleasing harmonies that must ever commend it to the taste of the true lover of music; although I allow that to a disciple of the modern and more flimsy school of this glorious ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... in the Iliad. The poem is almost wholly devoted to the praise and glorification of a single hero; it retains very much of the old manners of the earlier stages of epic poetry, before it ceased to be lyric. It is a poem ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... he settled in New Orleans, where he became a professor of law in the University of Louisiana. Though the author of a volume of poems of more than usual excellence, it is the melancholy lyric, My Life is like the Summer Rose, that, more than all the rest, has given him a niche in the temple of literary fame. Is it necessary to quote a stanza of ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... breast, Sang on, prophetic of serener days, As confident as June's completer hours. And I stood listening like a hind, who hears A wood nymph breathing in a forest flute Among the beech-boles of myth-haunted ways: And when it ceased, the memory of the air Blew like a syrinx in my brain: I made A lyric of the notes ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... Yet, as is generally known, this dramatic and lyric adaptation of the famous romance is not particularly happy. I was much embarrassed and I pretended not to understand, but I never dared to go ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... him across the golden spire of the pinnacle of Fame, and whose fine frenzy has as yet given him but a scurvy mundane support, when Scripsit brings home his modest rasher, and finds, on unfolding it, that it is wrapped in the unsold sheets of his last lyric,—doesn't he think that the tallow which helped him to pen the thoughts in the midnight watches was the costliest of feu sacre? When Senator Patriota sits brooding over the speech which has carried the opposition against him, and sees his honorable friend slipping into the place he has manoeuvred ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... the last, and the most interesting, of these recruits, and a good example of Murchard's somewhat morbid assertion that our old friend "liked 'em juicy." It was indeed a fact that Culwin, for all his mental dryness, specially tasted the lyric qualities in youth. As he was far too good an Epicurean to nip the flowers of soul which he gathered for his garden, his friendship was not a disintegrating influence: on the contrary, it forced the young idea to robuster bloom. And in Phil Frenham he had a fine subject for experimentation. The ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... of the Esthonians. Varieties of Literature from Foreign Literary Journals and Original MSS., now first published. London, 1795, pp. 22-44 (reprinted in "Folk-Lore Journal," iii. pp. 156-169, 1885). Contains twelve specimens of lyric poetry, undoubtedly based on some German publication. The anonymous compiler makes the strange mistake of regarding the Esthonians ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... every note Of every lung and tongue and throat, Ay, every rhythm and rhyme Of everything that lives and loves And upward, ever upward moves From lowly to sublime! Earth's multitudinous Sons of Light, I heard them lift their lyric might With each and every chanting sprite That lit the sky that wondrous night As far as ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... and which was held up to ridicule by the great Lockhart. More than ten years followed in which the poet wrote nothing, then he began a literary career which lifted him to the highest place in the literary world, a place which he has since held, and as a lyric poet he has never ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... stay in Milan, and breathed with rapture the incense burned in abundance before him. The Italian Journal in its account of the coronation reached lyric heights: ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Having fastened upon Germany, he questions himself similarly with reference to the cities. Yorick's love of lists, of mock-serious discrimination, of inconsequential reasonings is here copied. The call upon epic, tragic, lyric poets, musicians, etc., which follows here is a further imitation of ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... written in about five early years. Tennyson went on to a patriarchal age, but there is little of his later work that bears comparison with what he wrote before he was forty. Browning produced volume after volume, but, with the exception of an occasional fine lyric, his later work is hardly more than an illustration of his faults of writing. Coleridge deserted poetry very early; Byron, Shelley, Keats, ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... How did the two situations affect Una? 10. Note the teachings in xxiii (prayer), xxiv (absolution), and xxv (mortification of the flesh). 11. Observe that Faith teaches the Knight his relations to God; Charity, those to his fellow-men. 12. Explain the lyric note in l. 378. 13. Give an account of the knight's visit to the Hill of Contemplation. Explain the allegory. 14. Find a stanza complimentary to Queen Elizabeth. 16. What prophecy ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... A lyric conception—my friend, the Poet, said—hits me like a bullet in the forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running down the spine, —then a gasp and a great jump of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to get the fullest measure of music from this lyric gem you should put a strong emphasis on the final "ing." Joshua always did and the summer people never seemed to tire of hearing him recite it. There are ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... out all joy from his life and made him long for death, in spite of his feeling that he was in some measure a help and comfort to his sister." Under the influence of this great sorrow he wrote The Two Voices, Ulysses, "Break, Break, Break," and began that exquisite series of lyric poems, afterwards joined together in the In Memoriam. His friendship for Hallam remained throughout life with him as one of his most ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Palazzo del Te is the Villa Farnesina, raised on the banks of the Tiber by Baldassare Peruzzi for his fellow townsman Agostino Chigi of Siena. It is an idyll placed beside a lyric ode, gentler and quieter in style, yet full of grace, breathing the large and liberal spirit of enjoyment that characterised the age of Leo. The frescoes of Galatea and Psyche, executed by Raphael and his pupils, have made this villa famous in the annals of Italian painting. The memory of the Roman ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... is this same lyric cry that has been crystallised for all time, so far as the American people are concerned, in "The Old ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... child Monona loudly, and was hushed by both parents in simultaneous exclamation which rivalled this lyric outburst. They were alone at table. Di, daughter of a wife early lost to Mr. Deacon, was not there. Di was hardly ever there. She was at that age. That age, ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... on the fingers. Philomela, daughter of Pandion, changed into a nightingale. Phyllis, the S. Phyllis of a former lyric (To Groves). Gild the ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... that we are indebted for the connection of a national error, and for the cure of our Pindaric madness. He first taught the English writers that Pindar's odes were regular; and though certainly he had not the lire requisite for the higher species of lyric poetry, he has shown us that enthusiasm has its rules, and that in mere confusion there is neither ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... million bits of quartz a glow through which pirouetted the antic sand-fleas. Carl's cigarette had the fragrance that comes only from being impregnated with the smoke of an outdoor fire. The waves were lyric, and a group at the next fire crooned "Old Black Joe." The two lovers curled in their nest. Hand ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... we are not here much concerned. They are not fairly to be classed among "supers," and they pertain almost exclusively to the lyric stage. It is to be noted, however, that they are in some sort evidence of the connection that once existed between the Church and the Theatre; the ecclesiastical and the laical drama. At any rate, the chorus singers often undertake divided duties in this respect, and accept engagements ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... dipped into a little valley and rose again, breasting the slope of a wooded hill which thrust itself out from the steeper flank of the mountain-range. Down the hill-side a song floated to meet us—that most noble lyric of old Robert Herrick: ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... followed at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, as well as the Latin poetry of the same period, is rich in proofs of the powerful effect of nature on the human mind. The first glance at the lyric poets of that time will suffice to convince us. Elaborate descriptions of natural scenery, it is true, are very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age, poetry had something else to paint nature vigorously, but no effort to ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... {lyric} poems, the more easily to support his poverty, began to make a tour of the celebrated cities of Asia, singing the praises of victors for such reward as he might receive. After he had become enriched ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... of pity for outraged humanity, her anger at the cruelties of the slave-driver aye ready with knout or knife, are manifest in every line. Beyond the intense interest of the pure narrative we have passages of a rhythm that is lyric, exquisitely descriptive of the picturesque tropical scenery and exotic vegetations, fragrant and luxuriant; there are intimate accounts of adventuring and primitive life; there are personal touches which lend a colour only personal touches can, as Aphara tells her prose-epic ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... that the cynic sneers At such a rule of life; That, after but a few short years, Dissension should be rife. Ah! Lady, you'll avoid heart-ache, And scorn of bard satiric, If haply you should deign to take A lesson from our lyric. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... himself in a whole literature of so-called plays, which may possibly be studied, and even acted, by societies organized to that laudable end. But the dramatist who declares his end to be mere self-expression stultifies himself in that very phrase. The painter may paint, the sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself,[5] but the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Our purpose to inflame Our soldiers' arteries with lust of fame; To give them something in the lyric line That shall be tantamount to fumes of wine, Yet not too heady, like the champagne (sweet) That lately left them dormant in the street, So that the British, coming up just then, Took them for swine and not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... claim some capacity in the diviner flights of lyric letters, friend. You are not to despise poetry. Nay—rather contemn those who bring scorn to the name of poet—vain writers for filthy pence—fellows ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... publication, in 1855, of the Poems, in two volumes, entitled "Men and Women," Browning reviewed his work and made an interesting reclassification of it. He separated the simpler pieces of a lyric or epic cast—such rhymed presentations of an emotional moment, for example, as "Mesmerism" and "A Woman's Last Word," or the picturesque rhymed verse telling a story of an experience, such as "Childe Roland" and "The Statue and the Bust"—from their more complex companions, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... and came a child to Ohio; but William H. Lytle, dear to lovers of poetry as the author of the fine lyric, "Antony and Cleopatra," was born in Cincinnati, of the old Scotch-Irish stock, in 1826. He had everything pleasant in life and he enjoyed his prosperity, but when the war came he met its call halfway. At Chickamauga he fell, pierced by three bullets, ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... this Volume the productions of very distant periods. The lyric pieces were written in earlier youth; I now think the Ode the most worthless species of composition as well as the most difficult, and should never again attempt it, even if my future pursuits were such as allowed leisure for poetry. The poems addressed to the heart ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... that work (my own excepted) is known to exist. Goodeson's (printed at the end of the last century) is the only copy approaching to anything like completeness, and that is very unlike Purcell's Tempest. Did A.R. find in Purcell's Tempest the music of the beautiful lyric, "Where the Bee sucks?" No. Yet Purcell composed music to it. The absence, then, of "The Owl is abroad," is no proof that Purcell did not write music for that ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... heart and life. Soon the Achilles in the sky looked down upon 20,000 young Achilles walking through the streets beneath. With what admiration do men recall the intellectual achievements of Athens! What temples, and what statues in them! What orators and eloquence! What dramas! What lyric poems! What philosophers! Yet one ideal man who never lived, save in a poet's vision, turned rude tribes into intellectual giants. Thus each nation hungers for heroes. When it has none God sends poets to invent them as soul food for the nation's youth. The best gift to a people is not vineyards ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and they are filled with anecdotes, songs and stories adapted to the maintenance of patriotism and of devotion to the sacred person of His Majesty and to the Napoleonic dynasty."—To this end, the police likewise improves, orders and pays for dramatic or lyric productions of all kinds, cantatas, ballets, impromptus, vaudevilles, comedies, grand-operas, comic operas, a hundred and seventy-six works in one day, composed for the birth of the King of Rome and paid for in rewards to the sum of 88,400 francs. Let the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... still sung; Queen Mary loved music, and wrote verses in French; and James VI., the last occupant of the Scottish throne, sought reputation as a writer both of Latin and English poetry. Under the patronage of the Royal House of Stewart, epic and lyric poetry flourished in Scotland. The poetical chroniclers Barbour, Henry the Minstrel, and Wyntoun, are familiar names, as are likewise the poets Henryson, Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lyndsay. But the authors of the songs of the people have been forgotten. In a ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... we passed on to singing and nearly brought down the roof of Pinoli's restaurant. Cholmeley, the awful being of whose classic taste in Greek iambics I once stood in awe, sang with great feeling a fragment of lyric literature of which the following was, as far as ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... "ragtime" band, playing tom-tomic strains—the lyric style of dinner-gong music that tears holes in the air. The leader was an imitator of Sousa and had his gymnastic eccentricities down to a fine point. He executed a fantasia on his horn of plenty that brought a shower of silver ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... that anything more acute, delicate, and discriminating, and, I must add, more entirely valueless and pedantic, I do not think I ever heard. It must have required immense and complicated knowledge. He was tracing the development of a certain kind of dramatic lyric, and what surprised me was that he supplied the subtle intellectual connection, the missing links, so to speak, of which there is no earthly record. Let me give a single instance. He was accounting for a rather sudden change ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cases, as in the few poems of shipwreck or of mental conflict, we can only wonder at the gift of vivid imagination by which this recluse woman can delineate, by a few touches, the very crises of physical or mental struggle. And sometimes again we catch glimpses of a lyric strain, sustained perhaps but for a line or two at a time, and making the reader regret its sudden cessation. But the main quality of these poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor sometimes exasperating, seemingly wayward, but ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... will admit, though, that Peter has his lure. I read about him in the Tavistock Gazette, one of the few papers, I fancy, which does not belong to Lord NORTHCLIFFE; and this is how the lyric (it is really a lyric, although it masquerades as an advertisement) runs, not only in the paper but in my head: "To be let, by Tender" (this is not an oath but some odd legal or commercial term) "as and from Lady Day all that nice little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... with little variety of images, and a still scantier stock of language, is obliged to turn his few words to many purposes, by likenesses so clear and analogies so remote as to give his language the semblance and character of lyric poetry interspersed with grotesques. Something not unlike this was the case of such men as Behmen and Fox with regard to the Bible. It was their sole armoury of expressions, their only organ ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Roth's stirring "Chariot Race" and St. Gaudens's equestrian statue of General Sherman. Sculpture was profusely used to beautify buildings. Wholly original and charming were the four groups for the Temple of Music: Heroic Music, Sacred Music, Dance Music, and Lyric Music. Perched in every corner were figures of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... is't not? Is that well managed or not? Is the "thin Blue line" well disciplined or not? Have you such absolute perfection of "alltogetherishness" on your lyric stage as the Force voluntarily maintains—in its own interests, and obedient to its own peculiar ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... tree, and bears it to the wine-press to change it into perfumed wine. Listen! there is, a dozen hours from Alexandria, towards the west, not far from the sea, a nunnery, the rules of which, a masterpiece of wisdom, deserve to be put in lyric verse and sung to the sound of the theorbo and tambourines. It may truly be said that the women who are there, submissive to these rules, have their feet upon earth and their faces in heaven. They desire to be poor, that Jesus may love them, modest, that ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... the other little masterpieces of story-telling in verse are unfortunately untranslatable, as are all poems but a lyric or two, now and then, by a happy accident. A translated poem is a boiled strawberry, as some one once put it brutally. But the tales which M. Coppee has written in prose—a true poet's prose, nervous, vigorous, flexible, and firm—these ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... of thought; whose gift it is to find speech in dumb things and eloquence in the ideal half of the living world; to whom sorrow is a melody and joy sweet music; to whom the humblest effort of a humble life can furnish an immortal lyric, and in whom one thought of the Divine can inspire a sublime hymn. Another stoops and takes a handful of clay from the earth, and with the pressure of his fingers moulds it to the reality of an unreal image seen in dreams; or, standing before the vast, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... Bergerac furnished more laughable specimens. No phrase of Rombus equals the order given by the Pedant to his son when sending him to Venice to engage in commerce: "Since thou hast never desired to drink of the pool engendered by the hoof of the feathered horse,[248] and as the lyric harmony of the learned murderer of Python has never inflated thy speech, try if in merchandise Mercury will lend thee his Caduceus. So may the turbulent AEolus be as affable to thee as to the peaceful nests of halcyons. In short, Charlot, thou must go." Sidney kept entirely to these ineffectual attempts, ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... lyre take similar care that their young disciple is temperate and gets into no mischief; and when they have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the poems of other excellent poets, who are the lyric poets; and these they set to music, and make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children's souls, in order that they may learn to be more gentle, and harmonious, and rhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action; for the life of man in every part has need of ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... like to? The hills are one long glory to-day." It was not the note of her prayer, it was well-ordered and calm. Still, Steering's heart leaped like a boy's at her friendliness, and he began to speak his gratitude in a lyric tune: ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... were seeking to catch some lyric exordia as they flew by immersed in the billows ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... said, if we only had important personages, formed by great studies and situations in life, it might still go well with us, at least as far as our young lyric poets are concerned." ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... belongs also another lyric. It is printed in Hawthorn and Lavender, to which I have already referred, and is one of Mr. Henley's most ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... conscious of a great depression,—a 'fit of the blues,' which he attributed partly to the damp, lowering weather. Idly he turned over the leaves of a first edition of Tennyson's poems,—pausing here and there to glance at a favourite lyric or con over a well-remembered verse, when the echo of a silvery horn blown clear on the wintry silence startled him out of his semi-abstraction. Rising, he went instinctively to the window, though from that he could see nothing but his own garden, looking ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... on the field of Goito; it was won. It was won against odds. At Pastrengo they witnessed an encounter; this was a battle. Vittoria perceived that there was the difference between a symphony and a lyric song. The blessedness of the sensation that death can be light and easy dispossessed her of the meaner compassion, half made up of cowardice, which she had been nearly borne down by on the field of Pastrengo. At an angle on a height off the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... In the second lyric, An Belinden, he pictures in the same tone of half regret the case in which he finds himself, and the picture has an eloquent commentary in his letters of the time. He who had lately spent his peaceful evenings in the solitude of his own ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... century, and was, in fact, the parent of the vaccination which has superseded it, and which is merely inoculation with matter derived from another source, the cow. She was also an authoress of considerable repute for lyric odes and vers de societe, &c., and, above all, for her letters, most of which are to her daughter, Lady Bute (as Mme. de Sevigne's are to her daughter, Mme. de Grignan), and which are in no respect inferior to those of the French lady in sprightly wit, while in the variety of their subjects ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... shreds;—never was a man so violently exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "shop" as a poetic dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... seemed to be no doubt in his mind that the victim of his fun, even when it outraged common sensibilities, must enjoy it as much as he. Who but Eugene, after being the welcome guest, at a European capital, of one of our most ambitious and refined ambassadors, would have written a lyric, sounding the praises of a German "onion pie," ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... this: We grant the major premises, but why look to the work of prose fiction as the main instrument in this necessary process of, so to speak, sympathising humanity together? Cannot this be done far more effectively through biography and autobiography, for example? Isn't there the lyric; and, above all, isn't there the play? Well, so far as the stage goes, I think it is a very charming and exciting form of human activity, a display of actions and surprises of the most moving and impressive sort; but beyond the opportunity it affords for saying startling and thought-provoking ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... box you can haf all your wishes," asserted the Professor, still in the German lyric strain over his triumph. "It iss the box of enchantments. You haf but to will the change you would haf taig place—it iss done. The substance ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... irresistible charm for him; and he once declared that he would almost rather have been Ireland than Shakespeare; and then it was his delight to write Greek versions of a poem that might attach the mark of plagiarism to Tennyson, or show, by a Scandinavian lyric, how the laureate had been poaching from the Northmen. Now it was a mock pastoral in most ecclesiastical Latin that set the whole Church in arms; now a mock despatch of Baron Beust that actually deceived the Revue des Deux Mondes and caused quite a panic at the ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... a life that was wild and free, free, free, And a life that was wild and free." To this charming lyric there was a chorus of, "Then hurrah for the pirate bold, And hurrah for the rover wild, And hurrah for the yellow gold, And hurrah for the ocean's child!" the mild enunciation of which highly moral and appropriate chant appeared to give Mr. Poletiss great satisfaction, as he turned his half-shut ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... the capacity for lofty themes, but, especially as he grows older and more philosophic, and perhaps less lyric, half-seriously attributes whatever he does to ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... of lyric—especially when it came to the last verse—here, there, and everywhere he scored them through with a ruthless hand; and with a renewed sense of usefulness, and a conscience well at ease, he returned the much deleted ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... we have to notice is the collected edition of Motherwell's Poems, which has just issued from the Glasgow Press, under the auspices of Mr James M'Conechy. William Motherwell must always stand very high in the list of the minor Scottish poets, and one lyric of his, "Jeanie Morrison," is as pathetic as any in the language. But of him so much has already been said in former numbers of MAGA, that we may dispense with present criticism: and we shall merely draw the attention of the lovers of the supernatural to a more terrific temptation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... outlines, and even these have been the subject of many learned disputes. She was born near the close of the seventh century B.C., either at Mytilene or at Eresos in the island of Lesbos. She grew to maturity at the former place, and became one of the two great leaders of the AEolian school of lyric poetry. From the fragments of her poetry, and those of her great rival, Alcaeus, it is evident that the two were not envious of each other's fame, but lived in the most friendly intercourse. Of the events of her life, we have only two. One, referred to in the Parian marble ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... passion for the lyric stage, and now there is nothing to prevent—" did a slight shadow here darken also her sunny eyes, gone instantly?— "I shall make music my life's aim. Fortunately I have money of my own to enable me to ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... from another heaven than that created by his own celestial genius upon the long lines of pilgrims from every nation of the earth to the gushing fountain of poesy opened by the touch of his magic wand; if he could be permitted to behold the vast assemblage of grand and glorious productions of the lyric art called into being by his own inspired strains, he would weep tears of bitter anguish that, instead of lavishing all the stores of his mighty genius upon the fall of Ilion, it had not been his more blessed lot to crystallize in deathless ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... broke in a cloud of gold. The song of a mocking-bird in the poplars of the little graveyard came to her with unsuspected melody—a melody drawn from the freshness, the loneliness, the half-awakened calls from hidden nests and the lyric ecstasy ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... faces of those who dance with it. It is the Fires of Mora—come, God alone knows how—from Erin—to this place. The Fires of Mora!" He contemplated the hushed folk before him; and then from his lips came that weirdest, most haunting of the lyric legends ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... difference and disparity among the old editions of the poets and romancists; and there are, and always will be, a distinguished minority, of which the selling prices may be expected to remain firm. Such men as Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, Massinger, and among the lyric group Barnfield, Watson, Constable, Wither (earlier works and Hallelujah), Carew, Herrick, Suckling, and Lovelace, are to be ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... sons of Sophocles composed tragedy and wrote some lyric poems. But there exist no remains of their works, nor anything particular respecting themselves; some loose anecdotes excepted, which Plutarch has related respecting one of them of the name of Antiphon, who wrote a tragedy by which Dionysius the tyrant obtained a prize, long after ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... When any man is awake to the fact that the public is a vile patron, when he is conscious also that his bread and his fame are in their gift—it is a stern passage for his soul, a touchstone for the strength and gentleness of his spirit. Jonson, whose splendid scorn took to itself lyric wings in the two great Odes to Himself, sang high and aloof for a while, then the frenzy caught him, and he flung away his lyre to gird himself for deeds of mischief among nameless and noteless antagonists. Even Chapman, who, in The Tears of Peace, compares "men's refuse ears" to those gates in ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... many bands of music,—among these the very artistic one of Pagsanhan belonging to the escribano, Don Miguel Guevara,—swarms of Chinamen and Indians, who, with the curiosity of the former and the piety of the latter, awaited anxiously the day on which was to be celebrated the comic-mimic-lyric-lightning-change-dramatic spectacle, for which a large and spacious theater had been erected in the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the poet Gascoigne, and the elder of our fascinating trio, is conspicuous for an unswerving, whole-hearted attachment to nature and rural scenes. It is in the pastoral lyric where, with tenderest devotion, he pursues, untrammelled, a light and free-born fancy. His fertile, varied muse, laden with the passionate exaggerations of love-lorn swain, is yet charged with richest ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... 1850, Charlotte Bronte paid another visit to London, and later to Scotland, where she found Edinburgh "compared to London like a vivid page of history compared to a dull treatise on political economy; as a lyric, brief, bright, clean, and vital as a flash of lightning, compared to a great ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... this degenerate age. Well, her next essay in creative composition is my supper, which will be an equally spirited impromptu. To-morrow she will darn and sew me an epic; and her desserts will continue to be in the richest lyric vein. Such, sir, are the poems of Lisa, all addressed to me, who came so near to gallivanting with ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... and all kinds of pagan folk-lore. Gabriel Maxenius, however, was the first to publish a work on Finnish national poetry, which brought to light the beauties of the Kalevala. It appeared in 1733, and bore the title: De Effectibus Naturalibus. The book contains a quaint collection of Finnish poems in lyric forms, chiefly incantations; but the author was entirely at a loss how to account for them, or how to appreciate them. He failed to see their intimate connection with the religious worship of the Finns ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... as characteristic of the nineteenth as of the sixteenth century. The depletion of our lyric poetry, if everything relating to the singer's love affairs were omitted, is appalling even to contemplate. Yet, if this were the extent of love's influence upon poetry, one would have to class it, in kind if not in degree, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... better production than either of Wordsworth's, superior to Hogg's, and, though not so intellectual as Shelley's, rivals it in truth. Mackay's is the lark itself, Shelley's is himself listening, with unwearied ears and tightly-stretched imagination, to the lark. Who is surprised that Eric Mackay's lyric, 'The Waking of the Lark,' sent a thrill through the heart of America? This poem, which appeared in the New York Independent, is undoubtedly the lark-poem of the future. From the opening to the closing stanza there is not an imperfect verse, not a commonplace. ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... persistently as to become a nuisance, and the only way to get rid of it is to whistle or sing myself. For instance, I may be mentally reciting for my solace and delectation some beloved lyric like "The Waterfowl," or "Tears, Idle Tears," or "Break, Break, Break"; and all the while, between the lines, this fiend of a subcerebral vocalist, like a wandering minstrel in a distant square, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... something evaporates—some quite peculiar freshness, naivete, indiscreetness, which, can never be recaptured. Take a few typical instances. Coleridge lost the poetical gift altogether when he left his youth behind; Wordsworth wrote all his best poetry in a few early years; Milton lost his pure lyric gift. But the most salient instance of all is Tennyson; in the two earliest volumes there is a perfectly novel charm, a grace, a daring which he lost in later life. He became solemn, mannerised, conscious of responsibility. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... conduct their own horses in the rapid career. [41] Ten, twenty, forty chariots were allowed to start at the same instant; a crown of leaves was the reward of the victor; and his fame, with that of his family and country, was chanted in lyric strains more durable than monuments of brass and marble. But a senator, or even a citizen, conscious of his dignity, would have blushed to expose his person, or his horses, in the circus of Rome. The games were exhibited at the expense of the republic, the magistrates, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... owes less to Buerger than English owes to Burns, but it owes much. Buerger revived the ballad form in which so much of the finest German poetry has since been cast. With his lyric gifts and his dramatic power, he infused a life into these splendid poems that has made them a part of the folk-lore of his native land. 'Lenardo und Blandine,' his own favorite, 'Des Pfarrers Tochter von Taubenhain' (The ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... poem is built out of the simplest of technical elements, the precise tone and color of language employed to articulate impulse and mood, and the reproduction of objective substances for a clear visualization of character and scene, all tend by a sure and unfaltering composition, to present a lyric art unique in English poetry of the last ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... the truest Schubertian style. I like to fancy that the melody with its serene, lyric beauty is a picture of the fair Rosamunde herself. The first variation, a plaintive melody over an agitated accompaniment, I should be inclined, still referring to Rosamunde and regarding each variation as expressing an experience in her life, to entitle "Moods." The second variation is more ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... ordinary birds that is most regularly seized with the fit of ecstasy that results in this lyric burst in the air, as I described in my first book, "Wake Robin," over thirty years ago, is the oven-bird, or wood-accentor—the golden-crowned thrush of the old ornithologists. Every loiterer about the woods knows this ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... friends at heart," she resumed, "because she used to sing his songs. Ah, how did it go?" and Mrs. Hilbery, who had a very sweet voice, trolled out a famous lyric of her father's which had been set to an absurdly and charmingly sentimental air ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... soon as his countenance lighted with animation, it revealed a character rich in various possibility, a vital force which, by its bright indefiniteness, made some appeal to the imagination. Often he had the air of a lyric enthusiast; often, that of a profound thinker; not seldom there came into his eyes a glint of stern energy which seemed a challenge to the world. Therewithal, nothing perceptibly histrionic; look or speak as he might, the young man exhaled an atmosphere of sincerity, and persuaded others ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... talk of the best poem which the war has produced; and opinions usually vary. My own vote, so far as England is concerned, is still given to Julian Grenfell's lyric of the fighting man; but if France is to be included too, one must consider very seriously the claims of La Passion de Notre Frere le Poilu, by Marc Leclerc, which may be had in a little slender paper-covered book, at a ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... was of poetry in general and I was much struck with his frequent happy application of quotations to the little events of the drive and phases of feeling that came up as the day went on. The sun set gloriously, "So stirbt ein Held," said Bancroft, as he burst with feeling into the beautiful lyric of which these words are a line. The best German poetry seemed to be at his tongue's end and he recited it with sympathy and accuracy which called out much admiration from the cultivated German ladies with whom we were driving. Most interesting ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... first employed in celebrating the praises of the gods. The fragments of the Orphic hymns, and those of Linus and Musaeus, show these poets entertained sounder notions of the Supreme Being than many philosophers of a later date. There are lyric fragments yet remaining that bear striking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... that slight hand Could Raphael or Leonardo trace. Nor could the poets know in Fairyland The changing wonder of your lyric face. ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... "After the first Gipsy lyric then came another to which the captain especially directed my attention as being what Sam. Petalengro calls 'The girl in the red chemise'—as well as I can recall his words. A very sweet song, with a simple but spirited chorus, and ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... and at last himself. With him, as with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In Dramatic Lyrics he discovered the one thing that he could really do better than any one else—the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre of that field ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... to me." She started up again, with a shudder, and lifted screening hands like one who dreads missiles. "It drove me to marry. I made believe that I preferred being the wife of a Russian noble to being the greatest lyric actress of Europe; I made believe—I acted that part. It was because I felt my greatness sinking away from me, as I feel my life sinking now. I would not wait till men said, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... was speaking to himself. "It might work—it might add interest—" Mr. Heatherbloom waited patiently. "Would you have any objections," earnestly, "to my making a little addenda to the sign on the chariot of cadence? What's the Matter with Mother? 'The touching lyric, as interpreted by Horatio ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the index of the soul. The voice of the two Pitts was the same voice, we have been told—a deep, rich, cultivated lyric-barytone. It was a trained voice, a voice that came from a full column of air, that never broke into a screech, rasping the throat of the speaker and the ear of the listener. It was the natural voice carefully developed by right use. The power of Pitt lay in his cold, calculating ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... alleged afflatus, the fellow—so different from us—is neither to hold nor to bind. The easiest way with him seems to be a pitying contempt. "For all good poets," says Socrates sagely in the Ion, "epic as well as lyric, compose their lovely strains, not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian dances are not quite 'rational,' so the lyric poets are, so to speak, not quite 'all ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... gratitude and love of whoever can read the language which he makes musical with solace and aspiration. The present volume, while it will confirm Mr. Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric poets, deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty of epic narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. In our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red pepper of ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of the same inconstant April color, but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance's were always points of highlight, and always meaning another thing than the thing they meant yesterday. But it was hard to see why this earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face that was as gay as his was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder, and though his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words. ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... have the witness of her contemporaries. Sappho was at the height of her career about six centuries before Christ, at a period when lyric poetry was peculiarly esteemed and cultivated at the centres of Greek life. Among the Molic peoples of the Isles, in particular, it had been carried to a high pitch of perfection, and its forms had become the subject of assiduous study. ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were and what they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us again in their literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their architecture, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square,—a builded geometry. Then we have it once again in sculpture, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... crags. The breath of morn Still lingers in the valley; but the bee With restless passion hovers on the wing, Waiting the opening flower, of whose embrace The sun shall be the signal. Poised in air, The winged minstrel of the liquid dawn, The lark, pours forth his lyric, and responds To the fresh chorus of the sylvan doves, The stir of branches and the fall of streams, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... these I shall have occasion to speak; but, as the title of the book implies,—for Antiphon means the responsive song of the parted choir,—I shall have chiefly to do with the lyric ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... poems of the 'Anthology' there are none that have become very popular, none that are capable of affording any very keen delight to the lover of poetry. One sees that their author's lyric gift was not of the highest order. What is heard is not so much the note of honest feeling as the effort of an active intellect, searching heaven and earth for clever and striking things to say. Instead of learning from the folk-song, Schiller had learned originally from ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... further. A landscape painter would not make a primary study of Angelo's anatomical drawings; a composer of lyric forms of music would not study Sousa's marches; nor would a person writing a story look for much assistance in the arguments of Burke. The most direct benefit is derived from studying the very thing one wishes ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... beadrolls of names he can string together from the rough Cornish and Devon coasts. Only out of a poetic-hearted people are poets born. The peasant writes ballads, though scholars and antiquaries collect them. The Hebrew lyric fire blazed in myriad beacons from every landmark. The soil of Palestine is trodden, as it were, with the footsteps of God, so eloquent are its mountains and hamlets with these records ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... this opera is not much above that ordinary kind, to which music is so often doomed to be wedded—making up by her own sweetness for the dulness of her help-mate—by far the greater number of the songs are full of beauty, and some of them may rank among the best models of lyric writing. The verses, "Had I a heart for falsehood framed," notwithstanding the stiffness of this word "framed," and one or two other slight blemishes, are not unworthy of living in recollection with the matchless air ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... the poems that come under such denomination. I confess it is not a little puzzling to find a narrative poem of some five hundred lines or more included under the heading of hymns; it would seem that nearly all lyric poetry of an essentially Christian character was so designated, to separate it from secular or pagan poetry. In Prudentius' first published work, 'Liber Cathemerinon,' we find hymns composed absolutely after the manner of St Ambrose, in the same or in similar ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... evident that if the author of the lyric was not describing Indian squaws when he alluded to the 'scowling' females whose 'nimble poignards dare the day,' he certainly ought to have been. But the allusion to 'the bows,' settles the matter. Bows and arrows are not used in the confederate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... mountain spring; But—when it's bitter with base treachery— It dams itself against all utterance, And either mines the soul, or, breaking forth, Sweeps downward to destruction. Oh! 'tis true, Love is the lyric happiness of youth; And they, who sing its perfect melody, Do from the honest parish register Still take their tune. And so must you. For you Are now in the very period of youth When myriads of unborn ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... from this interview, and, flinging himself at his desk, attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the language of one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric which he began thus:— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... in which the stage alone can give the full significance to a dramatic poem, just as a lyric finds its full interpretation in music; but we prefer that a song of Goethe or Shelley should wait for its music, and in the meantime suggest its own aerial accompaniment, rather than be vulgarized in the setting. And even when set for the voice by a master, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... And this habit was kept up until Mr. Lincoln had found both his life work and his individual expression. Later he devoured Shakespeare and Burns; and the poetry of these masters of the dramatic and lyric form, sprung like himself from the common soil, and like him self-trained and directed, furnished a kind of running accompaniment to his work and his play. What he read he not only held tenaciously, but took into his imagination and incorporated ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... Seventy-eight were quite unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cowpunchers monstrously. They, knowing him to be a singular man, forebore ever to press him, and awaited his own humor, lest he should weary of the lyric; and when after a day of silence apparently saturnine, he would lift his ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... sojourn over the tinsmith's shop, Sunday, I drew down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness, such ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... She was a good listener, as women who have something else to think about often are; and so they rode along the twisting path, and the wind sang in the plumes of the bamboo trees, and Hartley believed that it sang a romantic lyric of platonic admiration, exquisitely hinted at by a tactful man, and properly appreciated by ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... majestically seated, instead of leaning on the window-ledge, has, in Scheffer's picture, I know not what touch of stiffness, of slightly theatrical. And the general impression is a cold dryness which contrasts with the lyric warmth of the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... to lyric poetry, because Sappho and Alcaeus were natives of Lesbos in Aeolia, and wrote in ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... The dramatic lyric and monologue in which Browning set forth the varieties of passionate experience was an art-form of immense possibilities, which it was a work of genius to discover. To say that Browning, the inventor of this amazingly ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... death of his "Lyric Love." The story of the most beautiful romance that the world has ever known thus falls into three distinctive periods,—that of the separate life of each up to the time of their marriage; their married life, with its scenic setting in the enchantment ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... intercourse between them, and their occasional intermarriages, seemed little short of monstrous to the ferocious exclusiveness of the Anglo-Saxon. [Footnote: Michelet notices this exclusiveness of the English, and inveighs against it in his most lyric style. "Crime contre la nature! Crime contre l'humanite! Il sera expie par la sterilite de l'esprit."] The Indians in the central part of Illinois cut very little figure in the reminiscences of the pioneers; they occupied ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... dreadful way of human birth, His shadow sometimes fell upon the earth And those who saw it wept with joy and fright. "Thou art Apollo, than the sun more bright!" They cried. "Our music is of little worth, But thrill our blood with thy creative mirth Thou god of song, thou lord of lyric might!" ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... that even cultivated readers have found more real satisfaction in the "One-Hoss Shay" than in many a more celebrated lyric. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... of subtlety compatible with an individual self,—the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... looked into eyes. Many might voice the thought expressed by one: "I may boast that Paul Hayne was my friend, though it was never my good fortune to meet him." Many a soul was upheld and strengthened by him, as was that of a man who wrote that he had been saved from suicide by reading the "Lyric of Action." His album held autographed photographs of many writers, among them Charles Kingsley, William Black, and Wilkie Collins. He cherished an ivy vine sent him by Blackmore from ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... 1150 to 1190. The lyric poets of this period were for the most part Austrian and Bavarian knights who lived remote from the French border and were little influenced by the now well-developed art of the troubadours and trouvres. They got their impulse rather from the ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... poet, chiefly lyric, recalling Pindaric days, has sprung up lately in Athens. His rendering of the dramas of Sophocles into modern Greek for the stage in Athens and Constantinople, is said to have attracted much attention ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... did not write poetry himself, but he read poetry with a good deal of effect, and he would sometimes take a hint from one of Gifted Hopkins's last productions to recite a passionate lyric of Byron or Moore, into which he would artfully throw so much meaning that Myrtle was almost as much puzzled, in her simplicity, to know what it meant, as she had been by the religious fervors ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that Pushkin is, he is accordingly at his best only in his lyrics. But the essence of a lyric is music, and the essence of music is harmony, and the essence of harmony is form; hence in beauty of form Pushkin is unsurpassed, and among singers he is peerless. His soul is a veritable olian harp. No sooner does the wind begin to blow ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... opera-dancers is extremely well defined, as their names implies; for they most do congregate wherever an opera-house exists. Some, however, descend to the non-lyric drama, and condescend to "illustrate" the plays of Shakespeare. It is said that the classical manager of Drury Lane Theatre has secured a company of them to help the singers he has engaged to perform Richard the Third, Coriolanus, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... performance as Gorboduc must have been hailed as not only a novelty but a wonder. It was the first piece composed in English on the ancient tragic model, with a regular division into five acts, closed by lyric choruses. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark, standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its innumerable pillars, is not in the least gray with time—no grayer than a Greek lyric. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Denmark. For many years he made the aspects of life at sea his particular theme, and he contrived to rouse the patriotic enthusiasm of the Danish public as it had never been roused before. His various and unceasing productiveness, his freshness and vigour, and the inexhaustible richness of his lyric versatility, early brought Drachmann to the front and kept him there. Meanwhile prose imaginative literature was ably supported by Sophus Schandorph (1836-1901), who had been entirely out of sympathy with the idealists, and had taken no step while that school was in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... pomum" by "he's a daisy," and remarks, appropriately enough, "that this was well enough for 1898; but we would now be more inclined to render it 'he's a peach.'" Again, Peck renders "illud erat vivere" by "that was life," but, in the words of our lyric American jazz, we would be more inclined to render it "that was the life." "But," as Professor Gaselee has said, "no rendering of this part of the Satyricon can be final, it must always be in the slang of ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... before he saw her. The rhythms of a song, a tender and gay little lyric which she had sung to crowded drawing-rooms, but for him alone, long years past, floated out to him, clear and pure, through the clear, pure balm of the forest. He slipped quietly from his horse and saw her, through the window, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... that the "Invitation from a True Lover Settled Abroad," was not a single lyric, but a beautiful incident taken from some epic poem.[81] A messenger comes with a token to a lady at home, by which she may credit his message; he bids her take ship as soon as she hears the voice of the cuckoo, and go out to him who has all things ready about ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... and a lyric to be lyrical and heart appealing, must be inevitable. It must be the spontaneous expression of the heart of the author—an expression which had to come. It is the latent secret of the power of true hymns, for what must be ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... From these combined inspirations resulted, to the eternal glory of the Catholic faith and of Christian art, a composition without a rival in the history of painting, and, we may also add, without a name; for to call it lyric or epic is not enough, unless, indeed, we mean, by using these expressions, to compare it with the allegorical epic of Dante, alone worthy to be ranked with this marvellous production of the pencil ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... himself, every line seems to flow in its natural and most simple order; and where the music required repetition of a line, or a word, the iteration seems to improve the sense and poetical effect. Neither is the piece deficient in the higher requisites of lyric poetry. When music is to be "married to immortal verse," the poet too commonly cares little with how indifferent a yoke-mate he provides her. But Dryden, probably less from a superior degree of care, than from that divine impulse which he could ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... lead into a form of historical primitivism in which the products of the first poets were "extemporary effusions," rudely imitative of pastoral scenes or celebratory of the divine being. Thus the first generic distinction Ogilvie makes is between pastoral poetry and lyric; the function of the former is to produce pleasure, the latter to raise admiration of the powers presiding over nature. As poetry is more natural to the young mind than philosophy, so is the end of pastoral poetry more easily achieved than that of the lyric. The difference resides essentially ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... my bread and honey, set among A grove of spice; An ever brimming cup; a lyric sung After ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... this work that survives in common use is the immortal lyric, "I love thy kingdom, Lord," founded on a motif in the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm. This, with Doddridge's hymn, "My God, and is thy table spread?" continued for a long time to be the most important church hymn and ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Lara, Spain's foremost lyric poet of the nineteenth century, was born on the 25th of March, 1808, the year of his country's heroic revolt against the tyranny of Napoleon. His parents were Lieutenant-Colonel Don Juan de Espronceda y Pimentel and Doa Mara del Carmen ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... having such a name?" I queried, sadly. "Avis! Why, it is the very soul of music, clear, and sweet and as insistent as a bird-call, an unforgettable lyric in four letters! It is just the sort of name a fellow cannot possibly forget. Why couldn't you have been named Polly or Lena or Margaret, or something commonplace like ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... fine etching hardly less than a painting. Here we have neither the plastic effect of the sculpture nor the color of the painting. The essential features of the real model are left out. As an imitation it would fail disastrously. What is imitated in a lyric poem? Through more than two thousand years we have appreciated the works of the great dramatists who had their personages speak in the rhythms of metrical language. Every iambic verse is a deviation from reality. If they had tried to imitate nature Antigone and Hamlet would have spoken the prose ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you think he puts such a lot ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... founded by Princess Elena Couza in 1862, to provide for 230 orphan girls. The summer home of these girls is a convent in the Transylvanian Alps. Hotels and restaurants are numerous. There are two theatres, the National and the Lyric, which is mainly patronized by foreign players; but minor places of amusement abound; as also do clubs—political, social and sporting. Socially, indeed, the progress of Bucharest is remarkable, its political, literary and scientific ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Shooting Togs.' But, after all, Mr. Seaman's masterpiece up to date is certainly 'To the Lord of Potsdam.' ... This will live, or we are greatly mistaken, among the most effective examples of historical satire-lyric."—The Saturday Review. ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... most striking songs which the war has brought forth, we must class that grim Puritanical lyric, 'The Kansas John Brown,' which appeared originally in the Kansas Herald, and which is, as we are informed, extensively sung in the army. The ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... madrigal, catch, round, chorus, chorale; antiphon[obs3], antiphony; accompaniment, second, bass; score; bourdon[obs3], drone, morceau[obs3], terzetto[obs3]. composer &c. 413; musician &c. 416. V. compose, perform &c. 416; attune. Adj. musical; instrumental, vocal, choral, lyric, operatic; harmonious &c. 413; Wagnerian. Adv. adagio; largo, larghetto, andante, andantino[obs3]; alla capella[It][obs3]; maestoso[obs3], moderato; allegro, allegretto; spiritoso[obs3], vivace[obs3], veloce[obs3]; presto, prestissimo[obs3]; con brio; capriccioso[obs3]; scherzo, scherzando[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... stories, and whatever else is usually delivered in declamation. At the same time she had contracted an unhappy habit of accompanying what she delivered with gestures, by which, in a disagreeable way, what is purely epic and lyric is more confused ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... "relish to his song," {0f} by adopting "a diversity of structure in the metre;" for the lyric comes in occasionally to relieve the solemnity of the heroic, whilst at the same time the latter is frequently capable of being divided into a shorter verse, a plan which has been observed in one of the MSS. used on the present occasion; e. ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... never explain satisfactorily what the "pea-vine" was. His "Ring around and shake a leg, ma lady," was a triumph in the lyric line. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... which I strayed one evening, one of the nigger corner-men sang a song of which the nature may be sufficiently divined from the refrain, "And the tom-cat was the cause of it all." This lyric being loudly encored, the performer came forward, and, to my astonishment, began to recite a long series of doggerel verses upon Mr. Kipling's illness, setting ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... requested to furnish words for The Melodies of Scotland, he responded by contributing over 100 songs, on which perhaps his claim to immortality chiefly rests, and which placed him in the front rank of lyric poets. His worldly prospects were now perhaps better than they had ever been; but he was entering upon the last and darkest period of his career. He had become soured, and moreover had alienated many of his best friends by too freely expressing sympathy with the French Revolution, and the then unpopular ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... and the early inscriptions are rude and unskilfully executed; nor can we even assure ourselves whether Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, Kallinus, Tyrtaeus, Xanthus, and the other early elegiac and lyric poets, committed their compositions to writing, or at what time the practice of doing so became familiar. The first positive ground which authorizes us to presume the existence of a manuscript of Homer, is in the famous ordinance of Solon, with regard to the rhapsodies at the Panathenaea: ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... (1809) is somewhat unpleasantly superhuman, and if, at times, he mixes sex and religion like a mystic of the Middle Ages or a Spaniard of the Counter Reformation, he rises to wonderful lyric heights when he touches his own experiences, or when he expresses the note of the people. His use of the supernatural, of the subconscious mood, gives rise to such poems as The Lore-Lay, the legend ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... In the rendering of lyric poetry there are two extremes to be avoided. One is the musical tendency to obscure the sense, as in "sing-song" rendering; the other is the reactionary effort made by many would-be sensible people to make prose ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... writer has done his work, the subject chosen being only his vehicle. Where a man who has something to say looks about for means to say it worthily, he may select a tale, a philosophical disquisition, a familiar essay, a drama or a lyric poem. He may choose badly or well, but in any case it is ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... in some measure prepared for it. But, to get rid of the details of history, which are always wearisome and usually inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been due to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all the wide ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... something, in a hazy sort of way. You had on a rose-colored gown that was distinctly wonderful, and when we tracked the German to the door of your room, you were wearing an evening coat, bright blue. But the main thing was your hair!" Here I became lyric. "An oak-leaf in the sunlight, Miss Falconer! Threads ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... a Polish Jesuit whose neo-Latin Horatian odes and Biblical paraphrases gained immediate European acclaim upon their first publication in 1625 and 1628.[1] The fine lyric quality of Sarbiewski's poetry, and the fact that he often fused classical and Christian motifs, made a critic like Hugo Grotius actually prefer the "divine Casimire" to Horace himself, and his popularity among the English poets is evidenced by ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... the basis of many a double meaning. There is, in fact, no lyric song describing natural scenery that may not have beneath it some implied, often indelicate, allusion whose riddle it takes an adroit and practiced mind ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... literature worthy the name in that Ultima Thule. He is, indeed, not in any way to be blamed for not suspecting the possibility of a highly developed drama under conditions such as obtain in Iceland, even though he may well be aware that lyric poetry has been cultivated there with ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... step-son to the poet Gascoigne, and the elder of our fascinating trio, is conspicuous for an unswerving, whole-hearted attachment to nature and rural scenes. It is in the pastoral lyric where, with tenderest devotion, he pursues, untrammelled, a light and free-born fancy. His fertile, varied muse, laden with the passionate exaggerations of love-lorn swain, is yet charged with richest imagery and thought, full to overflowing with joyous abandonment, and ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... realise divine mysteries, when the miracle of the Incarnation was, as it were, worked for her in her own soul; when she heard in her own heart the beating of the heart of God; when his hand touched her with a tenderness that warmed her place of peace. She had hardly known this flamed and lyric creature for herself. It was as if her soul, resting after long flight, had contemplated for the first time the silver and ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... who have suffered more than himself. The poem is arranged in strophes, each one telling of some afflicted hero and ending with the same refrain: His sorrow passed away; so will mine. "Deor" is much more poetic than "Widsith," and is the one perfect lyric[16] of the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... pondered the lyric. It told its own simple story and could at once have been dismissed but for its divined and puzzling relationship to the popular society favourite of Nome, Alaska. What could ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Part For Ever Come to Me in Cherry Time On the Death of Mrs. Jessie Willis Thank God for Pleasant Weather The Master's Song The Missing Ship Jeannie Marsh Lucy Epitaph In Memory of John W. Francis, Jr Nature's Noblemen A Wall-Street Lyric King Cotton Words Adapted to a Spanish Melody Love in Exile To the Evening Star Welcome Home The Sycamore Shade Up the Hudson Only Thine Epigram on Reading Grim's Attack upon Clinton On Hearing that Morse ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... might pursue the footsteps of Diomede and Menelaus, and conduct their own horses in the rapid career. [41] Ten, twenty, forty chariots were allowed to start at the same instant; a crown of leaves was the reward of the victor; and his fame, with that of his family and country, was chanted in lyric strains more durable than monuments of brass and marble. But a senator, or even a citizen, conscious of his dignity, would have blushed to expose his person, or his horses, in the circus of Rome. The games were ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Boy-Poet of the Decadence,' and at 'To Julia in Shooting Togs.' But, after all, Mr. Seaman's masterpiece up to date is certainly 'To the Lord of Potsdam.' ... This will live, or we are greatly mistaken, among the most effective examples of historical satire-lyric."—The Saturday Review. ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... not long ago befell The tear-compelling incident I now propose to tell; So come, my sweet collector friends, and listen while I sing Unto your delectation this brief, pathetic thing— No lyric pitched in vaunting key, but just a requiem Of blowing twenty dollars ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... from the source from which the promise had come to him. Although his mission was not properly a prophetic one,—although, in the main, it belonged to him to describe poetically what had come to him through prophetic inspiration, yet prophetic inspiration and sacred lyric are frequently commingled in him. The man who is "the sweet psalmist of Israel" claims a [Hebrew: naM] in 2 Sam. xxiii. 1, and, in ver. 2, says that the Spirit of God spake by him, and His word was upon his tongue. In Acts ii. 30, 31, Peter declares that, by the divine promise, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... the sons of Sophocles composed tragedy and wrote some lyric poems. But there exist no remains of their works, nor anything particular respecting themselves; some loose anecdotes excepted, which Plutarch has related respecting one of them of the name of Antiphon, who wrote a tragedy by which Dionysius the tyrant obtained a prize, long after he had put ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... romanticism were repellent to him, he could not endure the struggling for wonderful effects, for delicious excesses. "He loved Shakspeare only under many conditions. He thought his characters were drawn too closely to the life, and spoke a language too true; he preferred the epic and lyric syntheses which leave the poor details of humanity in the shade. For the same reason he spoke little and listened less, not wishing to give expression to his own thoughts, or to receive the thoughts of others, until after they had attained ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... more 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 ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... the soldier should care so little for martial songs, or the songs that are ostensibly written for him; but that is not the fault of Tommy Atkins. Lyric poets don't give him what he calls "the stuff." He doesn't get it even from Kipling; Thomas Hardy's "Song of the Soldiers" leaves him cold. He wants no epic stanzas, no heroic periods. What he asks for is something simple and romantic, something about a girl, ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... age of Italian poetry, which now followed at the end of the fifteenth century, as well as the Latin poetry of the same period, is rich in proofs of the powerful effect of nature on the human mind. The first glance at the lyric poets of that time will suffice to convince us. Elaborate descriptions, it is true, of natural scenery are very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age, the novels and the lyric or epic poetry had something else to deal with. Bojardo and Ariosto paint nature vigorously, but as briefly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... individual bit is necessary to the perfection of the whole. I allow that this is not the usual way of looking at it; but my pleasure lies in seeing it entire, making the tea-table into a kind of lyric, elevating the family life by the application of the principles of abstract beauty to its homeliest details. Pardon, Miss Beecham, but Mrs. Tozer is right, and you are wrong. The idea of carrying off a few lines of a poem in one's pocket for ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... probable that to many of our readers the name which stands at the head of this sketch is unknown, and that those who recognize it will only know it as that of the author of the well-known lines upon the death of Sir John Moore—a lyric of such surpassing beauty, that so high a judge as Lord Byron considered it the perfection of English lyrical poetry, preferring it before Coleridge's lines on Switzerland—Campbell's Hohenlinden—and the finest of Moore's Irish melodies, which were instanced by Shelley and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... directly from the study of the Greek and Roman classics. In all that Mistral has written there is very little that springs from his personal sorrows. The great body of his poetry is epic in character, and the best of his work in the lyric form gives expression not to merely personal emotion, but to the feeling of the race to ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... and the 'Adoration of the Shepherds' in the Scuola di San Rocco illustrate his unique power of presenting sacred history in a novel, romantic framework of familiar things. The commonplace circumstances of ordinary life have been employed to portray in the one case a lyric of mysterious splendour; in the other, an idyll of infinite sweetness. Divinity shines through the rafters of that upper chamber, where round a low large table the Apostles are assembled in a group ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... to stimulate the imagination more keenly and to enthral the feelings more completely. Upon a closer consideration it is seen that poetry and good prose have much in common, and that often it is really but a question of form, for lyric beauty glows in the phrases of our finest prose, and both heart and soul are moved ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... chanted; and though at first the chant of the poet was accompanied by the dance of the chorus, it ultimately grew into independence. Later still, when the poem had been differentiated into epic and lyric—when it became the custom to sing the lyric and recite the epic—poetry proper was born. As during the same period musical instruments were being multiplied, we may presume that music came to have an existence ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... crickets, coming in full choir upon the wind, and fancied that, if moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that. Finally, he took a draught at the Shaker spring, and, as if it were the true Castalia, was forthwith moved to compose a lyric, a Farewell to his Harp, which he swore should be its closing strain, the last verse that an ungrateful world should have from him. This effusion, with two or three other little pieces, subsequently written, he took the first opportunity to send, by one of the Shaker brethren, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... college days, who sowed the wind to reap the whirlwind and won at last through strangest penance the prize of love, seizes the reader in the strait grip of its feverish interest. Miss Rives has outdone herself in the invention of a love story that rings with lyric feeling and touches every fiber of the ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... if necessary, all of Milton, all of Shakespeare but a song or two, much of Dante and some of Homer, to be secured in them for ever. My friend (of the Ramillies) and I were disputing about a phrase I had applied to lyric poetry as the infallible test of its merit. I asked for "the lyric cry," and he scorned me. I could find a better phrase with time; but the quatrain just quoted makes it unmistakable, as I think. Anyhow, it will be conceded that there was some putting off of the tie-wig, the ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... appearance among them, they generally have been swift to turn from him and to prefer to him not only foreigners, which would not necessarily be bad, but oftentimes the least respectable of musicians. The triumph of Rameau was of the briefest. Scarcely had his magnificent lyric tragedies established themselves when the Guerre des bouffons broke out, and popular taste, under the direction of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the other Encyclopedists, discovered the light Italian music of the day more "natural" and infinitely preferable to the severe and noble forms ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... "it is just the poetry, the reality of life, in all its stern glory,—because it is and must be stern if it is to be spiritual,—it is just that, it seems to me, that you are trying to reduce to a sort of pretty, facile lyric." ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the detectives say when tracking down a criminal. It is, however, of no consequence; but it was clear that the song she sang had moved her, for there was the glint of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the house, the words of the lyric singing themselves ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the poet was equally at home in the simpler lyric region of the Haynes Bayley school. Taking for his model the favourite drawing-room ballad of the period, "She wore a wreath of roses the night that first we met," he made a parody of its rhythmical cadence the medium for presenting some leading incidents in the career of a Circe of "the boozing ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... Mary Anderson asked the poet Longfellow what she could do to improve her voice. He replied, "Read aloud daily, joyous, lyric poetry." ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... band, playing tom-tomic strains—the lyric style of dinner-gong music that tears holes in the air. The leader was an imitator of Sousa and had his gymnastic eccentricities down to a fine point. He executed a fantasia on his horn of plenty that brought a shower of ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... is an "Official Number", containing the work of none but titled authors. Rheinhart Kleiner contributes the single piece of verse, a smooth and pleasing lyric entitled "Love Again", which is not unlike his previous poem, "Love, Come Again". As an amatory poet, Mr. Kleiner shows much delicacy of sentiment, refinement of language, and appreciation of metrical values; his efforts in this direction entitle ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you think he puts such a lot of ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... demonstrated this in his vaudeville act "Staging an Act." He took a commonplace melody and built it up into a production—then the audience liked it. George Cohan did precisely the same thing in his "Hello, Broadway"; taking a silly lyric and a melody, he told the audience he was going to make 'em like it; and he ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... and her gilded harp between her knees, called upon the retiring woman at Son Vent. She enjoyed overwhelming the ladies of the island who did not know French with the superiority of the foreigner; she listened to the novelist's lyric eulogies of the originality of this African landscape, with its little white houses, spiny cacti, slender palms, and aged olive trees, in such striking contrast to the harmonious order of the broad fields of France. Then Dona Elvira, in the social gatherings at Palma, defended the authoress with ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... gathered; and the operas, the casts, were of absorbing interest. At once a memento of the heroic period of American music and of his first manhood, the faded crudely embellished strips of paper, bearing names, lyric tenors and sopranos of limpid, bird-like song long ago lost in rosy and nebulous clouds of fable and cherished affection, roused remembered pleasures sharper than any calm actuality of to-day. He paused ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... dancing certainly was primarily part of a religious rite; with music it formed the lyric art. The term, however, with them included all those actions of the body and limbs, and all expressions and actions of the features and head which suggest ideas; marching, acrobatic performances, and mimetic action all came ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... high in the heavens; his heart was lyric with joy; He plucked a posy of lilies; he sped like a love-sick boy. He stole up the velvety pathway—his cottage was sunsteeped and still; Vines honeysuckled the window; softly he peeped o'er the sill. The lilies dropped from his fingers; devils were choking his breath; Rigid ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... "common sense" of mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there was as striking an identity of form. In poetry this showed itself in the death of the lyric, as in the universal popularity of the rhetorical ode, in the loss of all delight in variety of poetic measure, and in the growing restriction of verse to the single form of the ten-syllable line. Prose too dropped everywhere its grandeur with its obscurity; and became the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... cold rain fell intermittently; the streets were deep with slush, and the soft ice made walking on the pavements uncomfortable, and even dangerous. But these things were not permitted to interfere with the determination of the lovers of the German lyric drama to bear testimony to their admiration for the artist who had done so much for their pleasure. The house was crowded in every part. Every seat had been sold days before. Many of the tickets had been bought by speculators, who, in spite ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Lyric poetry is by its excellence the chief art of England, as music is the art of Germany. A book of poetry is almost sure of fair appreciation in the English press which does not trouble to notice a "Sartor Resartus" or the first essays of an Emerson. The excessive ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... plain, remarkable for his unparalleled facility in speaking. He owed his universal popularity to the fact that at students' Parties he could at any time stand up and rattle off at a furious rate an apparently unprepared speech, a sort of stump speech in which humorous perversions, distortions, lyric remarks, clever back-handed blows to right and left, astonishing incursions and rapid sorties, were woven into a whole so good that it was an entertaining challenge ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Flacci . . . Od in locos communes ad lyric poseos studiosorum utilitatem digest. Studio & oper Josephi Langii. Hanovi, typis Wechelianis, apud Claudium Marnium & ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... appear that in the three great departments of poetry,—the epic, the lyric, and the dramatic,—the old Greeks were great masters, and have been the teachers of all ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... but it is its sincerity which gives it its value. Here are the little sharp experiences of life mirrored poignantly, sometimes feverishly, always truly. Each lyric is an instantaneous photograph of one of the many moments in existence which affect one briefly perhaps, but indelibly. Mr. Braithwaite says in his introduction that this author engages "life at its most reserved sources whether the form or substance through which it articulates ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... fat woman, lapsing, as she occasionally did lapse, into the easy Italian of the lyric stage. "She ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... these love endearments of namings, it seemed to him that in them were the ripplings of running waters, the tinklings of silver wind- bells, and the scents of the oleander and the jasmine. She was his poem of woman, a lyric delight, a three-dimensions of flesh and spirit delicious, a fate and a good fortune written, ere the first man and woman were, by the gods whose whim had been to make all men and women for ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... Chansons de Geste; the strange technicalities of Scandinavian poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in professional and literary hands. The mediaeval minstrels and jongleurs (who may best be studied in Leon Gautier's Introduction to his Epopees Francaises) ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... fascinating hesitation,— The charming of these charmers, who seem bound, I can't tell why, to this dissimulation,— Fair Adeline, with eyes fixed on the ground At first, then kindling into animation, Added her sweet voice to the lyric sound, And sang with much simplicity,—a merit Not the less precious, that ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Here we have neither the plastic effect of the sculpture nor the color of the painting. The essential features of the real model are left out. As an imitation it would fail disastrously. What is imitated in a lyric poem? Through more than two thousand years we have appreciated the works of the great dramatists who had their personages speak in the rhythms of metrical language. Every iambic verse is a deviation from reality. ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... inscription earlier than the fortieth Olympiad, and the early inscriptions are rude and unskilfully executed; nor can we even assure ourselves whether Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, Kallinus, Tyrtaeus, Xanthus, and the other early elegiac and lyric poets, committed their compositions to writing, or at what time the practice of doing so became familiar. The first positive ground which authorizes us to presume the existence of a manuscript of Homer, is in the famous ordinance of Solon, with regard to the rhapsodies at the Panathenaea: but for ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... in those who believe it possible for music to drive away the pestilence. Antiquity, however, as mentioned above, relates that Thaletas, a famous lyric poet, contemporary with Solon, was gifted with this power; but it is impossible to render the fact credible, without qualifying it by several circumstances omitted in the relation. In the first place, it is certain, that this ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... for the poetry this was not necessary. Poems of the size of Klopstock's Messiah or Gessner's Death of Abel appeared in the magazines only in selections or extracts, while on the other hand most of the lyric poems, being short, could very easily be reprinted entire in translation. With hardly an exception, the short poems of German authors appeared in America in the periodicals some time before they were ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... to philosophisings. It grows late apace. (Ah, Hulda, how like opals in the lyric April rain are your eyes in this first faint purple-pink of the tremulous dawn.... Were I a Heine!) In my far-away America, Hulda, in far-away New York, it is now onto midnight. I see Broadway, strumpet of the highways, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... before him a keyboard made up of a series of I's. The lyric and satiric writers play in the purely human octave; the critic plays in the bookman's octave; the historian in the octave of the investigator. When an author writes of himself, perforce he plays upon his own "I," which is not exactly that ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... very interesting circumstance connected with the birth of Moore, which deserves record. The fact of the birth, as every one knows, took place at Aungier-street, and its occasion was at a moment singularly appropriate for the lyric poet being ushered into the world. Jerry Keller, the wit and humorist, rented apartments in the house of Moore's brother, in Aungier-street, and had a dinner-party on the very day of the poet's birth. Just as the guests were assembled, and the dinner on ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... pushes number two over. Number two screams: that frightens the baby and he joins in. I call number one a naughty girl, take the persecuted one in my arms, and endeavor to comfort her by trotting to the old lyric:— ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... to this discourse of Candaules, and sought to penetrate the hidden sense of these lyric divagations. The king appeared to be in a state of extraordinary excitement: his eyes sparkled with enthusiasm; a feverish rosiness tinted his cheeks; his dilated nostrils inhaled the ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... wonder that a heart like Burns, which, for all its unsteadfastness, never lost its sensibility, nor even a sense of conscience, should have been visited by the remorse which forms the burden of the lyric to Mary in heaven, written three years after. ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... soul and lie Blind to the beauty of the earth, Deaf tho' a lyric wind goes by, Dumb in a storm ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... judge, philosopher, expounder, and executioner. The ovaidd, or ovates, were the priests, chiefly concerned in the study of theology and the practice of religion. The bards were heroic poets of rare lyric power; they kept the national traditions in trust, and claimed the second sight and the power of prophecy. Much has been said of their human sacrifices in colossal images of wicker-work—the "immani magnitudine simulacra" of Caesar—which were filled with human victims, and which crackled ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... The present lyric begins by wondering how and why the strangers have come: then come thoughts of the voyage and places they must have passed; the coast, where Phineus was haunted by the Harpies, the enchanted sea beyond the Symplegades, and the mysterious Isle of Leuce ("White") ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... cotemporary, with the act."—Ib., p. 60. "The man has been traveling for five years."—Ib., p. 77. "I shall not take up time in combatting their scruples."—Blair's Rhet., p. 320. "In several of the chorusses of Euripides and Sophocles, we have the same kind of lyric poetry as in Pindar."—Ib., p. 398. "Until the Statesman and Divine shall unite their efforts in forming the human mind, rather than in loping its excressences, after it has been neglected."—Webster's Essays, p. 26. "Where conviction could be followed only by a ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... height of their renown in music, as well as what might be termed their golden era, with the establishment of the Italian opera, in the seventeenth century. At this period all the stages of Italy were the scenes of the lyric triumphs of this otherwise unfortunate class, some of whom accumulated vast fortunes. In the following century, as has been seen, Clement XVI abolished the practice as far as the church was concerned, and in the present century the first Napoleon ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... in this place to say anything particular of your lyric poems, though they are the delight and wonder of the age, and will be the envy of the next. The subject of this book confines me to satire; and in that an author of your own quality, whose ashes I will ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... been received into the circle of the gods. This at least is the case in Sanscrit as in Greek literature, where the hymn and ballad precede the epic. The epic poem becomes the stable form of poetry during the middle period in the history of literature, both in India and Greece. The union of the lyric and the epic produces the drama. The speeches uttered by the heroes in such poems as the "Iliad" are put into the mouths of real personages who appear in sight of the audience and represent with fitting gestures and costumes the characters of the story. ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... alone, For no eye marks us, or would know why we are here. Your husband is dead, your sister lives far away, Your father is bent with age; He has forgotten you, he scarcely leaves the house Any more. No one remembers your exquisite face, Your lyric voice! How you sang, even on the morning you were stricken, With piercing sweetness, with thrilling sorrow, Before the advent of the child which died with you. It is all forgotten, save by us, the memories, Who are forgotten by the world. All is changed, save the river and the hill— Even they ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... the first place among the lyric poets of Greece. The character and subjects of his poetry, of which the portions remaining to us are the Triumphal Odes, celebrating victories gained in the great games of Greece, are indicated by the lines ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... Jersey. But if he be a fool, he will stay and stay on until the town becomes all in all to him; until the very streets are his chums and certain buildings and 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 ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... practiced more sedulously than my comrade; and hence, no doubt, arose the interchange of positions, the disciple turned into the master. It was not, however, an overwhelming infatuation, a painful obsession; it was rather a recreation, almost a poetic feast. As our great lyric writer put it in the preface to his volume, Les Rayons et les ombres: 'Mathematics play their part in art as well as in science. There is algebra in astronomy: astronomy is akin to poetry; there is algebra in music: music ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... Anactoria I knew thy grace, I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes; But never wholly, soul and body mine, Didst thou bid any love me as I loved. Now I have found the peace that fled from me; Close, close, against my heart I hold my world. Ah, Love that made my life a lyric cry, Ah, Love that tuned my lips to lyres of thine, I taught the world thy music, now alone I sing for one who falls asleep ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... one of the supreme lyric expressions in the English language of the passion of love. Furthermore, Whitman's free unmetered swing, the glorious length of his stride, fell in with March's rhythmic idiom as though they had been ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... my departure my mother drove with me to Blasewitz, where there was an elegant entertainment at which the lyric poet Julius Hammer, the author of "Look Around You and Look Within You," who was to become a dear friend of mine, extolled in enthusiastic verse the delights of student liberty and the noble sisters ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... his eyes glowing as there fell from her lips the gentle love-song of a heart-broken Indian maiden, filled with its infinite sadness and despair. He knew the song. It was a lyric of the Crees. He had heard it before, but never as it came to him now, sobbing its grief in the low notes of the violin, speaking to him with immeasurable pathos from the trembling ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... details of the battle of Copenhagen see Southey's Life of Nelson. That conflict has been celebrated, in a noble lyric, by Campbell— ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... might find worthy, or to furnish original words to such music as might suit him. In the collection was the air—unknown at that time to Americans—to which Dr. Smith set the words now so widely known and sung. There was not the slightest idea on his part that he was producing a national lyric, but it caught the popular taste at once, and every year has fixed it more firmly in the hearts of the people as an expression of patriotic feeling. It was first sung at a children's festival at Park Street ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... when he was asked to sing, He gave the different nations something national; 'T was all the same to him—"God save the King," Or "Ca ira," according to the fashion all: His Muse made increment of anything, From the high lyric down to the low rational;[cx][194] If Pindar sang horse-races, what should hinder Himself from ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... of this work that survives in common use is the immortal lyric, "I love thy kingdom, Lord," founded on a motif in the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm. This, with Doddridge's hymn, "My God, and is thy table spread?" continued for a long time to be the most important church hymn and eucharistic hymn in ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... various feelings and sensations gave birth to art. But in verse the use of number is more obvious; though some particular species of it, without the assistance of music, have the air of harmonious prose, and especially the lyric poetry, and that even the best of the kind, which, if divested of the aid of music, would be almost as plain and naked as common language. We have several specimens of this nature in our own poets [Footnote: It must here be ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... ineradicably complex, varying endlessly in their instances, and changing as we deal with them. I am inclined to think that the only really profitable discussion of sexual matters is in terms of individuality, through the novel, the lyric, the play, autobiography or biography of the frankest sort. But such generalizations as I can ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... "Lyric Declamation: Recitative, Song and Ballad Singing," will be discussed the practical application of these basic principles of Style to the vocal music of the German, French, Italian and ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... them. Then, again, the teachers of the lyre take similar care that their young disciple is temperate and gets into no mischief; and when they have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the poems of other excellent poets, who are the lyric poets; and these they set to music, and make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children's souls, in order that they may learn to be more gentle, and harmonious, and rhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action; ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... the northern part of the country. This, the langue d'oil, became at length the French language. But the langue d'oc, a soft and musical tongue, survived long enough to become the vehicle of lyric strains, mostly on subjects of love and gallantry, still familiar in mention, and famous as the songs of the troubadours. The flourishing time of the troubadours was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Provencal is an alternative name ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... affect Una? 10. Note the teachings in xxiii (prayer), xxiv (absolution), and xxv (mortification of the flesh). 11. Observe that Faith teaches the Knight his relations to God; Charity, those to his fellow-men. 12. Explain the lyric note in l. 378. 13. Give an account of the knight's visit to the Hill of Contemplation. Explain the allegory. 14. Find a stanza complimentary to Queen Elizabeth. 16. What prophecy was ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... literature, had an irresistible charm for him; and he once declared that he would almost rather have been Ireland than Shakespeare; and then it was his delight to write Greek versions of a poem that might attach the mark of plagiarism to Tennyson, or show, by a Scandinavian lyric, how the laureate had been poaching from the Northmen. Now it was a mock pastoral in most ecclesiastical Latin that set the whole Church in arms; now a mock despatch of Baron Beust that actually deceived the Revue des Deux Mondes and caused quite a panic at the Tuileries. He had ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... acknowledged leader of the spirit of protest; in lyric music Rossini led; and Delacroix raised the standard of revolt in painting. With this new school, which called itself "Romanticism," Madame Scheffer and her sons sincerely sympathized. The term "Romanticism" of itself means little, or nothing, or everything, but the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... most august musings have a habit of stewing themselves down to some ferocious or jocular three-line comment. He may yearn desperately to compose a really thrilling poem that will speak his passionate soul; to churn up from the typewriter some lyric that will rock with blue seas and frantic hearts; he finds himself allaying the frenzy with some jovial sneer at Henry Ford or a yell about the High Cost of Living. Poor soul, he is like one condemned to harangue the vast, idiotic world through a keyhole, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... presence in the neighbourhood was in no wise surprising, for it was one of his favourite haunts when he was not engaged farther up the Avenue, in his daily labour, which was, as he explained to the chance acquaintance met at the ball in Lyric Hall described in "Cinderella," "mixing cocktails at the Knickerbocker Club." Only a few doors distant from the Ninth Street house there is an apartment hotel known as the Berkeley, and it was to a Berkeley ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... Carlyle's criticism of it; Poetry versus Tour-de-Force; "The Ring and the Book" begun in 1866; analysis of the poem; kinship of "The Ring and the Book" and "Aurora Leigh"; explanation of title; the idea taken from a parchment volume Browning picked up in Florence; the poem planned at Casa Guidi; "O Lyric Love," etc.; description and analysis of "The Ring and the Book," with quotations; compared as a poem with "The Inn Album," "Pauline," "Asolando," "Men and Women," etc.; imaginary volumes, to be entitled "Transcripts from Life" and "Flowers o' the Vine"; ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Miss Lilly Becker has studied with me for a period of three years. I consider her voice a lyric soprano ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... in st. 6. See the passage translated by Shelley from Bion (p. 63), 'Sleep no more, Venus:... 'tis Misery calls,' &c.; but here the phrase, ''Tis Misery calls,' is Shelley's own. He more than once introduces Misery (in the sense of Unhappiness, Tribulation) as an emblematic personage. There is his lyric named Misery, written in 1818, ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... "Those lyric feasts, Where men such clusters had, As made them nobly wild, not mad; While yet each verse of thine Outdid the meat, outdid ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... years saw Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Shakespeare, Chapman, Decker, and Ben Jonson at the head of our drama; Spenser, Warner, Daniel, and Drayton leading narrative poetry; the contributors to England's Helicon, published a year later, at the head of our sonneteers and lyric poets; and Sidney, Lyly, Greene, and Hooker in the van of our prose literature. The history of Meres's work, a dissertation from which is here extracted, is curious. In or about 1596, Nicholas Ling and John Bodenham ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... Hon. Stephen Coleridge has already established his position among the more tuneful writers of true lyric verse, and into all that he writes the poet puts delicacy and true emotion, the former never becomes mere phrase, the latter never degenerates into ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... all only about thirty thousand lines; but it includes epic, lyric, didactic, elegiac, and allegorical poems, together with war-ballads, paraphrases, riddles, and charms. Of the five elegiac poems (Wanderer, Seafarer, Ruin, Wife's Complaint, and Husband's Message), the Wanderer is the most artistic, and best portrays ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... exquisite as that slight hand Could Raphael or Leonardo trace. Nor could the poets know in Fairyland The changing wonder of your lyric face. ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... Finnish national poetry, which brought to light the beauties of the Kalevala. It appeared in 1733, and bore the title: De Effectibus Naturalibus. The book contains a quaint collection of Finnish poems in lyric forms, chiefly incantations; but the author was entirely at a loss how to account for them, or how to appreciate them. He failed to see their intimate connection with the religious worship of the ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... the ninetieth psalm. In the period of the judges we have only the song of Deborah and Barak. The perfect originality of all these primitive songs is acknowledged by all. It constitutes indeed one of their chief charms. With "the sweet psalmist of Israel" began the era of lyric song; with Solomon that of didactic, and with Hosea, Joel, Isaiah, and their contemporaries, that of prophetic poetry. The poets to whom, under the illumination of the Holy Ghost, these different forms of Hebrew poetry owe their origin, are all distinguished for their originality. So is also ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... among the old editions of the poets and romancists; and there are, and always will be, a distinguished minority, of which the selling prices may be expected to remain firm. Such men as Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, Massinger, and among the lyric group Barnfield, Watson, Constable, Wither (earlier works and Hallelujah), Carew, Herrick, Suckling, and Lovelace, are to be viewed as ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... same lyric cry that has been crystallised for all time, so far as the American people are concerned, in "The Old ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... the Times," his patriotic trumpet-call aroused Prussians to fight France. Napoleon tracked the lyric poet out; Arndt fled to Sweden; but continued to write for the cause. He returned ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... party is not willing to cut old friends. What to call 'em I don't know. Blank verse they are not, because of the rhymes.—Rhimes they are not, because of the blank verse. Heroics they are not, because they are lyric, lyric they are not, because of the Heroic measure. ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... overpraise— The gods, the ladies, and the king; And I, for one, endorse the thing. The heart, praise tickles and entices; Of fair one's smile, it oft the price is. See how the gods sometimes repay it. Simonides—the ancients say it— Once undertook, in poem lyric, To write a wrestler's panegyric; Which, ere he had proceeded far in, He found his subject somewhat barren. No ancestors of great renown; His sire of some unnoted town; Himself as little known to fame, The wrestler's praise was rather tame. The poet, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... road dipped into a little valley and rose again, breasting the slope of a wooded hill which thrust itself out from the steeper flank of the mountain-range. Down the hill-side a song floated to meet us—that most noble lyric of ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... written in the truest Schubertian style. I like to fancy that the melody with its serene, lyric beauty is a picture of the fair Rosamunde herself. The first variation, a plaintive melody over an agitated accompaniment, I should be inclined, still referring to Rosamunde and regarding each variation as expressing an experience ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... dear Sir, Madame George Sand must be gratified this time! Your article this morning upon her autobiography really did hit the bull's-eye, plumb! What fire! what enthusiasm! what lyric strains!" ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Ross I 'll daily sing, With vocal note and lyric string, And duly, when I 've drank the king, He 'll be my second toss. May Heaven its choicest blessings send On such a man, and such a friend; And still may all that 's good attend The worthy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Potidaea? Because in the former case every thing is ordered by law, and each of you knows long before-hand, who is the choir-master [Footnote: The choregus, or choir-master, of each tribe, had to defray the expense of the choruses, whether dramatic, lyric, or musical, which formed part of the entertainment on solemn occasions. This was one of the [Greek: leitourgiai], or burdensome offices, to which men of property were liable at Athens, of which we shall see more in other parts of our author.] of his tribe, who the gymnastic [Footnote: ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... critics have already assigned to H. H. her high place in our catalogue of authors. She is, without doubt, the most highly intellectual of our female poets.... The new poems, while not inferior to the others in point of literary art, have in them more of fervor and of feeling; more of that lyric sweetness which catches the attention and makes the song sing itself over and over afterwards in the remembering brain.... Some of the new poems seem among the noblest H. H. has ever written. They touch the high-water mark of her intellectual power, ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow passengers, the less I was tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... very good Latinist and hi improvising whole tragedies on any subject, chosen by the audience. When the subject is chosen, he develops his plan, fixes his dramatis personae and then strikes off in versi sciolti. He at times introduces a chorus with lyric poetry. I was present one evening at an Accademia given by him in the Palazzo Chigi. The subject chosen was Sophonisba and it was wonderful the manner in which he varied his plot from that of every other dramatic author ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... we want Examples of the same good sense in modern Times, even amidst the cruel inrodes that Art and Fashion have made upon Nature and the simplicity of Wisdom. Menage, the greatest name in France for all kind of philologic Learning, prided himself in writing critical Notes on their best lyric Poet, Malherbe: And our greater Selden, when he thought it might reflect credit on his Country, did not disdain even to comment a very ordinary Poet, one Michael Drayton. But the English tongue, at this Juncture, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... that are among the gifts sent to Cleon, seems to be indicated the degradation of the spiritual by its subjection to earthly ideals, as were the ideals of Greek art. This is more particularly indicated by the one white she-slave, the lyric woman, whom further on in his letter, Cleon promises to the King he will make narrate (in lyric song we must suppose) his fortunes, speak his great words, and describe his ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... is really inherent in the music. "Norma" was at that time even given for his benefit! He now took up the "Rienzi" material in earnest and projected a plan for the work which required the largest stage for its execution. The lyric element of the romance, the messengers of peace, the battle hymns, and the passion of love had already charmed his purely musical sense. It was however by a solid work for the theatre, of which the main feature should not be simply "beautiful verses and fine rhymes" but ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... military committee. The officers gathered in the club-room and drank long life to Leonard and confusion to Devers, and then little Sanders tuned up his guitar and sang. He was just back from leave, and a popular lyric of the day was one they called "The Accent On," for the last line of every verse was "with the accent on" some syllable of the last word of the previous line. There was nothing especially poetic ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... theorist, and an ardent specialist in grammar and the use of words, Malherbe reacted violently both against the misplaced and artificial erudition of the Pleiade and their unforced outbursts of lyric song. His object was to purify the French tongue; to make it—even at the cost of diminishing its flavour and narrowing its range—strong, supple, accurate and correct; to create a language which, though it might be incapable of expressing ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Or the best lyric pieces, how like they are to certain bird-songs! —clear, ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge and triumph which the outpouring of the male bird contains. (Is not the genuine singing, lyrical quality essentially ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... bumps and jars. It was very uncomfortable, her position being wretchedly cramped. Once she was startled to hear the driver break into song. It sounded like a Spanish love song and his voice was a lyric tenor and very musical. It was Pachuca! She determined to know what was ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... that the temptations to which the great lyric poet, Thomas Moore, was so often and so peculiarly exposed, were ever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... in a new walk of poetry; but in the then barbarous state of our Theatre, such a performance as Gorboduc must have been hailed as not only a novelty but a wonder. It was the first piece composed in English on the ancient tragic model, with a regular division into five acts, closed by lyric choruses. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... before they will let us pass. For example, one afternoon I was waylaid on my way to the women by the head of the household I was visiting, a fine old man of the usual type, courteous but opposed. He asked to look at my books. I had a Bible, a lyric book, and a book of stanzas bearing upon the Truth, copied from the old Tamil classics. He pounced upon this. Then he began to chant the stanzas in their inimitable way, and at the sound several other old men drew round ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... rendering of "bell um pomum" by "he's a daisy," and remarks, appropriately enough, "that this was well enough for 1898; but we would now be more inclined to render it 'he's a peach.'" Again, Peck renders "illud erat vivere" by "that was life," but, in the words of our lyric American jazz, we would be more inclined to render it "that was the life." "But," as Professor Gaselee has said, "no rendering of this part of the Satyricon can be final, it must always be in the slang of ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... perturbing theme. It seems to combine the enduring lustre of a precious metal with the tenuity of gold-leaf. Even the most vivid emotions of grief and love, as well as the horrors of war, were banished from the Japanese Parnassus, where the Muse of Tragedy warbles, and the lyric Muse utters nothing but ditties of exquisite and melting sweetness, which soothe the ear, but never stir the heart: while their meaning is often so obscure as ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... Say how or when Shall we, thy guests, Meet at those lyric feasts, Made at the "Sun," The "Dog," the "Triple Tun," Where we such clusters had As made us nobly wild, not mad? And yet each verse of thine Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine. My Ben! Or come again, Or send to us, Thy wit's great ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the woods. Wouldn't you like to? The hills are one long glory to-day." It was not the note of her prayer, it was well-ordered and calm. Still, Steering's heart leaped like a boy's at her friendliness, and he began to speak his gratitude in a lyric tune: ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... class, even giving the word class a fairly elastic sense. They are short prose Romans d'aventures. But Asseneth is a mystical allegory; Aucassin et Nicolette is a sort of idyll, almost a lyric, in which the adventure is entirely subordinated to the emotional and poetical interest; L'Empereur Constant, though with something of the Roman d'aventures in it, has a tendency towards a moralitas ("there is ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... King's health, and supported the toast by a ballad in which "Great Charles, like Jehovah," was described as merciful and generous to the foes that would unking him and the vipers that would sting him. The chorus to this loyal lyric was sung by the "groundlings" with heartiness ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and lyric. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... valley, and saw the full moon come up and look down upon us from behind Sentinel Rock, and heard the intermittent booming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the spruce trees that towered around us, and felt the tender, brooding spirit of the great valley, itself touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on every hand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls—surely that was a night none of us can ever forget. As Yosemite can stand the broad, searching light of midday and not be cheapened, so its enchantments can stand the light ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... in the ambassador's house at Soleure, he was lodged in a room which had once belonged to his namesake, Jean Baptiste Rousseau (b. 1670—d. 1741), whom the older critics astonishingly insist on counting the first of French lyric poets. There was a third Rousseau, Pierre [b. 1725—d. 1785], who wrote plays and did other work now well forgotten. There are some lines ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... accompaniment, second, bass; score; bourdon[obs3], drone, morceau[obs3], terzetto[obs3]. composer &c. 413; musician &c. 416. V. compose, perform &c. 416; attune. Adj. musical; instrumental, vocal, choral, lyric, operatic; harmonious &c. 413; Wagnerian. Adv. adagio; largo, larghetto, andante, andantino[obs3]; alla capella[It][obs3]; maestoso[obs3], moderato; allegro, allegretto; spiritoso[obs3], vivace[obs3], veloce[obs3]; presto, prestissimo[obs3]; con brio; capriccioso[obs3]; scherzo, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... his "Lyric Love." The story of the most beautiful romance that the world has ever known thus falls into three distinctive periods,—that of the separate life of each up to the time of their marriage; their married life, with its scenic setting in the enchantment of Italy; and his life after ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... did feed Admetus' heifers white Is no light tale. Upon the lyric string Nor more could I my joyful notes indite, Nor with sweet ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... was, as I remember it, a most exquisite night—a white poem, a frosty, starry lyric of light. It was one of those nights on which one might fall asleep and dream happy dreams of gardens of mirth and song, feeling all the while through one's sleep the soft splendour and radiance of the white moon-world outside, as one hears soft, far-away music sounding through ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... twenty years," concluded the report in a strain of lyric prophecy, "petroleum will have taken the place of all the primitive and useless illuminating mediums now employed. It will replace, in like manner, all the coarse and troublesome varieties of fuel of our day. In less than twenty years the whole world will be lighted and heated by petroleum; ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... an early date: Enzina's echo verses are imitated in the Comedia de Rubena, 1521). We may note that the story of Troy is running in Vicente's head as in the Exhorta[c,][a]o of 1513 (he had probably just read the Cronica Troyana). The last lyric, A la guerra, caballeros, is out of keeping with the rest of the play, but fighting in Africa was so frequent that it cannot help to determine the play's date. It is in this period (1512-14) that it is customary to place the death of ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... all concurred in the opinion, that poetry was first employed in celebrating the praises of the gods. The fragments of the Orphic hymns, and those of Linus and Musaeus, show these poets entertained sounder notions of the Supreme Being than many philosophers of a later date. There are lyric fragments yet remaining that bear striking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... spoken in the northern part of the country. This, the langue d'oil, became at length the French language. But the langue d'oc, a soft and musical tongue, survived long enough to become the vehicle of lyric strains, mostly on subjects of love and gallantry, still familiar in mention, and famous as the songs of the troubadours. The flourishing time of the troubadours was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Provencal is an alternative ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... dignified form than is really inherent in the music. "Norma" was at that time even given for his benefit! He now took up the "Rienzi" material in earnest and projected a plan for the work which required the largest stage for its execution. The lyric element of the romance, the messengers of peace, the battle hymns, and the passion of love had already charmed his purely musical sense. It was however by a solid work for the theatre, of which the main feature should not be simply "beautiful verses and fine ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... listen to an entire concert is to provide variety of material—a heavy number followed by a light one; a slow, flowing adagio by a bright snappy scherzo; a tragic and emotionally taxing song like the Erl-King by a sunny and optimistic lyric; a song or a group of songs in major possibly relieved by one in minor; a coloratura aria by a song in cantabile style; a group of songs in French by a group in English; a composition in severe classic style by one of romantic tendency, ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... motive for our care of offspring, and for all our other most self-forgetful devotions, our finest altruisms, our most polished expressions in language, manners and dress. It justifies labor, ambition, and at times even self-effacement. It underlies nearly all the lyric expressions in art; furnishes almost the only theme for that delineation of modern life which we call the novel; and is a main support for music, painting, statuary and belles-lettres. It gives us the institution of the family, which is the parent of the state; it is closely allied to religion; ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... reading at this time so limited as might be expected from the foregoing. The study of Shelley's poetry had led me to read pretty nearly all the English lyric poets; Shelley's atheism had led me to read Kant, Spinoza, Godwin, Darwin and Mill; and these, again, in their turn, introduced me to many writers and various literature. I do not think that at this time I cared much for novel reading. Scott seemed to me on a par with Burke's speeches; that is ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... us how the mysteries of being are shared by the commonest lives; the short lyric "Wages" condenses into a few lines the strongest proof of the life to come; and "Crossing the Bar" has borne many a spirit in peace out to the ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the Revolutionary epoch in modern history. Though he wrote several long narrative poems and one great tragedy, he was above all a lyric poet—according to some the greatest lyric poet of England. His life, like his poetry, was almost untrammelled by convention. Both gave great offence to the stricter elements of English society. In ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Devastation or a Glatton? Can a Devastation or a Glatton ever inspire poetic thoughts and images? One would say that the singer must be endowed in no ordinary degree with the sacred fire whom such a theme as a modern ironclad turret-ship should move to lyric utterance. It has been said that all the romance of the road died out with the old coaching days; and certainly a locomotive engine, with its long black train of practical-looking cars, makes hardly so picturesque a feature in the landscape as one of the old ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... There is no more mystery in it than in the singing of birds. The motive may be either to obtain discharge from the sense of guilt or a desire to save and store up the very echoes and last drops of pleasure. Human beings keep diaries for as many different reasons as they write lyric poems. With Pepys, I fancy, the main motive was a simple happiness in chewing the cud of pleasure. The fact that so much of his pleasure had to be kept secret from the world made it all the more necessary for him to babble when alone. True, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Blessed Virgin, King Edward III dedicated his principal religious foundation; and Chaucer, to whatever extent his opinions or sentiments may have been in accordance with ideas of ecclesiastical reform, displays a pious devotion towards the foremost Saint of the Church. The lyric entitled the "Praise of Women," in which she is enthusiastically recognized as the representative of the whole of her sex, is generally rejected as not Chaucer's; but the elaborate "Orison ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... before among the rudiments of grammar; but that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe. This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play-writers be; and show them what religious, what glorious and magnificent ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... pigeon-wings, the concertina played "Matamoras," Jones continued his lyric, when two Mexicans leaped at each other, and the concertina stopped with ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... the German mind—for many centuries. But at the same time this evil effect was counter-balanced by the ineradicable strength and virtues of the Northern barbaric blood. This sacred Teutonic blood it was which brought into Western Europe the subtlety of romantic conceptions, the true lyric touch in poetry, the deep reverence which was (till recently) the note of their religion, the love of adventure in which the old civilization was lacking, and a vast respect for women. At the same time their warrior spirit evolved the great structure of feudalism, the chivalric model ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, Safe from the weather! 30 He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, Singing together, He was a man born with thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo! Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note Winter would follow? Till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone! Cramped and diminished, Moaned he, "New measures, other feet anon! My dance is finished?" ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... least of scholars, who exerted themselves to emulate the Alexandrian masters. With true tact the more gifted of the Alexandrian poets avoided larger works and the pure forms of poetry—the drama, the epos, the lyric; the most pleasing and successful performances consisted with them, just as with the new Latin poets, in "short- winded" tasks, and especially in such as belonged to the domains bordering on the pure forms of art, more especially to the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... against its revival, pursuing it continually, wherever it should pause or lurk, even to the most remote and unconsidered villages and hamlets"—Crescimbeni could not do less than write four dialogues, as he did, in which he evolved from four of Constanzo's sonnets all that was necessary for Tuscan lyric poetry. ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... Harmless tribe! Your lyric madness You'll continue, while there yonder, In the East, the clouds are gathering, Soon to ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... gathering their utmost force from the sense of communion in a form which has expressed them both, for long generations of struggling fellow-men. The Hebrew liturgy, like others, has its transitions of litany, lyric, proclamation, dry statement and blessing; but this evening, all were one for Deronda: the chant of the Chazaris or Reader's grand wide-ranging voice with its passage from monotony to sudden cries, the outburst of sweet boys' voices from the little choir, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... that Cowper's poetry lacked the true note of passion, that there was an absence of the "lyric cry." I protest that I find the note of passion in the "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture," in his two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce not less marked than I find it in ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... following generation, now that the foundations were once laid, there arose a lyric, epic, and dramatic art; and it is of great importance, even in a historical point of view, to ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... though the owners of the windows may possibly not think so. This rather indescribable element runs through a hundred English things, as in the love of bathos shown even in the sound of proper names; so that even the yearning lover in a lyric yearns for somebody named Sally rather than Salome, and for a place called Wapping rather than a place called Westermain. Even in the relapse into rowdiness there is a sort of relapse into comfort. There is also ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... first and the music having been enthusiastically applauded, Dresden followed the good example in October 1890. The music is full of sweet melody, the composition masterfully set. Its comic parts are not quite natural, but the lyric is almost classical and the text, written by the composer himself, though lacking in action, shows, that Cornelius was a true poet as well as a ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Germany in these years inevitably reflected the liberal sentiment of the time; it is always the radical emotion of any revolutionary period that finds the most effective lyric expression, the conservative state of mind being more characteristically prosaic. For the group of ardent spirits who made themselves the heralds of the new day, one of their number, the novelist and dramatist Karl Gutzkow, found the name "Young Germany." Just as the "Storm and Stress" of 1770 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... so much as this, however, is not to say the last word. The question is whether Wordsworth, however unequal to Shelley in lyric quality, to Coleridge or to Keats in imaginative quality, to Burns in tenderness, warmth, and that humour which is so nearly akin to pathos, to Byron in vividness and energy, yet possesses excellences of his own which place him in other respects above ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... course would be the pecuniary emolument by no means to be sneezed at, going hand in hand with his tuition fees. Not, he parenthesised, that for the sake of filthy lucre he need necessarily embrace the lyric platform as a walk in life for any lengthy space of time. But a step in the required direction it was beyond yea or nay and both monetarily and mentally it contained no reflection on his dignity in the smallest and it often turned in uncommonly handy to be handed ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the lovely lyric which comes from the lips of Mary, has been sung during many centuries as one of the chief canticles of the Christian Church. Its occasion was a visit paid to her kinswoman, Elisabeth, by Mary shortly ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... contrasted in Synge's "Riders to the Sea" and his "Playboy." The first was written straight from the heart. We feel Synge must have followed those people carrying the dead body, and touched to the quick by the caoine, passed the touch on to us, for in the lyric swell of the close we get the true emotion. Here alone is he in the line of greatness. This gripped his heart and he wrote out of himself. But in the other work of his it was otherwise. He has put his method on record: he listened through a chink in the floor, and wrote around ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... lose, if necessary, all of Milton, all of Shakespeare but a song or two, much of Dante and some of Homer, to be secured in them for ever. My friend (of the Ramillies) and I were disputing about a phrase I had applied to lyric poetry as the infallible test of its merit. I asked for "the lyric cry," and he scorned me. I could find a better phrase with time; but the quatrain just quoted makes it unmistakable, as I think. Anyhow, it will be conceded that there was some putting off ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... gazed with reverent delight, for he thought he was praying. But he was only blessed. So easily can God make a man happy! The past had dropped from him like a wild but weary and sordid dream. He was reborn, a new child, in a new bright world, with a glowing summer to revel in. One of God's lyric prophets, the larks, was within earshot, pouring down a vocal summer of jubilant melody. The lark thought nobody was listening but his wife; but God heard in heaven, and the young prodigal heard on the earth. He would be ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... Verona, is the greatest lyric poet of Roman literature. One hundred and sixteen of ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... The moral laws are deduced from faith in the equal personal dignity of men, and the ennobling of humanity set up as the highest mission of morality. The three fundamental aesthetical tempers are the idyllic and epic of enthusiasm, the dramatic of resignation, the lyric of devotion. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... in other countries. In the construction and conduct of his plots he showed great skill, yet the ingenuity expended in the management of the story did not restrain the fiery emotion and opulent imagination which mark his finest speeches and give them a lyric quality which some critics regard as his ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... part of its literature shows more striking proof of the common life and interests of Mediaeval Europe than does the lyric poetry of the period. In Northern France, in Provence, in all parts of Germany, in Italy, and a little later in Spain, we see a most remarkable outburst of song. The subjects were the same in all the countries. Love-the love of feudal chivalry—patriotism, and religion were ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... of opera-dancers is extremely well defined, as their names implies; for they most do congregate wherever an opera-house exists. Some, however, descend to the non-lyric drama, and condescend to "illustrate" the plays of Shakespeare. It is said that the classical manager of Drury Lane Theatre has secured a company of them to help the singers he has engaged to perform Richard the Third, Coriolanus, and other ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... herself "en rapport" with those around her. Books were her world from her earliest years; in them she literally lost and found herself. She was eleven years old when the War of Succession broke out, which inspired her first lyric outbursts. Her poems and translations written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were collected, and constituted her first published volume. Crude and immature as these productions naturally were, and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... authors. She is, without doubt, the most highly intellectual of our female poets.... The new poems, while not inferior to the others in point of literary art, have in them more of fervor and of feeling; more of that lyric sweetness which catches the attention and makes the song sing itself over and over afterwards in the remembering brain.... Some of the new poems seem among the noblest H. H. has ever written. They touch the high-water mark of ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... from the little-read play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, may serve to illustrate the perfection of the Shakespearean lyric. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... decline to give at least their name, deeply as they feel that in giving it they are offending against all the rules of historical perspective. I should not say that my father was one of the great poets of Germany, though Heine, no mean critic, declared that he placed his lyric poetry next to that of Goethe. Besides, he was barely thirty-three when he died. He had been a favourite pupil of F. A. Wolf, and had proved his classical scholarship by his Homerische Vorschule, and other publications. His poems became popular in the true sense of the word, ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... 90th Psalm—'the prayer o' Moses, the man o' God'—the grandest piece o' lyric, to my taste, that I ever heard o' on the face o' God's earth, an' see what a man can write that'll have the patience to wait a century or twa before he rins to the publisher's. I gie ye up fra' this moment; the letting out o' ink is like the letting out o' waters, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... The Lyric Poems are almost all of the light and airy kind, such as trip lightly and nimbly along, without the load of any weighty meaning. From these, however, "Rural Elegance" has some right to be excepted. I once heard it praised by a very learned lady; and, though the lines ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... book of Daniel. The contact with the outside world makes possible a phase of literature such as that to which the books of Job and Ecclesiastes belong. The deepening of the inner life gave the world the lyric of the Psalms, some of which are credibly assigned to a period so late as that ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... disclaims the capacity for lofty themes, but, especially as he grows older and more philosophic, and perhaps less lyric, half-seriously attributes whatever he does to persevering effort. ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... expectancy, and when we steamed out into the lake I could scarcely repress a cry of joy so thrilling was the view. I had never seen a large body of water, had striven to picture the majesty of a wave, and now I stood with poetry rolling about me—now a deep-blue elegy, now a limpid lyric, varying in hue with the shifting of a luminous fleece-work, far above. To have been born and brought up amid great scenes were surely a privilege, but to come upon them for the first time when the mind is ripe, ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... course we are. Old rivals too, In commerce and adventure the world over. From JOHN THE GREAT'S time to the present, you In Africa have been a daring rover; "The Rover's free"! Ah! that's good lyric brag— He is not free to trample on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... ringing true. Look, for example, at the work of those two whom we could so ill spare—Synge and St. John Hankin. They were as far apart as dramatists well could be, except that each had found a special medium—the one a kind of lyric satire, the other a neat, individual sort of comedy—which seemed exactly to express his spirit. Both forms were in a sense artificial, but both were quite sincere; for through them each of these two dramatists, so utterly dissimilar, shaped forth the essence of his broodings and visions ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... will only say that anything more acute, delicate, and discriminating, and, I must add, more entirely valueless and pedantic, I do not think I ever heard. It must have required immense and complicated knowledge. He was tracing the development of a certain kind of dramatic lyric, and what surprised me was that he supplied the subtle intellectual connection, the missing links, so to speak, of which there is no earthly record. Let me give a single instance. He was accounting for a rather sudden change of thought in a well-known poet, and he showed ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... event of the evening! General Hardshell Jackson, Senor Lupe de Tamale, and the renowned lyric barytone, James Russell Lowell Mason, will combine in a grand farewell concert. Ascend the platform, Senor!" he cried to the Mexican lad, who stood, wide-eyed, in a corner. Then he ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... they generally have been swift to turn from him and to prefer to him not only foreigners, which would not necessarily be bad, but oftentimes the least respectable of musicians. The triumph of Rameau was of the briefest. Scarcely had his magnificent lyric tragedies established themselves when the Guerre des bouffons broke out, and popular taste, under the direction of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the other Encyclopedists, discovered the light Italian music of the day more "natural" and infinitely ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... he followed Owen back to his study, hoping to persuade him into telling the story of how he had gone down to Dulwich to write a criticism of Innes's concert, and how he had at once recognised that Evelyn had a beautiful voice, and would certainly win a high position on the lyric stage if ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... power to their AEolian and Dorian neighbours. Among the Ionic cities themselves Miletus and Ephesus were the most flourishing, Grecian literature took its rise in the AEolic and Ionic cities of Asia Minor. Homer was probably a native of Smyrna. Lyric poetry flourished in the island of Lesbos, where Sappho and Alcaeus were born. The Ionic cities were also the seats of the earliest schools of Grecian philosophy. Thales, who founded the Ionic school of ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... quasi-satirical poems of The Mooncalf, The Owl, and The Man in the Moon, show a faculty of comic treatment less graceful indeed, but scarcely inferior, and the lyrics called Odes (of which the Ballad of Agincourt is sometimes classed as one) exhibit a command of lyric metre hardly inferior to the command displayed in that masterpiece. In fact, if ever there was a poet who could write, and write, perhaps beautifully, certainly well, about any conceivable broomstick in almost any conceivable manner, that poet was Drayton. His historical poems, which ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... teach him, and your words will be hopeless and profitless. The one thing that is required to bind Christian men together is this common affection. That being there, everything will come. It is the germ out of which all is developed. As we read in that great chapter to the Corinthians—the lyric praise of Charity,—all kinds of blessing and sweetness and gladness come out of this, It is the central force which, being present, secures that all shall be right, which, being absent, ensures that all shall ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... music. Apollo is the god of dreams, Dionysus the god of intoxication; the one represents for us the world of appearances, the other is, as it were, the voice of things in themselves. The chorus, then, which arose out of the hymns to Dionysus, is the "lyric cry," the vital ecstasy; the drama is the projection into vision, into a picture, of the exterior, temporary world of forms. "We now see that the stage and the action are conceived only as vision: that the sole 'reality' is precisely the chorus, which ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... his claims. After giving up his farm he removed to Dumfries. It was at this time that, being requested to furnish words for The Melodies of Scotland, he responded by contributing over 100 songs, on which perhaps his claim to immortality chiefly rests, and which placed him in the front rank of lyric poets. His worldly prospects were now perhaps better than they had ever been; but he was entering upon the last and darkest period of his career. He had become soured, and moreover had alienated many of his best friends by ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the publication, in 1855, of the Poems, in two volumes, entitled "Men and Women," Browning reviewed his work and made an interesting reclassification of it. He separated the simpler pieces of a lyric or epic cast—such rhymed presentations of an emotional moment, for example, as "Mesmerism" and "A Woman's Last Word," or the picturesque rhymed verse telling a story of an experience, such as "Childe ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... a fool, he will stay and stay on until the town becomes all in all to him; until the very streets are his chums and certain buildings and 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 ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... think, there was a waiter in this very hotel, but, alas! he is now gone, who sang (from morning to night, as my informant said with a shrug at the recollection) what but 's ist lange her, the German version of Auld Lang Syne; so you see, madame, the finest lyric ever written will make its way out of whatsoever corner of patois it found ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thou, Euterpe, touched blind Milton's tongue, And swept the thousand chords of Shakespeare's soul; Woke Byron from his hours of idle dream, And then he sang mankind a deathless song. But thou at last didst reach the lyric goal Of art in Tennyson's ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... Julia by name, Your friend, little Cally, your wishes proclaim; Read this and you'll soon learn to know it, I'm not your papa the great lyric poet. ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... very extensive compositions, to give them additional polish, and bring them to the highest possible perfection of which they were susceptible, even had I written them down with the utmost care. Maroncelli did the same, and, by degrees, retained by heart many thousand lyric verses, and epics of different kinds. It was thus, too, I composed the tragedy of Leoniero da Dertona, ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and technical skill; but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. He was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on poetry was to the ground of it. He could not be deceived as to the presence or absence of the poetic element in any composition, ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... English lyric verse, of whose depths, main-stream, and back-waters his knowledge was profound, ...
— The Garden of Bright Waters - One Hundred and Twenty Asiatic Love Poems • Translated by Edward Powys Mathers
... life is wrought In movements of melodious thought; In symphony, great wave on wave— Or fugue, elusive, swift, and grave; A singing land, whose lyric rhymes Float on the air like village chimes: Music and Verse—the deepest part Of a whole nation's thinking heart! * * * * * Oh land of Now, oh land of Then! Dear God! the dreams, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... were not wearing a mask, but were exhibiting their genuine selves with perfect simplicity. Now one characteristic of the Wit is always a fear of ridicule. Above all things he dreads making a fool of himself. The old lyric, for example, which came so spontaneously to the Elizabethan poet or dramatist, and of which echoes are still to be found in the Restoration, has decayed, or rather, has been transformed. When you have written a genuine bit of love-poetry, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... a lyric recitation; let us be brief and clear. What do you want? Explain yourself. I don't suppose that you have addressed this rebuke to me solely for the purpose of telling me that you are in ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... The lyric related the history of a new suit of clothes that was worn by everyone except the person ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... of throbbing life lie behind that roll! Then run over the persons of a single drama: that one bounded inclosure, how rich in variety and intensity, and truth of feeling! And when you shall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic, comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought, accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wide provinces of human sorrow and joy. Why are these pictures of passion so uniquely prized, passed on from generation ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... very valuable to a collector of English sound sense.... Burns's 'Scots wha hae' is poor as a lyric composition. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... belongs more to the masculine than to the mystic school. Deep in thought, he is clear in language and in purpose. Since Byron's dramas, we have seldom had such fiery and vigorous verse. He blends the strong with the tender, in natural and sweet proportions. His genius, too, vaults into the lyric motion with very great ease and mastery. He is a minstrel as well as a bard, and has shown power over almost every form of lyrical composition. His sentiment is clear without being commonplace, original, yet not extravagant, and betokens, as well as his ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... their renown in music, as well as what might be termed their golden era, with the establishment of the Italian opera, in the seventeenth century. At this period all the stages of Italy were the scenes of the lyric triumphs of this otherwise unfortunate class, some of whom accumulated vast fortunes. In the following century, as has been seen, Clement XVI abolished the practice as far as the church was concerned, and in the present century the first Napoleon abolished the practice secularly and socially. ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... death, in spite of his feeling that he was in some measure a help and comfort to his sister." Under the influence of this great sorrow he wrote The Two Voices, Ulysses, "Break, Break, Break," and began that exquisite series of lyric poems, afterwards joined together in the In Memoriam. His friendship for Hallam remained throughout life with him as one of his most ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... to be found in the Peninsula; the one consists of these somewhat reactionary and romantic lovers of the past, the other of the fresh, native products of the people, independent as far as possible of antiquity, and altogether unaffected by learned studies. The latter is mainly lyric in its character, and has often a wild beauty, which is none the less attractive because it is purely natural. These songs deal more with nature than those of the Sclavonic tribes, with which Mrs. Robinson ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... glad to hear that you are soon to have Voltaire at Manheim: immediately upon his arrival, pray make him a thousand compliments from me. I admire him most exceedingly; and, whether as an epic, dramatic, or lyric poet, or prose-writer, I think I justly apply to him the 'Nil molitur inepte'. I long to read his own correct edition of 'Les Annales de l'Empire', of which the 'Abrege Chronologique de l'Histoire Universelle', ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... "I wrote the lyric as well as the melody," said Wilson Hymack, who had already seated himself at the piano. "It's got the greatest title you ever heard. It's a lallapaloosa! It's called 'It's a Long Way Back to Mother's ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... all recollect a dozen instances when architecture, music, painting, or some sudden sight of sea or mountain, have thus affected us; and all poetry, particularly all great lyric poetry, Goethe's, Shelley's, Wordsworth's, and, above all, Browning's, is full of the record of ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... more necessary to define sharply the line between poetry of the people and poetry for the people.[2] The latter may still be written; the making of the former is a lost art. Poetry of the people is either lyric or narrative. This difference is roughly that between song and ballad. 'With us,' says Ritson, 'songs of sentiment, expression, or even description, are properly termed songs, in contradistinction to mere narrative ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Wagner, who was more moderate and a closer follower of tradition, sought to establish a compromise (perhaps an impossible one) between music and speech, and to create the new lyric drama, Berlioz, who was more revolutionary, achieved the dramatic symphony, of which the unequalled model to-day is still Romeo ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
