"Elegy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that your own hare or a wig?" is perfect in its way. Here there is an absolute identity of sound with an equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Hood abounds in examples of this sort of fun—only that his analogies are of a more subtle and perplexing kind. In his elegy on the old ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Macdonald's house, where the haughty Lord of Sleat ended his career. ["Genealogy of the Macras" and the Ardintoul MS. "This Donald Gorme was son to Donald Gruamach, son to Donald Gallach, son to Hugh, natural son to Alexander, Earl of Ross, for which the elegy made on his death calls him grandchild and great grandchild to Rhi-Fingal (King ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... throne for the young champion, whom he had so much cause to regard as a rival. What a proof of the victory of love over self is his saying, 'Thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto thee'! (1 Samuel xxiii. 17). Truly did David sing in his elegy, 'Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women'; for in that old world, in which the relations between the sexes had not yet received the hallowing and refinement of Christian times, much of what ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... meritorious sense of the word: he was the creator of philosophic poetry in France. Until Jocelyn appeared, in 1836, the form of poetic expression was confined chiefly to the ode, the ballad, and the elegy; and no poet, with the exception of the author of 'Moise' and 'Eloa', ever dreamed that abstract ideas and themes dealing with the moralities could be expressed in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... we come to transcribe some of Sir Philip Sidney's work. There is no irreverence in it. Nor can I take it as any sign of hardness that Raleigh should treat the visual image of his own anticipated death with so much coolness, if the writer of a little elegy on his execution, when Raleigh was fourteen years older than at the presumed date of the foregoing verses, describes him truly ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... and clear give variety to the sameness of the English words. —Gray, in the Elegy, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... chance in my own library another bit of evidence in the case, which fully confirms my surmise that the Elegy was printed in The Magazine of Magazines before it appeared in the Grand Magazine of Magazines. Chambers's Book of Days (vol. ii. p. 146), in an article on "Gray and his Elegy," says: ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... of Array for this county, and on May 28, 1645, had the honour of entertaining his sovereign at Cotes, after which he was fined 1114l. by the parliamentary sequestrators. He was the last of the family who resided at Cotes; and amongst his poems is "An Elegy on the Death of my never enough lamented master, King Charles I." The others are chiefly of a melancholy turn. Sir Henry, his second son, died soon after his father, unmarried; whereupon his title and estate went to his next brother Sir Gray, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... which "charms the storms of the soul," (DER SEELE STURM BESCHWORT,) he sought without doubt forgetfulness, which occupation, by rendering the memory torpid, may sometimes procure, though it cannot destroy the sense of pain. At the close of that fine elegy which he names "The Ideal," a poet, who was also the victim of an inconsolable melancholy, appeals to labor as a consolation when a prey to bitter regret; while expecting an early death, he invokes occupation as the last resource against ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... street—and so vast that all bargaining is below it, and they may inherit it without considering their deserts.' I believe this to be strictly and equally true of the appeal which Poetry makes to each of us, child or man, in his degree. As Johnson said of Gray's "Elegy," it 'abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' It exalts us through the best of us, by telling us something new yet not strange, something that we recognise, ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... is free to confess that he does not admire Gray's 'Elegy,' and Macaulay to avow that he sees little to praise in Dickens and Wordsworth, why should not humbler folks have the courage of their own opinions? They cannot possibly be more wrong than Johnson and Macaulay were, and it is surely better to be honest, though ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... Nations Greek Particles Latin Compounds Propertius Tibullus Lucan Statius Valerius Flaccus Claudian Persius Prudentius Hermesianax Destruction of Jerusalem Epic Poem German and English Paradise Lost Modern Travels The Trinity Incarnation Redemption Education Elegy Lavacrum Pallados Greek and Latin Pentameter Milton's Latin Poems Poetical Filter Gray and Cotton Homeric Heroes in Shakspeare Dryden Dr. Johnson Scott's Novels Scope of Christianity Times of Charles I. Messenger of the Covenant Prophecy Logic of ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... out, upon his chilling banks "Her limbs extending. There her very griefs, "Pour'd with her tears, still musically sound. "Mourning, her words in a soft dying tone "Are heard, as when of old th' expiring swan "Sung his own elegy. Wasted at length "Her finest marrow, fast she pin'd away; "And vanish'd quite to unsubstantial air. "Yet still tradition marks the spot, the muse "Of ancient days, still Canens call'd the place, "In honor of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... pass sentence on my life," Raphael answered. "If your friendship is not strong enough to bear with my elegy, if you cannot put up with half an hour's tedium for my sake, go to sleep! But, then, never ask again for the reason of suicide that hangs over me, that comes nearer and calls to me, that I bow myself before. If you are to judge a man, you must ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... indirect, and, perhaps, more effective, species of sacred poetry, we fear it must be acknowledged, to the shame of the last century, that there is hardly a single specimen of it (excepting, perhaps, Gray's Elegy, and possibly some of the most perfect of Collins's poems) which has obtained any celebrity. We except the writers of our own times, who do not fall within the scope of ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... some uncouth lines on the death of the present laird's father, intituled 'Nature's Elegy upon the death of Donald Maclean of Col.' They are not worth insertion. I shall only give what is called his Epitaph, which Dr. Johnson said, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... being taken from the barbarians, were consecrated to the gods. And in Salamis they had permitted them to bury the dead near the city, as being men who had behaved themselves gallantly, and to write over them this elegy:— ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... year 1712, Pope appeared again before the public as the author of the Temple of Fame, and the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. Much speculation has arisen on the question concerning the name of this lady, and the more interesting question concerning the nature of the persecutions and misfortunes ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in 1864, and Mr. Gray (as he of the "Elegy" used to be called on his title-pages) found them in 1740. "The streets," he wrote home to his mother, "are one continued market, and thronged with populace so much that a coach can hardly pass. The common sort ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... sepulture[obs3]; inhumation|; obsequies, exequies[obs3]; funeral, wake, pyre, funeral pile; cremation. funeral, funeral rite, funeral solemnity; kneel, passing bell, tolling; dirge &c. (lamentation) 839; cypress; orbit, dead march, muffled drum; mortuary, undertaker, mute; elegy; funeral, funeral oration, funeral sermon; epitaph. graveclothes[obs3], shroud, winding sheet, cerecloth; cerement. coffin, shell, sarcophagus, urn, pall, bier, hearse, catafalque, cinerary urn[obs3]. grave, pit, sepulcher, tomb, vault, crypt, catacomb, mausoleum, Golgotha, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... said, "told me last term that her favorite poem in English literature, is 'Gray's Elegy' on account of it's being so full of calm. Sometimes I think that Sylvia ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... nay, he could distinguish by their countenances the different kinds of poetry in which they exercised the muse. He saw Tragedy conspicuous in a grave solemnity of regard; Satire louring in a frown of envy and discontent; Elegy whining in a funeral aspect; Pastoral dozing in a most insipid languor of face; Ode-writing delineated in a distracted stare; and Epigram squinting with a pert sneer. Perhaps our hero refined too much in his penetration, when he affirmed, that, over and above these discoveries, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... adds to them but addeth chaff, Obscures with husks the golden grain. Not all the bards of other days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could bring to that one simple phrase What were not rather loss than gain; That elegy so briefly fine, That epic writ in half a line, That little which so much conveys, Whose silence is a hymn of praise And throbs ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... most curious pieces of verse ever written on tobacco is the following by Southey, entitled "Elegy ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... rising to the glories of empire, was to be sacrificed to the mad notion of petty "State Sovereignty," by a sworn band of desperadoes. How sad when other generations would ask, where is the Federal Government, to be answered only by poets, who would sing her elegy, as in the past they have sang that of the ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... Tacitus, parts of the tragedians, at school, but now he had it in his power to study a great author entire, and as a whole. Never before did he fully appreciate the "thunderous lilt" of Greek epic, the touching and voluptuous tenderness of Latin elegy, the regal pomp of history, the gorgeous and philosophic mystery of the old dramatic fables. Never before had he learnt to gaze on "the bright countenance of truth, in the mild and dewy air of delightful studies." ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the descriptive allegorical poem which gave Botticelli ideas for his "Birth of Venus" and "Primavera". He lives chiefly by his Latin poems; but he did much to make the language of Tuscany a literary tongue. His elegy on the death of Lorenzo has real feeling in it and proves him to have esteemed that friend and patron. Like Pico, he survived Lorenzo only two years, and he also was buried in Dominican robes. Perhaps the finest feat of Poliziano's life was his action in slamming the sacristy doors in the face ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... friends, are some of the "short and simple annals of the poor." But those of whom Gray spoke rest peacefully in the "country churchyard;" their spirits are in heaven, and their history is embalmed in his own immortal Elegy. But these records are of those who yet live and ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... 480. The 'sepulchralis ara' is the funeral pile, which was built in the form of an altar, with four equal sides. Ovid also calls it 'funeris ara,' in the Tristia, book iii. Elegy xiii. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... was mad. He then secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy which begins thus:— ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... and thy seed after thee." Oh, the palace, the palace, the palace! That is what Richard Baxter called "The Saints' Everlasting Rest." That is what John Bunyan called the "Celestial City." That is Young's "Night Thoughts" turned into morning exultations. That is Gray's "Elegy in a Churchyard" turned to resurrection spectacle. That is the "Cotter's Saturday Night" exchanged for the Cotter's Sabbath morning. That is the shepherd of Salisbury Plain amid the flocks on the hills of heaven. That is the famine-struck Padan-aram turned into the rich ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... provincial poet—in the sense that America still was a literary province of the mother country." To this amazing statement one can only rejoin that if "The Biglow Papers," the "Harvard Commemoration Ode," "Under the Old Elm," the "Fourth of July Ode," and the Agassiz elegy are English provincial poetry, most of us need a new map and a new vocabulary. Of both series of "Biglow Papers" we may surely exclaim, as did Quintilian concerning early Roman satire, "This is wholly ours." It is true that Lowell, like ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... that it took, Gray, author of 'An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,' seven years ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... thought, a courageous aim at high and, in a strict sense manly, excellence in many of the writers:—nor can that period be justly termed tame and wanting in originality, which produced poems such as Pope's Satires, Gray's Odes and Elegy, the ballads of Gay and Carey, the songs of Burns and Cowper. In truth Poetry at this as at all times was a more or less unconscious mirror of the genius of the age; and the brave and admirable spirit ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... The elegy of Tickell, maliciously called by Steele "prose in rhyme," is alike inspired by affection and fancy; it has a melodious languor, and a melancholy grace. The sonnet of Gray to the memory of West is a beautiful effusion, and a model for English sonnets. Helvetius was the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... epicure, knew coffee as few men before him or since. In his historical elegy, contained in Gastronomy as a Fine Art, or the Science of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... vividness: whether it be the romance of Alexander the Great and the exploits of Rustem, or the love scenes of Zal and Rodhale, of Bezhan and Manezhe, of Gushtasp and Kitayim. That he was also an excellent lyric poet, Firdusi shows in the beautiful elegy upon the death of his only son; a curious intermingling of his personal woes with the history of his heroes. A cheerful vigor runs through it all. He praises the delights of wine-drinking, and does not despise the comforts ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... into a deep relapse of the wandering disposition, which, as I may say, being born in my very blood, soon recovered its hold of me; and, like the returns of a violent distemper, came on with an irresistible force upon me. This blow was the loss of my wife. It is not my business here to write an elegy upon my wife, give a character of her particular virtues, and make my court to the sex by the flattery of a funeral sermon. She was, in a few words, the stay of all my affairs; the centre of all my enterprises; the engine that, by her prudence, reduced me to ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... added and interlined and balanced it all on his actor's tongue, and read it aloud before the glass. Poe shortened his days and flung away a valuable fag-end of his life, trying to show that life is not worth living, and thus proved it is. Gray spent thirteen years writing his "Elegy," and so made clear the point that the man who does good work does not at the last lay him down and rest his head upon the lap of earth, a youth to fortune and to fame unknown. Gray secured both fame and fortune. He was so successful that he declined the Laureateship, and had the felicity to die ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... elegy shall sing, For elegy has other subject none; Each strain of music in my ears shall ring Knell of departure from that ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... History but the story of the bygone? The elegy, too, comes to us as the last lamenting, sadly solemn swan-song of that glorious golden time. And, indeed, are not all poesies but various notes of that mighty diapason of Thought and Feeling, that has, through the ages, been singing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... would pen, engross, indite, Transcribe, set forth, compose, address, Record, submit—yea, even write An ode, an elegy ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... point at the base of the Heights of Abraham, where a narrow path had been discovered to the summit. Not a voice broke the silence of the night save the voice of Wolfe himself, as he quietly repeated the stanzas of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," remarking as he closed, "I had rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec." But his nature was as brave as it was tender; he was the first to leap on shore and to scale the narrow path where no two men could go abreast. His men followed, ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Isham copy or ed. A.—In the old copies this elegy is marked "Elegia v." The fifth elegy (beginning "Nox erat et somnus," &c.) was ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... this conclusion without much thought. She composed an Ode to Despair, an Elegy to an Unhappy Woman, and a Triolet to Interfering Dukes, before her mind was made up. She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a melancholy grey and holding communion ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... exceptionally fine collection of editions of his works and of rare plates illustrating episodes from them. Notable among the books was a first edition of his earliest published poems, four redondillas, a copla and an elegy, on the death, October 3, 1568, of Elizabeth de Valois, third wife of Philip II, and sister of Charles IX of France.[13] Dark rumors were afloat for some time that she had been poisoned by order of her husband. Among the other ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... window to the dying day, and lightly sighed. The time was April's end, and had been squally, with violent storms; but the last onslaughts of the north-wester had routed the rain-clouds. The day was dying under a clear saffron sky, and a thrush piped its mellow elegy. Miss Percival heard him, and listened, smiling with her lips, and with her eyes also which the serene light soothed. Her lips barely moved, just relaxed their firm embrace, but no more. She held the light gratefully ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... his hair and spake, saying, "I am a descendant of Ali;" and he entered the city along with the caravan from Hijaz, saying, "I come a pilgrim from Mecca;" and he presented a Casidah or elegy to the king, saying, "I have composed it!" The king gave him money, treated him with respect, and ordered him to be shown much flattering attention; till one of the courtiers, who had that day returned from a voyage at sea, said, "I saw ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... beautiful words because they had beautiful thoughts? this is surely too great a paradox to be borne. Rather, it is the fire within the author's breast which overflows in the torrent of his burning, irresistible eloquence; it is the poetry of his inner soul, which relieves itself in the Ode or the Elegy; and his mental attitude and bearing, the beauty of his moral countenance, the force and keenness of his logic, are imaged in the tenderness, or energy, or richness of his language. Nay, according to the well-known line, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Death (1361 and 1369), and a few years earlier the poet of the "Vision" had given voice to the sufferings of the poor. It was not, however, the mothers of the people crying for their children whom the courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the year 1369; the woe to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a princely widower temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first wife. In 1367 the Black Prince was conquering Castile ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... The Shepherd's Pipe, a publication of the same year. The former two were, in turn, under the patronage of that most cultured family, the Herberts, Breton being a protege of "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," whom Browne (and not Ben Jonson, as is commonly said) eulogised thus in elegy. George Wither, being Browne's intimate friend, was presumably not unappreciated by the kinsfolk of George Herbert. Thus do they appear as in a bond ...
— 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)
... Orleans." In the spring of 1801 the "Maid of Orleans" appeared on the stage, to be followed in 1803 by the "Bride of Messina," and in 1804 by his last great work, his "William Tell." During the same time Schiller composed his best ballads, his "Song of the Bell," his epigrams, and his beautiful Elegy, not to mention his translations and adaptations of English and French plays for the theatre at Weimar. After his "William Tell" Schiller could feel that he no longer owed his place by the side of Goethe to favor and friendship, but to his own work ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... find the feeling of the poets, also, attaching itself with tenderness to graceful scenes of country life. Tito Strozza, about the year 1480, describes in a Latin elegy the dwelling of his mistress. We are shown an old ivy-clad house, half hidden in trees, and adorned with weather-stained frescoes of the saints, and near it a chapel, much damaged by the violence of the river Po, which flowed hard by; not far ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... him, we do not know. In 1601 Fitzgeoffrey published a short Latin elegy on Nash in his "Affaniae," alluding in happy phrase to the twin lightnings of his armed tongue and his terrible pen; and Nash had six lines of tempered praise in "The Return from Parnassus." But all we know of the cause or manner of Nash's death has to be collected ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... Shenstone, who, by the beauties which he made to appear on his paternal farm of Leasowes, fairly rivalled the best of the landscape-gardeners,—and who, by the graces and the tenderness which he lavished on his verse, made no mean rank for himself at a time when people were reading the "Elegy" of Gray, the Homer of Pope, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Poges, and I want you to see it, for it's such a lovely spot. Probably you have all learned in school parts of Gray's 'Elegy,' and very likely you never cared or thought much about the poem. Even if that's true, you can't possibly help loving this peaceful, beautiful place, ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... 'everybody is talking about him' is a eulogy. To say 'every one is talking about her' is an elegy," is no longer true, more's the pity. More's the pity, I mean, because such a delicious bit deserves a longer life. I could weep over the early death of an epigram with a hearty spirit, which is second only to the grief I feel at a good story ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... Leigh Hunt so justly and so critically said that Beaumont and Fletcher never wrote anything of the kind more lovely. Herrick, of course, lives simply by virtue of his songs; his more ambitious or pretentious lyrics are merely magnified and prolonged and elaborated songs. Elegy or litany, epicede or epithalamium, his work is always a song-writer's; nothing more, but nothing less, than the work of the greatest song-writer—as surely as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist—ever born of English ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... at Rome in 1821. Every reader knows his history and the cause of his death. Shelley says, in the preface to his elegy: ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... specialties of successive configuration, splendour and colour, his Firework blazes-off. Small, as usual, is the satisfaction that such can meet with here. From amid these confused masses of Eulogy and Elegy, with their mad Petrarchan and Werterean ware lying madly scattered among all sorts of quite extraneous matter, not so much as the fair one's name can be deciphered. For, without doubt, the title ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... cross the Atlantic. We did not say that The Spoon River Anthology was a new book, but that it was a new book from America. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported from Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' People in England who heard of Main Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street; with the principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... population, is a magnificent spectacle; and Montcalm laying down his life to lose Quebec is not less affecting than Wolfe dying to win her. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on the eve of his costly victory, the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," which he would "rather have written than beat the French to-morrow;" but it aches for the defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered, when told how brief his time was, "So much the better; then I shall not live to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... short time there had appeared Gray's "Elegy," Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle," Fielding's "Amelia" and Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." Here was menu to fit most palates, and the bill-of-fare was duly discussed in all social gatherings of the upper circles. The afflicted ones ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... least, prevent her image from being enshrined in my heart. No, Julia! even when thou descendest to the grave, thy remembrance will cause thee to live in my imagination, and I shall thus write thine elegy: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... of those fortunate bards who obtain fame and honor during life. His learning was deep, his reading extensive, his acquaintance with mankind large. "To him," says Denham in his famous elegy, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... feelings and emotions. He is found writing a pensive, semi-religious letter one day, and the next indulging in some outburst of extravagant merriment. One day, he indulges in a strain of melancholy recollection regarding a deceased mistress, commemorating her in an elegy which hardly any one has ever since been able to read without tears; and within four-and-twenty hours, he is again strumming on the comic lyre. A deep mortification falls upon him in the shape of a censure ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... till noon, after which they both reappeared like men who had got rid of a burden. The true secret of their retirement revealed itself the morning after, when each of two great newspapers, with which they were severally connected, was found to contain long columns of elegy on the irreparable loss which the country had just suffered—compositions implying a suggestion on the part of each of the elegists that a poet existed who was not unfit to repair it. That same day after luncheon the two competitors departed. Our hostess and the other ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... professors at the Bourges College, nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy, melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called Tristesse (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems Paquita la Sevillane and Le Chene de la Messe; three sonnets, a description of the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, with a tale ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... as much as children, when we advised that a great deal of poetry should not be read by very young pupils; the labour and difficulty of explaining it can be known only to those who have tried the experiment. The Elegy in a country church-yard, is one of the most popular poems, which is usually given to children to learn by heart; it cost at least a quarter of an hour to explain to intelligent children, the youngest of whom was at the time nine years old, the first stanza ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... individual feeling. Hence, lyrical poetry re-appeared, not in the shape of religious songs, as in the old time, but in a form to touch all the chords of sentiment. Two new types of verse appeared,—the Elegiac and the Iambic. At first the elegy was probably a lament for the dead. It was accompanied by the soft music of the Lydian flute. The instruments which the Greeks had used were string-instruments. The early Greek elegies related to a variety of themes,—as war, love, preceptive wisdom. The iambic meter ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... "Juvenile Poems on Various Subjects, with the Prince of Parthia," printed in Philadelphia by one Henry Miller.[4] The volume contained a life written by Evans, a critical estimate written by Dr. Smith, of the College of Philadelphia, and an Elegy from the pen of John Green, who had been previously complimented by Godfrey in a poem entitled "A Night Piece." The whole spirit of the publication was one of friendly devotion and of firm belief in the permanency of ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... Church of England, and proceeded to India as a chaplain. In addition to his chaplaincy, he held the office of preceptor to one of the native princes of Hindostan. He died at Bhoog, in the kingdom of Cutch, on the 25th of September 1830; and if we add that he was a man of remarkable learning, his elegy may be ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Yorkshireman. Henry Carey From "Snaith Marsh" Anonymous When at Hame wi' Dad Anonymous I'm Yorkshire too Anonymous The Wensleydale Lad Anonymous A Song 1. Thomas Browne A Song 2. Thomas Browne The Invasion: An Ecologue Thomas Browne Elegy on the Death of a Frog David Lewis Sheffield Cutler's Song Abel Bywater Address to Poverty Anonymous The Collingham Ghost Anonymous The Yorkshire Horse Dealers Anonymous The Lucky Dream John Castillo The Milkin'-Time J. H. Dixon I Niver can call Her my Wife Ben Preston Come ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... be imagined: a face alive with moral personality and human charms, such as win and warm our stranger eyes, yet the name, subject, artist, owner, all lost in oblivion! To pause before an interesting but "unknown portrait" is to read an elegy as pathetic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... almost coincident with his death. His "Royal Civic Function" showed what a hand had been lost to Punch; but it was his delightful "New Year's Ode: To the Winner of the St. Nisbett—Season, 1844," that was the best of his rare contributions. It was at once an elegy of Mrs. Nisbett, and a prayer and prophecy that she might again be seen on the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... imagination, to the vicinity of the galleries devoted to the men of the Revolution and the campaigns of '92; amid the smoke of conflict ever appears that resolute, olive face with the dark eye fixed and the thin lip curved in decision or expectancy. We mechanically repeat Campbell's elegy as we mark "Hohenlinden," and linger with patriotic gratitude over "Yorktown," notwithstanding the absurd prominence given to the French officers; Conde, Turenne, Moreau, Lannes, Massena, and Lafayette fight over again before us the ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... visits that consecrated ground who has not reaped enjoyment from the labors of that man's life. And as the simple epitaph meets the eye, and is read in an audible tone, the heart-felt invocation, "Blessings on his memory!" is his oft-repeated elegy. ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... such as these is to know a very different Brann from the author of "The Bradley-Martin Bal Masque" or "Garters and Amen Groans." The Brann who wrote "Life and Death," by that work alone, wins to undying fame as surely as does Grey by his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." I have combed my memory in vain to match it from an American pen. A few paragraphs from Ingersoll, a few pages from Poe, a few stanzas from Whitman—but make your own search and your own comparisons; and if, in your ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... and Harry Esmond blushed that he had not a single tear for her, and fell to composing an elegy in Latin verses over the rustic little beauty. He bade the dryads mourn and the river-nymphs deplore her. As her father followed the calling of Vulcan, he said that surely she was like a daughter of Venus, though Sievewright's wife was an ugly shrew, as he remembered to have heard ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mournful speech, the wail of tree, The words the winds and waters say, Make up that general elegy, ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... but some of your bright wits might have found it a subject affording many poetical turns, and have told the world, in an heroic elegy, that, ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... which was then spreading far and wide." Two years of penury followed; and then three years of school-mastering in the College of St. Barbe, which he has immortalised—at least, for the few who care to read modern Latin poetry—in his elegy on "The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the Humanities." The wretched regent-master, pale and suffering, sits up all night preparing his lecture, biting his nails and thumping his desk; and falls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the sound ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... The Two Poets of Croisic (1878) brings the work of this decade to a close.[119] La Saisiaz, the record of thoughts that were awakened during that solitary clamber to the summit of Saleve after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith, is not an elegy, but it remains with us as a memorial of friendship. In reading it we discern the tall white figure of the "stranger lady," leaning through the terrace wreaths of leaf and bloom, or pacing that low grass-path which she had loved and called her own. It serves Browning's purpose ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Shelley. After a perplexing search his mother found the desired poems, most of them in first editions, at the Olliers, Vere Street, London. She took home also three volumes by another poet, John Keats, who, she was told, was the subject of an elegy by Shelley. Browning never forgot the May evening when he first read these new books, to the accompaniment, he said, of two nightingales, one in a copper-beech, one in a laburnum, each striving to outdo the other in melody. A new imaginative world was opened to the boy. ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... possible that my Marietta would have deserted our parental roof. At length the idea oppressed me with the weight of absolute certainty, and I fell into a wretched and agonised state of mind. Maroncelli was no less affected than myself. The next day he composed a beautiful elegy upon "the sister of the prisoner." When he had completed it, he read it to me. How grateful was I for such a proof of his affection for me! Among the infinite number of poems which had been written upon ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... at a great age, and her elegy over her coffin were these words from himself: "Here lies my dear faithful, pious, prudent, prayerful wife. I shall go to her, but she shall not return ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... own poetical spirit, according to the funeral elegy written some two hundred and fifty years after his death, a great honour ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... flageolets escort the stalwart young Memon bridegroom unto the house of the bride. Thus is it ever in this city of strange contrasts. Life and Death in closest juxtaposition, the hymn in honour of the Prophet's birth blending with the elegy to the dead. Bag-pipes are not unknown in the Musalman quarters of Bombay; and not infrequently you may watch a crescent of ten or twelve wild Arab sailors in flowing brown gowns and parti-coloured head-scarves treading a measure to the rhythm of the bagpipes blown by a younger member of ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... In Gray's "Elegy" is there an image more striking than his "shapeless sculpture"? Of sculpture in general, it may be observed that it is more poetical than nature itself, inasmuch as it represents and bodies forth that ideal beauty and sublimity ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... years, spelt by th' unletter'd Muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... Lunatic Asylum The White Peacock Colors A Minor Poet The Lover in Hell Winged Man Music The Innovator Love in Twilight The Fiddling Wood Portrait of a Boy Portrait of a Baby The General Public Road and Hills Elegy for ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... of his commentary on his consulship and his history of his own times, is altogether lost. Of the former, which consisted of the heroic poems Halcyone, Limon, Marius, and his Consulate, the elegy of Tamelastes, translations of Homer and Aratus, epigrams, etc., nothing remains, except some fragments of the Phaenomena and Diosemeia of Aratus. It may, however, be questioned whether literature has suffered much by these losses. We are ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Signorina Vivaldi became the fashion. The literati celebrated her scholarship, the sonneteers her eloquence and beauty; and no foreigner on the grand tour was content to leave Milan without having beheld the fair prodigy and heard her recite Petrarch's Ode to Italy, or the latest elegy of Pindamonte. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Intrigue him; &c. you must spread all upon Paper, and if you can procure a Scrap of Latin to put at the End, it will garnish it mightily: then having affixed your Name at the bottom with a Maestus Composuit, you will have an Excellent Elegy. ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... best pieces, such as his famous elegy, he caught the classic tone to perfection, feeling himself in vital union with the great of bygone centuries; but in thought and feeling he was really modern and under the influence of the Christian Germanic spirit with all its depth and intensity. ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... rather absurd that I was on the point of propounding to you this identical idea. I realised, and I regret to add revealed to two girls, a fortnight ago, the truth that all existing poems were in fact acrostics; and I offered a small pecuniary reward to whichever would find out Gray's "Elegy" within half an hour! But it never occurred to me to utilise the discovery, as it did to you. I see that it might be utilised, now you mention it—and I shall instruct these two young women not to publish ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... between the soothing charm of the 'gai scavoir' and the excitement of war, and who was equally at his ease whether he was holding the lance or the pen. He had the tenderest friendship for the young Prince, and mourned his death in the best elegy that appeared at the dawn of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... upon the memory of a poet whom he sincerely admired. No criticisms upon Shelley's works are half so good as his own. It is, therefore, interesting to collect the passages in which he speaks of an elegy only equalled in our language by "Lycidas", and in the point of passionate eloquence even superior to Milton's youthful lament for his friend. "The 'Adonais', in spite of its mysticism," he writes to Ollier, "is the least imperfect of my compositions." "I confess I should be ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... tired of the jingle of Pope's imitators, and the new era had not dawned. Goldsmith and Gray, both recently dead, serve to illustrate the condition in which the most exquisite polish and refinement of language has been developed until there is a danger of sterility. The 'Elegy' and the 'Deserted Village' are in their way inimitable poems: but we feel that the intellectual fibre of the poets has become dangerously delicate. The critical faculty could not be stimulated further without ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... especially to the monorhyme, Rim continuat or tirade monorime, whose monotonous simplicity was preferred by the Troubadours for threnodies. It may serve well for three or four couplets but, when it extends, as in the Ghazal-cannon, to eighteen, and in the Kasidah, elegy or ode, to more, it must either satisfy itself with banal rhyme words, when the assonants should as a rule be expressive and emphatic; or, it must display an ingenuity, a smell of the oil, which assuredly ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Preface Dedication The Wrexham Eisteddfod and the "Death of Saul" Historical Note DEATH OF SAUL Episode the First Episode the Second Episode the Third Episode the Fourth Palm Sunday in Wales Elegy on the late Crawshay Bailey, Esq. Nash Vaughan Edwardes Vaughan; a Monody Monody on the Death of Mrs. Nicholl Carne Elegiac Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Grenfell In Dreams Mewn Cof Anwyl: on the Death of John Johnes, Esq., of Dolaucothy Elegiac In Memoriam ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... exclusively to prose. Poetry loves genius, and starves it; whilst prose, hating, feeds and clothes its child. Clearly genius, so much at ease in the essay, would prosper in the poem. No one can imagine when men will live and not love Gray's "Elegy"; and if this be so, then for as long, at least, there will be a place within the heart for Goldsmith's Deserted Village. Of The Traveller, Dr. Johnson said: "There has not been so fine a poem since Pope's time." This may seem poor praise. It was not so at that ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... compared by Anthony with a Greek statue, he had sweetness as well as depth of nature. His drawings of horses were the delight of his family; and when his favourite hunter died he wrote a graceful elegy on the afflicting event. The influence of his genial kindness was never forgotten by his youngest brother; but there was a stronger and more dominating personality of which the effect was less beneficial to a sensitive ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... place to him, Writers of Rome and Greece. This application to Milton of a line from the last elegy (25th) in the second book of Propertius is not only an example of Addison's felicity in choice of motto for a paper, but was so bold and well-timed that it must have given a wholesome shock to the minds of many of the Spectators readers. Addison was not before Steele in appreciation ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... beloved by his pupils and associates, and was identified with the brilliant group—Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell,—each of whom has written of him. Lowell considered his 'Elegy on Agassiz,' written in Florence in 1874, among his best verses; Longfellow wrote a poem for 'The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz,' and Holmes 'A Farewell to Agassiz' on his departure for the Andes, whose affectionate and humorous ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... “The Visions,” an elegy, the first of the poems in Anna Seward’s “Poetical Works,” having reference to the sad event, ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... fine genius, a gentle and amiable nature, and pure Christian sentiments, Grant afforded eminent promise, with a prolonged career, of becoming an ornament to literature. Cut down in the bloom of youth, his elegy has been recorded by ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... "Sunrise" is an elegy to James A. Garfield, 20th President of the United States, who died on September 19, 1881, from a gunshot wound received in an assassination attempt ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... Directions," continuing Edmund Waller's "Instructions to a Painter." The printer of these poems, with which were printed one by Andrew Marvell, was sentenced to stand in the pillory. In 1667 Denham wrote his beautiful elegy on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... 2 Sam. i. 17-27 (R.V.). This elegy is described as a quotation from Jasher, the "Book of the Upright." Many modern writers attribute its authorship to David himself; others reject this view; all agree in regarding it as extremely ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero |
