"Lyrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wings having each two smaller arches, the entablatures of which are enriched, if we must so term it, with gaudy mosaic figures, portraits and heraldic bearings, while the spans of the arches surmount pyramidal groups of emblems, scientific, medical, lyrical and so forth. Red curtains with heavy gilt cords and tassels behind the arches throw the columns with composition (not Composite) capitals and the emblems into high relief. Beneath the centre arch is the armorial bearing of the country. The vestibules ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... consists the true lyrical magic. In that line of Burns's, clearly, it lies in the harmony of lyric thought and ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... fitness, soundness, human perfection, elevated wisdom, sublime thought, pure, strong intuition, and whatever other qualities one might enumerate. But when we find all these qualities, not only in the dramatic works that have come down to us but also in lyrical and epic works, in the philosophers, the orators, and the historians, and in an equally high degree in the works of plastic art that have come down to us, we must feel convinced that such qualities did not ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... how a climax of physical horror is immediately veiled and made beautiful by lyrical poetry. Sophocles does not, however, carry this plan of simply flooding the scene with sudden beauty nearly so far as Euripides does. See Hipp., p. 39; Trojan Women, ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... produced "Osorio," "Fears in Solitude," "Ode to France," the first part of "Christabel," "Frost at Midnight," "The Nightingale," "Kubla Khan," and "The Ancient Mariner," and planned with his friend Wordsworth "Lyrical Ballads," the most epoch-making book of modern English poetry. Truly this year, from April, 1797, to April, 1798, was the annus mirabilis of his life. Never again was he so happy, never again did he do such good work, as when he harboured in this cottage, and slipped through the back gate ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... inspirations freshly from nature. I can, indeed, describe poorly in words the odours of this June morning—the mingled lilacs, late wild cherries, new-broken soil, and the fragrance of the sun on green verdure, for there are here both lyrical and symphonic odours—but how inadequate it is! I can tell you what I feel and smell and taste, and give you, perhaps, a desire another spring to spend the months of May and June in the country, but I can scarcely ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... addresses, as well as prose documents of a weighty or serious character, must be spoken or written in this pompous and antiquated style, owing to which, naturally, the country is almost destitute of orators. But the poets,—especially men of the sparkling fancy of Bellman, or the rich lyrical inspiration of Tegner, are not to be fettered by such conventionalities; and they have given the verse of Sweden an ease, and grace, and elegance, which one vainly seeks in its prose. In Stockholm, the French taste, so visible in the manners of ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... the North American Review pointed out recently "their spontaneous power and freshness, their imaginative vision, their lyrical magic." He adds: "Mr. Noyes is surprisingly various. I have seldom read one book, particularly by so young a writer, in which so many different things are done, and all done so well.... But that for which one is most grateful to Mr. Noyes in his strong ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... corner of this bridge is the prison, with accommodation for over two hundred prisoners. Leaning one day over the Ponte di Paglia I saw one being brought in, in a barca with a green box—as we should say, a Black and Green Maria. I cannot resist quoting Coryat's lyrical passage in praise of what to most of us is as sinister a building as could be imagined. "There is near unto the Dukes Palace a very faire prison, the fairest absolutely that ever I saw, being divided from ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... part of the DEBACLE may be all very fine; but I cannot read it. It suffers from IMPAIRED VITALITY, and UNCERTAIN AIM; two deadly sicknesses. Vital - that's what I am at, first: wholly vital, with a buoyancy of life. Then lyrical, if it may be, and picturesque, always with an epic value of scenes, so that the figures remain in the mind's eye ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Waley's scholarly book is the third work on the No to be published in England in recent years is evidence that a knowledge of a form of lyrical drama of rare artistry is gradually ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... and shrieks, tempers Alleluia with Matantur-lurette, chants every rhythm from the De Profundis to the Jack-pudding, finds without seeking, knows what he is ignorant of, is a Spartan to the point of thieving, is mad to wisdom, is lyrical to filth, would crouch down on Olympus, wallows in the dunghill and emerges from it covered with stars. The gamin of Paris is ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... her ways so pretty that the old man felt the pathos of beauty, so fleet, so fleeting, so lyrical, so full of—Alas! The tears were in his eyes, and he almost applauded with the others when the dance was finished. He bowed vaguely in the direction of the anxious Prue and made his way out. She felt rebuked and condemned and would not be ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Lyrical emotion makes the prophet's language obscure by reason of its swift transitions from one mood of feeling to another. But the main drift here is discernible. God is guarding Israel, His vineyard, and before Him ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... he has excited more sympathy, than ever were bestowed on a supernatural being. Sir Walter Scott also endowed the White Lady of Avenel with many of the attributes of the undines, or water-sprites. German romance and lyrical poetry teem with allusions to sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders; and the French have not been behind in substituting them, in works of fiction, for the more cumbrous mythology of Greece and Rome. The sylphs, more especially, have been the favourites of the bards, and have become so ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... aisles, as if aided by some marvelous sounding-board. Indeed, his song is very strong for so small a bird, and unites in a remarkable degree brilliancy and plaintiveness. I think of a tremulous vibrating tongue of silver. You may know it is the song of a wren, from its gushing lyrical character; but you must needs look sharp to see the little minstrel, especially while in the act of singing. He is nearly the color of the ground and the leaves; he never ascends the tall trees, but keeps ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Lyrical Drama, and other Poems. The Prometheus ranks as at once the greatest and the most thoroughly ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... traced in her works, which, from 1830 to 1840, were personal, lyrical, spontaneous—a direct flow from inspiration, issuing from a common source of emotions and personal sorrows, being the expressions of her habitual reflections, of her moral agitations, of her real and imaginary sufferings. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... after his contemporaries had introduced new versification, partly because he was old-fashioned to the backbone and partly because he had none of those lofty inspirations which naturally generate new forms of melody. He seldom trusts himself to be lyrical, and when he does his versification is nearly as monotonous as it is in his narrative poetry. We must not expect to soar with Crabbe into any of the loftier regions; to see the world 'apparelled in celestial light,' ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even though the rigid law of mine and ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... above named. And seldom has such a bequest borne ampler fruit. 'Upon the interest of the 900 pounds, 400 pounds being laid out in annuity, with 200 pounds deducted from the principal, and 100 pounds a legacy to my sister, and 100 pounds more which "The Lyrical Ballads" have brought me, my sister and I have contrived to live seven years, nearly eight.' So wrote Wordsworth in 1805 to his friend Sir George Beaumont. Thus at this juncture of the Poet's fate, when to onlookers he must have seemed both outwardly ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... that of the Cavallini and their school at Assisi there may be found a faint memory of the splendour that had so unfortunately passed away, it is rather the shadow of the statues we find there—in the Abraham of the upper church of S. Francesco, for instance—than the more lyrical and mortal loveliness of the unknown painters of Imperial Rome. Yet it is there, in that lonely and beautiful church full of the soft sweet light of Umbria, that Giotto perhaps learned all that was needed to enable him not only to recreate ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... were augmented and pieced together, not always very successfully or artistically,[1] by Dr. Kreutzwald, and the story is interrupted by long lyrical passages, especially at the beginning of some of the cantos, which are tedious and out of place in a narrative poem. Consequently, a complete translation would hardly be sufficiently attractive; but there is so much that is curious ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... later work they declared inscrutable. Their bland discrimination, at any rate, in favor of "Men and Women" became henceforth inapplicable, since the poet not only cast out from the division they elected to honor the little lyrical pieces that caught their eye, but also brought to the front, from his earlier neglected work of the same kind as the monologues retained, his Johannes Agricola of 1836, Pictor Ignotus of 1845, and Rudel of 1842. Later criticism, moreover, that even yet assumes to ring the old changes ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... saw important changes in our literature. The last of the great nineteenth century poets were vanishing from the literary scene, their places being taken by others, whose poetry, though hardly as profound and lofty in conception, was more lyrical and simple in manner, with greater delicacy and refinement of form. Especially in the prose-writing of the period, there were signs of flourishing growth. Gunnar Gunnarsson wrote The Church on the Mountain, and Laxness was becoming known. In the early thirties ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... attempted it in pure English, we may venture to predict that he would have failed. But had he allowed himself that free use of the Scottish dialect of which he was the supreme master, especially if he had shaped the subject into a lyrical drama, no one can say what he might not have achieved. Many of his smaller poems show that he possessed the genuine dramatic vein. The Jolly Beggars, unpleasant as from its grossness it is, shows the presence of this vein in a very high degree, seeing ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... of Mrs. Robinson was a volume of Lyrical Tales. She repaired a short time after to a small cottage ornee, belonging to her daughter, near Windsor. Rural occupation and amusement, quiet and pure air, appeared for a time to cheer her ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... page, they remain footnotes still. When they were placed by him as prefaces to his Poems, they retain that place in this edition; but when they were appendix notes—as e.g. in the early editions of "Lyrical Ballads"—they are now made footnotes to the Poems they illustrate. In such a case, however, as the elaborate note to 'The Excursion', containing a reprint of the 'Essay upon Epitaphs'—originally contributed to "The ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... delicacy and variety. It is a finer and more intimate style, which over and over again distinguishes Borrow from the Victorian pure and simple. The dialogue is finer; it is used less to disguise or vary narrative, and more to reveal character and make dramatic effect; and it is even lyrical at times. Borrow can be Victorian still. This example is from the old man's history in ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... of Philae is severe. Even in bright sunshine it has an iron look. On a grey or stormy day it would be forbidding or even terrible. In the old winters and springs one loved Philae the more because of the contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty, its curious tenderness of charm—a charm in which the isle itself was mingled with its buildings. But now, and before my boat had touched the quay, I saw that the island ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... has arrived at this moment, driven from the plane-trees in the square by the din of the rejoicings, to demand my hospitality. I can hear him in the top of a cypress near by. From up there, dominating the lyrical assembly, at regular intervals he cuts into the vague orchestration of the Grasshoppers and ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... of Homer, though the poems ascribed to them (some of which still remain) were of much later date. Almost coeval with the Grecian gods were doubtless religious hymns in their honour. And the germe of the great lyrical poetry that we now possess was, in the rude chants of the warlike Dorians, to that Apollo who was no less the Inspirer than the Protector. The religion of the Greeks preserved and dignified the poetry it created; and the bard, "beloved by gods as men," became invested, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... than anything else. The style is ill suited to the thought; besides, Matthew Arnold, a master at times of blank verse, and of the statelier stanza, was less often an adept at the lighter and more rushing lyrical measures. He is infinitely more at home in the beautiful New Sirens, which, for what reason it is difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later, partly at Mr Swinburne's most judicious suggestion. The scheme is trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond all doubt ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... warning him with the greatest solicitude against further exposure to the night air. Two other policemen appeared; the whole force was doing them honor, Hood declared proudly. He lifted his voice in song, but the lyrical impulse was hushed by a prod from a revolver. He continued to talk, however, assuring his captors of his heartiest admiration for their efficiency. He meant to recommend them for positions in the secret service—men of their genius were wasted upon ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... fragments of a Suffolk Harvest-Home Song, remembered by an old Suffolk Divine, offer room for historical and lyrical conjecture. I think the song must consist of ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... work is almost or quite as excellent in a somewhat more restricted range. In verse he is probably the best artist in American letters. Here his sole pursuit was beauty, both of form and thought; he is vivid and apt, intensely lyrical but without much range of thought. He has deep intuitions but no comprehensive ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... of his natural position among great music makers. His tone poetry is of a quality and power that is not quite like that of any other composer, and in the portraying, or suggesting, as he preferred to call it, of Natural, Historical and Legendary subjects he stands alone. Superbly gifted as a lyrical poet both in the literary and the musical sense, and with a most refined and keen feeling for the dramatic, he spoke with a voice of singular eloquence and power. Probably his greatest achievement was his remarkable, unerring ability to create atmospheres of widely varied kinds in ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... banquet-chamber in Pompeii. Nor, again, did he possess that severe and lofty art of composition which seeks the highest beauty of design in architectural harmony supreme above the melodies of gracefulness in detail. He was essentially a lyrical as distinguished from an epical or dramatic poet. The unity of his work is derived from the effect of light and atmosphere, the inbreathed soul of tremulous and throbbing life, which bathes and liquefies the whole. It was enough for him to produce a gleeful symphony by the play of light and colour, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... of military material is said to have reached the Albanians from Gabriele d'Annunzio in the S.S. Knin. To the Irish, the Egyptians and the Turks the poet-filibuster had merely sent greetings. Some one may have told him that even the most lyrical greeting would not be valued by the Albanians half as much as a ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... I think I have a note on the subject: "his scientific romances" are "on the plane of epic poetry" and "in 'Tono-Bungay' he has achieved the same feat, magnified by ten—or a hundred"; "there are passages toward the close of the book which may fitly be compared with the lyrical freedoms of no matter what epic, and which display an unsurpassable dexterity of hand." And now what are we to say of "Manon Lescaut"? That it is a million times better than Milton and knocks spots off Homer? But all this though distressing ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Tennyson's genius is lyrical rather than either dramatic or epic. What music is like his? Say of his poems, in words ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but upon this condition only—that she make a defence of herself in lyrical ...
— The Republic • Plato
... it is warm and bright, the trees are coming out, the sea looks like summer, the young ladies are yearning for sensations: but yet the north is better than the south of Russia, in spring at any rate. In our part nature is more melancholy, more lyrical, more Levitanesque; here it is neither one thing nor the other, like good, sonorous, but frigid verse. Thanks to my palpitations I haven't drunk wine for a week, and that makes the surroundings ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... monstrous rocks, etc., says the Abbe 'sont admirees avec surprise des voyageurs qui s'ecrient aussitot avec Horace: Ut mihi devio rupee et vacuum nemus mirari libet.' The good man is not exactly lyrical in his praise; and you see how he sets his back against Horace as against a trusty oak. Horace, at any rate, was classical. For the rest, however, the Abbe likes places where many alleys meet; or which, like the Belle- Etoile, are kept up 'by a special gardener,' and admires at the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies reechoing through the world and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in the shop-parlour of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her heart to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to us only through translation in books. But she knew the country too well; she knew the lowing of cattle, the ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... remove to the neighbourhood of Nether Stowey. Out of the relations with Wordsworth thus established came Coleridge's best achievements as a poet, the "Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel." The "Ancient Mariner" was finished, and was the chief part of Coleridge's contribution to the "Lyrical Ballads," which the two friends published in 1798. "Christabel," being unfinished, was ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Fenger. "As wooden as an Indian while talking about a million-a-year deal, and lyrical over a combination of electric sign, sunset, and moth-eaten park. Oh, well, perhaps that's what makes ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... all in lyrical form—if the word form may be applied to her utter disregard of all metrical conventions. Her lines are rugged and her expressions wayward to an extraordinary degree, but "her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music," and the "thought-rhymes" ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... patriots out of Parliament. When he found that the change of administration had produced no change of system, he gave vent to his indignation in the 'Epistle to Curio,' the best poem that he ever wrote; a poem, indeed, which seems to indicate that, if he had left lyrical composition to Cray and Collins, and had employed his powers in grave and elevated satire, he might have disputed the pre-eminence of Dryden." This passage occurs in Macaulay's Essay on Horace Walpole. In the course of the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... fourteen, as it still did to the Browning of forty, the presence of a lofty spirit, one dwelling in the communion of higher things. There was often a deep sadness in his utterance; the consecration of an early death was upon him. And so the worship rooted itself and grew. It was to find its lyrical expression in 'Pauline'; its rational and, from the writer's point of view, philosophic justification in the prose essay on Shelley, published eighteen ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... tease themselves least over his dramatic lapses. For let it be whispered at once, without further scruple. As far as the art of the drama is concerned, Shakespeare is shameless. The poetic instinct—one might call it "epical" or "lyrical," for it is both these—is far more dominant in our "greatest dramatist" than any dramatic conscience. That is precisely why those among us who love "poetry," but find "drama," especially "drama since Ibsen," intolerably tiresome, revert ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... give a signal proof of the reality of its title, and that Life was indeed a Dream, the Queen of Sweden expired in the theatre of Stockholm during the performance of "La Vida es Sueno". In England the play has been much studied for its literary value and the exceeding beauty and lyrical sweetness of some passages; but with the exception of a version by John Oxenford published in "The Monthly Magazine" for 1842, which being in blank verse does not represent the form of the original, no ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... be struck with the modern character of these extracts, nor can he fail to have noticed the lyrical measure, so eminently felicitous, with which the preceding ode commences; together with the bold image of freedom triumphing over power. If the merits of the Rowleian Controversy rented solely on this one piece, it would be decisive; for no man, in ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... the classical period in lyrical verse is particularly significant, because the song is the most primitive and spontaneous kind of poetry, and the most direct utterance of personal feeling. Whatever else the poets of Pope's time could do, they could ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... writing the Introductory Essay of 1830—they were announced, by an advertisement early in 1807, as "Six Epistles from Ettrick Forest," to be published in a separate volume, similar to that of the Ballads and Lyrical Pieces; and perhaps it might have been better that this first plan had been adhered to. But however that may be, are there any pages, among all he ever wrote, that one would be more sorry he should not have written? They are among the most delicious portraitures that ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... ready to start forward into life, snatch the word from the mouth of the narrator, and speak in their own persons. All these forms have been used for the utterance of religious thought and feeling. Of the lyrical poems of England, religion possesses the most; of the epic, the best; of the ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... of lyrical treasure the future may enshrine in Canadian literature, and however deserving may be the claims of the volumes of verse that have already appeared from the native press, I am bold to claim for these productions of Mrs. MacLean's muse a high place in the national ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... pure sky and the landscape formed a large portion of my existence, so large that much of myself depended on it, and I wondered how men could be worth anything if they could never see the face of nature. For this belief my early training on the "Lyrical Ballads" is answerable. When I came to London the same creed survived, and I was for ever thirsting for intercourse with my ancient friend. Hope, faith, and God seemed impossible amidst the smoke of the streets. It ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... in "Mademoiselle de Maupin" a lyrical exaltation of the joys of the flesh: he had eloquently and unreservedly pronounced the fleshly pleasures good. Baudelaire had gone farther: he had said that Evil was beautiful, the most beautiful thing in the world—and proved it, to those ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Danish lyrical romanticism is apparent in the style of the play, the structure, as it seems to me, shows no less clearly that influence of the French plot-manipulators which we found so unmistakably at work in Lady Inger. Despite its ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... s. of a clergyman, and ed. there and at Oxf., entered the Church and held various scholastic appointments, including a mastership at Clifton. His later years were spent in his native island. He had a true lyrical gift, and much of his poetry was written in Manx dialect. His poems include Fo'c'sle Yarns (1881), The Doctor (1887), The Manx Witch (1889), and Old John (1893). He was also an admirable letter-writer, and 2 vols. of ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... romantic school" that it has infected all the Parisians, and that on the stage they think of nothing but the plague, the gallows, the devil, childbeds, and the like. Nor were the romances less extravagant than the dramas. The lyrical poetry, too, had its defects and blemishes. But if it had laid itself open to the blame of being "very unequal and very mixed," it also called for the praise of being "rich, richer than any lyrical poetry France ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... she has received into her heart a human passion. Her peace is gone. Here the poet, in order to express the rapid alternations of feeling to which she is a prey, breaks from the even tenor of blank verse into a lyrical effusion of remarkable beauty and pathos. She is sought for to take her part in the ceremony of the coronation; it is now with a feeling of horror that she receives into her hands the sacred banner, which she had borne triumphantly to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... brushes upon them in freakful yet artistic sport, came forth in the freedom of their wills and the faithful ignorance of their minds. The birds, the poets of the animal creation—what though they never get beyond the lyrical!—awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children. The birds grew silent, because their history laid hold upon them, compelling them to turn their words into deeds, and keep eggs warm, and hunt for worms. The butterflies ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... 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 masculine?) Keats and Shelley, perhaps more notably than any other English poets, have the bird organization and the piercing wild-bird cry. This, of course, is not saying that they are the greatest poets, but that they have preeminently the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... machines in the masks and operas of the sixteenth century; and it required little invention to paint the duchess of York as Venus, or to represent her husband protected by Neptune, and Charles consulting with Proteus. But though the device be trite, the lyrical diction of the opera is most beautifully sweet and flowing. The reader finds none of these harsh inversions, and awkward constructions, by which ordinary poets are obliged to screw their verses into the fetters of musical time. Notwithstanding the obstacles stated by Dryden himself, every ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... peered back through the years. "U-h-m, that was years and years ago, Jeanette—years and years ago, and Nellie had just bought me my rhyming dictionary. It was the first time I had a chance to use it." The lyrical artist drummed with his fingers on the mahogany arm of the sofa. "My goodness, child—what a long column there was of words rhyming with 'ette.'" He laughed to himself as he mused: "You know, my dear, ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... observation, fancy, and humour, or as the intense reflection of the movement of life in its animation of joy and pain—would remain one of the most natural and captivating forms in which the creative impulse of the poet can work. When we look at its variety and flexibility of structure—from the lyrical tragedy of AEschylus to a "Proverbe" of De Musset; at its diversity of spirit—from the exuberance of a comedy of Aristophanes and the caprice of an Elizabethan mask to the serenity of "Comus" and Tasso, and the terror of "Agamemnon" ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... the Gerusalemme; and by Italians it is especially admired for its graceful elegance of diction. Leigh Hunt executed a very good translation of it, which he dedicated to Keats. Its choruses, which are so many "lyrical voices floating in the air," are very beautiful. It was designed for the theatre, and was acted with great splendour at the court of Ferrara, and a few years later at Mantua, when the well-known artist and architect Buontalenti painted the scenery. This fact, however, shows how ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... vitality which makes Hamlet and Orlando, Lady Macbeth and Perdita, men and women of all time. They live; Calderon's people, like Ben Jonson's, move. There is a resemblance between the autos of Calderon and the masques of Jonson. Jonson's are lyrical; Calderon's less lyrical than splendid, ethical, grandiose. They were both court poets; they both made court spectacles; they both assisted in the decay of the drama; they reflected the tastes of their time; but Calderon is the more noble, the more ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... to the lyrical drama, and supposing the contrary, Rossini, of all composers, was the most unfit to treat such a subject in music. The catastrophe in the English tragedy is necessary; we see it from the beginning as through a long and gloomy vista. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... Nal-ayira-prabandham breathe the same spirit of ecstatic devotion as the Bhagavata-purana; they are the utterances of wandering votaries who travelled from temple to temple and poured forth the passionate raptures of their souls in lyrical praise of their deities. Through these three main channels the stream of devotion spread far and wide through the land. Like most currents of what we call "revivalism," it usually had an erotic side; and the larger ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... B.C., and died probably in his eightieth year, and was contemporary with Aeschylus and the battle of Marathon.] We possess, also, fragments of Sappho, Simonides, Anacreon, and others, enough to show that, could the lyrical poetry of Greece be recovered, we should probably possess the richest collection that ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... war, and presenting a startling and truthful picture of the real condition of that region. No pains will be spared to render the literary attractions of the CONTINENTAL both brilliant and substantial. The lyrical or descriptive talents of the most eminent literati have been promised to its pages; and nothing will be admitted which will not be distinguished by marked energy, originality, and solid strength. ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... somewhat unaccountable impression that to 'tell a story,' that is, to compose fictitious narrative of any king, was a sin. . . . Nor would she read the chivalrous tales in the verse of Sir Walter Scott, obstinately alleging that they were not true. She would nothing but lyrical and subjective poetry. As a child, however, she had possessed a passion for making up stories, and so considerable a skill in it, that she was constantly being begged to indulge others with its exercise. . . ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... progress, but worked it out badly, dealing irreverently with Plato as well as Homer and Pindar, and exalting among the moderns not only Moliere and Corneille, but also Chapelain, Scuderi, and Quinault, whom he called the greatest lyrical and dramatic poet that France ever had. The battle had begun with a debate in the Academy: Racine having ironically complimented Perrault on the ingenuity with which he had elevated little men above the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... poems should be warned that they smack not a little of the conversation of his Long Acre friends. Johnson speaks slightingly of his lyrics; but with due deference to the great Samuel, Prior's seem to me amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems.(111) Horace is always in his mind, and his song, and his philosophy, his good sense, his happy easy turns and melody, his loves, and his Epicureanism, bear a great resemblance to that most delightful and accomplished master. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a high level of artistic expression and makes a quite extraordinary appeal. It is intense poetry, lyrical and meditative. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... highest and hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared with this, all other purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a deep enjoyment of the "rich beauties and the dim obscurities" of the "Eve of St. Agnes"[97] and an appreciation of the perfection of the great odes.[98] If he failed to give Shelley his full dues, he did not overlook his exquisite lyrical inspiration. He spoke of Shelley as a man of genius, but "'all air,' disdaining the bars and ties of mortal mould;" he praised him for "single thoughts of great depth and force, single images of rare ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... spacious and stately characteristics of the Hudson from the Palisades to the Catskills are as epical as the loveliness of the Rhine is lyrical. The Hudson implies a continent beyond. No European river is so lordly in its bearing, none flows in such state to the sea. Of all the rivers that I know, the Hudson, with this grandeur, has the ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... poetic result of their friendship was the "Lyrical Ballads," published by Cottle in September, 1798. The origin of the work has been described both by Wordsworth (in a prefatory note to "We Are Seven") and by Coleridge (in the Biographia Literaria, chap. xiv.). At first, they were to collaborate in ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... "she who advances With rapturous, lyrical glances, Singing the song of the earth, singing Its hymn ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Mac-Carthy in the specimens, six in number, which are here translated, preserving, namely, the metrical form, which is one of the characteristics of the old Spanish drama. This medium, through which it partakes of the lyrical character, is no accident of style, but an essential property of that remarkable creation of a poetic age—remarkable, because while the drama so adorned was entirely the offspring of popular impulse, in opposition to many rigorous attempts in favour of classical ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... is peculiarly his own. He carries in memory all the poems in his books, and recites the program made out for him; the wonderful effect of sound produced by his lines, their relation to the idea which the author seeks to convey, and their marvelous lyrical quality are quite beyond the ordinary, and suggest new possibilities and new meanings in poetry. It is his main object to give his already established friends a deeper sense of the musical intention ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... both was the school of Squarcione. For the much more striking resemblances of composition and spirit, the explanation seems to be that Lotto on one side of his nature was akin to Correggio; he had the same lyrical feeling, the same inclination to exuberance and buoyancy. To both, painting was a vehicle for the expression of feeling, but Lotto had also common sense and a goodly share of that humour that is allied ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... lions and tigers had drawn for a little time, until one of the animals had bitten a piece out of the Herr's shoulder; when the Lord Chamberlain interfered, and put a stop to this species of performance: and the grand Lyrical Drama, though brought out with unexampled splendour and success, with Monsieur Poumons as first tenor, and an enormous orchestra, had almost crushed poor Dolphin in its triumphant progress: so that great as his genius and resources were, they ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... editors to print Sonnets to Diana's Eyebrow, and little lyrics of Madison Square, Longacre Square, Battery Place and Boston Common, the way you do, has a right to consider himself an adept at bunco. I tell you what I'll do with you. I'll swap off my confidence for your lyrical facility and see what I can do. Why can't we collaborate and get up a libretto for next season? They tell me there's large ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... Chorus is borrowed from the Greeks, as Racine expressly declared in his preface. In this play, as in Greek tragedy, the Chorus comments upon the action as it unfolds itself, and the great interests at stake lift the poet to lofty heights of lyrical inspiration. The lyrics of the chorus, far from being a relapse into the pernicious practice, prevalent before the time of Corneille, of providing such passages for the mere display of the actor's ability, are pure chants and hymns, like the Cantiques Spirituels which Racine ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... than four months, and had not taken time to reconsider them. They were not narrative pieces, in which the interest of the story carries you along in reading, whether the diction is perfected or not, but mostly short lyrical poems, and contemplative pieces, which are always much more effective when found amongst other descriptions of poetry or in a magazine, than when collected together in a volume. They were generally sad, a common fault with poetesses; but poor Elsie had more excuse for taking that tone than many ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... devoted to setting forth the incidents of Concord and Lexington fights, in the Revolutionary days, and therefore very appropriate to our own time. The 'plan' is excellent; the incidents well devised, while many little lyrical touches here and there are truly admirable. For ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... vidderne); a tragedy in lyrical ballads by Henrik Ibsen; English version in the form of the original by William Norman Guthrie. Sewanee, Tenn. Printed for the University extension department of the University of the ...
— Henrik Ibsen - A Bibliography of Criticism and Biography with an Index to Characters • Ina Ten Eyck Firkins
... more or less detailed history of the Metropolitan Opera House (I-VII) were written for the sake of the light which they shed on existing institutions and conditions, and to illustrate the development of existing taste, appreciation, and interest touching the lyrical drama. To the same end much consideration has been paid to significant doings outside the Metropolitan Opera House since it has been the chief domicile of grand opera in New York. Especial attention has been given for ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Barlow herself prefers the 'Bogland Studies,' because, she says, they are "a sort of poetry." "I had set my heart too long upon being a poet ever to give up the idea quite contentedly; 'the old hope is hardest to be lost.' A real poet I can never be, as I have, I fear, nothing of the lyrical faculty; and a poet without that is worse than a bird without wings, so, like Mrs. Browning's Nazianzen, I am doomed to look 'at the lyre hung out ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... his surprise, while I informed him that I knew who was the reviewer and translator; and explained the reason for the verses giving pleasure in an English dress, to be the superior simplicity of the English language over modern French, for which he has a great contempt, as unfitted for lyrical composition. He inquired of me respecting Burns, to whom he had been likened; and begged me to tell him something of Moore. The delight of himself and his wife was amusing, at having discovered a secret which had ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... though he is much less mysterious and diffuse. Whenever Degas plays with colour, it is with the same restraint of his boldness; he never goes to excess in abandoning himself to its charm. He is neither lyrical, nor voluptuous; his energy is cold; his wise spirit affirms soberly the true character of a ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... Sologub is the pseudonym of Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov, novelist and poet. A considerable portion of his prose works has been recently made accessible to the English reader. Sologub's poetic output includes lyrical pieces of rare beauty. He was ...
— The Shield • Various
... things he had left standing on his departure. He talked the most joyous nonsense about finding himself back in his old quarters. On the first Sunday afternoon following their return, on their going together to Saint Peter's, he delivered himself of a lyrical greeting to the great church and to the city in general, in a tone of voice so irrepressibly elevated that it rang through the nave in rather a scandalous fashion, and almost arrested a procession of canons who were marching across to the choir. He began to model ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... intellectually through the reading of Herbert Spencer which had dispelled all "isms" from his mind and left him "the vague but omnipotent consolation of the Great Doubt." And in "Ultimate Questions," which strikes, so to say, the dominant chord of this volume, we have an almost lyrical expression of the meaning for him of the Spencerian philosophy and psychology. In it is his characteristic mingling of Buddhist and Shinto thought with English and French psychology, strains which ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... nearly as possible valueless, but they went through three editions in a very short time. It ought to be remembered that except Cowper, who was just dead, and Crabbe, who had for years intermitted writing, the public had only Rogers and Southey for poets, for it would none of the "Lyrical Ballads," and the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" had not yet been published. So that it did not make one of its worst mistakes in taking up Leigh Hunt, who certainly had poetry in him, if he did not put ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... professors and men of letters to deal with: a novice who had not come humbly to be taught, but one who had come to take up his share of the inheritance, to sit down among the great, as in his natural place. He was not perhaps altogether unmoved by their insane advices to him, one of the greatest of lyrical poets, a singer above all—to write a tragedy, to give up the language he knew and write his poetry in the high English which, alas! he uses in his letters. Not unmoved, and seriously inclining to a more lofty measure, he compounded ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... lived in exile, first in Jersey and then in Guernsey. "Les Miserables" is not only the greatest of all Victor Hugo's productions, but is in many respects the greatest work of fiction ever conceived. An enormous range of matter is pressed into its pages—by turn historical, philosophical, lyrical, humanitarian—but running through all the change of scene is the tragedy and comedy of life at its darkest and its brightest, and of human passions at their worst and at their best. It is more than a novel. It is a magnificent plea for the outcasts of society, for those who are crushed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... lyrical quality appears in this volume as it did once in the splendid "Bells and Pomegranates," which gave us such vivid shapes, and emotions so consistent and sustained, even though they were so often flawed by over-reflection. In this volume the purposes are less palpable, and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... more worthy of the author of the best parts of 'The Excursion,' than of the puerilities of many of the Lyrical Ballads." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... Lindsay has won the approbation of the critics and of his audiences in general for the new verse form which he is employing. The wonderful effects of sound produced by his lines, their relation to the idea which the author seeks to convey and their marvelous lyrical quality are something, it is maintained, quite out of the ordinary and suggest new possibilities and new meanings in poetry. In this book are presented a number of Mr. Lindsay's most daring experiments, ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... going, you have charg'd me with new Obligations, both for a very kinde Letter from you dated the sixth of this Month, and for a dainty peece of entertainment which came therwith. Wherin I should much commend the Tragical part, if the Lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your Songs and Odes, wherunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our Language: Ipsa mollities. But I must not omit to tell you, that I now onely owe you ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... poetry was exclusively lyrical. The average standard of versifying was higher, perhaps, than it has ever been before or since. Every man of education seems to have been able to turn a sonnet or ode. Men of religion, like St. Francis ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... the household; I've cancelled my grudge against Fate; My lyrical efforts are now sold At a simply phenomenal rate; And, whether I'm laying the lino Or bathing the babes, I regard The job as a cushy one: I know The way ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... 1817, the first in the unusual key of B major; and here we find a marked advance in conception and execution. It opens with an Allegro, the total effect of which, however, is not satisfactory; the principal theme has dramatic power, and what follows has lyrical charm, but the development section is disappointing. The Adagio seems like an arrangement of a lovely symphonic movement; the orchestra, and not the pianoforte, must have been in the composer's mind when he penned it. The lively ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... string to your bow. Should you think it inconvenient to publish a book of vocal compositions,—lieder or ballads, melodies or lyrical effusions, anything? For a work of this class signed with your name I can easily find a publisher and insist upon a decent honorarium, and there is surely nothing derogatory in continuing in a path which Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... name is on the title-pages of several books, but no book of his will yet bear out my statement. The proof of it lies in weekly papers. No living Englishman can do "the grand manner"—combining majestic dignity with a genuine lyrical inspiration—better than Mr. Whitten. These are proud words of mine, but I am not going to disguise my conviction that I know what I am talking about. Some day some publisher will wake up out of the coma in which publishers ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... according to knowledge, a sincere Romantic; he had no petty jealousy in matters literary; and, above all, he had, as Scott recognised, but as has not been always recognised since, a really remarkable and then novel command of flowing but fairly strict lyrical measures, the very things needed to thaw the frost of the eighteenth-century couplet. Erskine offered, and Lewis gladly accepted, contributions from Scott, and though Tales of Wonder were much delayed, and did not appear till 1801, the project directly ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury |
