"Odyssey" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stormy petrel," he said. "I used to think the chief difficulty in writing a book would be to invent things to happen, but if I were to sit down and write the adventures I'd had with her it would be a regular Odyssey." ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... minister of a small church in the hills inquired for him and insisted that he was still here. This last week, at the General Assembly, I heard of the wee Highlander from several sources. The tales of his escapes from the sheep-farm have grown into a sort of Odyssey of the Pentlands. I think, perhaps, if you had not continued to feed him, Mr. Traill, he might have remained ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... origin of polite letters, both prose and poetic. It matters nothing whether there was one Homer, or whether there may have been a score of Homers, so far as the fact of oral publication applies to the Iliad and the Odyssey, nearly a thousand years (900) before the foundation of Christianity. By the lips of a single bard, or of a series of bards, otherwise of public declaimers or reciters, the world was first familiarised with the many enthralling tales strung together in those peerless masterpieces. ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... are fain to avert their eyes, to clean forget for a season the actual world and lose themselves in the mazes of romance. In moments of despondency there is no greater relief to a fretted spirit than to turn to the "Odyssey" or Mr. Payne's exquisite translation of the "Arabian Nights." Great should be our gratitude to Mr. Morris for teaching us in golden verse that "Love is Enough," and for spreading wide the gates of his "Earthly Paradise." Lucian's "True History," that carries us over unknown seas beyond ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... be made of Felix Weingartner, whose 'Genesius' (1892) and 'Orestes' (1902) are said to contain much fine music; of August Bungert, whose trilogy founded upon the Odyssey has been received with favour in Dresden, though it does not appear to have made much way elsewhere; and of Hans Pfitzner, whose 'Rose von Liebesgarten' (1901) is one of the most promising operas of the ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... their formation. We cannot explain all these different things, but there is little doubt that, with the little forms which they have in their arms, they represent the messengers of death bearing away the souls of the deceased. In the Odyssey, Homer represents the Harpies as carrying off the daughters of King Pandareus and giving them to the cruel Erinnyes for servants. For this reason the Harpies were considered as robbers, and whenever a person suddenly disappeared it was said that they had been carried ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... nine fathoms tall. They even threatened the immortals, raising the din of tumultuous war on Olympus, and strove to set Ossa upon Olympus and wood-clad Pelion upon Ossa, in order to scale heaven. But Jove destroyed them both." Odyssey, xi. 306-317. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... together, the antecedents of Paradise Lost. In no one instance, taken singly, is the relation of Milton to a predecessor that of imitation, not even to the extent in which the Aeneid, for instance, is an imitation of the Iliad and Odyssey. The originality of Milton lies not in his subject, but in his manner; not in his thoughts, but in his mode of thinking. His story and his personages, their acts and words, had been the common property of all poets since the fall of the Roman Empire. Not only ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... type, and gilded lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of literature; but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to build our definitions on some more fundamental ground than binding. Why, then, are we to add "in prose"? "The Odyssey" appears to me the best of romances; "The Lady of the Lake" to stand high in the second order; and Chaucer's tales and prologues to contain more of the matter and art of the modern English novel than the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... child's sword, gorget, and sash; a deal table stood in the proximity of the rusty grate, where smoked and smouldered a pile of black turf from the bog—a deal table without a piece of baize to cover it, yet fraught with things not devoid of interest: a Bible, given by a mother; the Odyssey, the Greek Odyssey; a flute, with broad silver keys; crayons, moreover, and water colours, and a sketch of a wild prospect near, which, though but half finished, afforded ample proof of the excellence and skill of the boyish hand ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... book is redolent with the spirit of the Odyssey, that glorious primitive epic, fresh with the dew of the morning of time. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read his recital of the adventures of the wily Odysseus, slightly expurgated though it be, and adapted for the intelligence of youthful minds. Howard Pyle's illustrations ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Canalis.—I did not expect so poetical an interruption; but since the memory of the Odyssey has been thus evoked, I shall ask the Chamber to kindly remember that Ulysses, though disguised as a beggar and loaded with insults, was yet able to string his bow and easily get the better of his enemies. [Violent murmurs from the Centre.] I vote for leave of absence for fifteen days, and that ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... with the antiquity of the dance, practically as we have it, from lines 187-8, Book VI. of the Odyssey: ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... Englishman of our day writing exactly in the spirit of the heroic ages, with no thought or feeling suggested by the experience of the last two thousand years, it will fully answer his expectations. The work is so far Greek as to read in many parts like Chapman's translation of the Odyssey; though it must be confessed that Homer is, if not a better Pagan, at least a greater poet than Mr. Morris. Indeed, it appears to us that Mr. Morris's success is almost wholly in the reflected sentiment and color of his work, and it seems, therefore, to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... and to have regarded as inferior to Ovid. He says, 'Take away his imitation of Homer, and what do you leave him?' Of Homer his admiration was unbounded, although he says that he never read the whole of the 'Odyssey' in the original, but that everything which is most admirable in poetry is to be found in Homer. I care the less about remembering these things because they will probably ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... comes the Odyssey, and a flower finds the place; he begins to read . . . but she responds not, again the dark deep eyes are off "upon their search." Well, if the books were not its goal, the statues must be—and they will surely bring the word he increasingly longs for. That of the "Almaign ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... mistakes, and the everlastingly warning calls of his name maddened him. In the theoretical work he was naturally far in advance of his comrades; for, despite idleness at school, this was mere child's play to his practised memory. He, who had had to learn hundreds of lines of the "Odyssey" by heart, could easily remember facts about the ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... died 1744. The author of numerous poems and translations, all of them marked by the same lucid thought and polished versification. The Essay on Man, the Satires and Epistles, and the translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, are amongst ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... habit of quoting Homer on all occasions, and was reputed to know the whole "Iliad" and "Odyssey" by heart. He modestly disavowed this tribute to his learning, but without giving up the quotations that seemed to justify it. It is true ill-natured people said his verses were not always quite applicable; but the Hellenists ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... bird, that most Delights itself in song.] I cannot think with Vellutello, that the swallow is here meant. Dante probably alludes to the story of Philomela, as it is found in Homer's Odyssey, b. xix. 518 rather than as later poets have told it. "She intended to slay the son of her husband's brother Amphion, incited to it, by the envy of his wife, who had six children, while herself had only two, but through mistake slew her own son Itylus, and for her ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... a musical comedy once, lived through the production of it, and had spent a hard-earned two-weeks vacation trouping with it on the road, so he could speak with authority. It was a wonderful Odyssey when you could get him to tell it, and as she made a good audience she got the whole thing—what everybody was like, from the director down, how the principals dug themselves in and fought to the last trench for every line and bit of business in their parts, and ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... evidence derived from the books themselves showing similarities of style and method of treating subjects too great for us to admit non-identity in the writers. M. Reynaud lived at a time when it was all the fashion to suggest that old works that had come down to us, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even such national epics as the Cid and the Arthur Legends and the Nibelungenlied were to be attributed to several writers rather than to one. We have passed that period of criticism, however, and have reverted to the idea of single authorship for these works, and ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... complete illustrated edition of his poetical writings. To the honors which these volumes brought him he added fresh laurels in 1870 and 1871 by the publication of his translation of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"—a translation which was highly praised both at home and abroad, and which, if not the best that the English language is capable of, is, in many respects, the best which any English-writing ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... life of an anthropologist is no doubt filled much of the time with the monotonous routine of carefully assembling powdery relics of ancient races and civilizations. But White's lone Peruvian odyssey was most unusual. A story pseudonymously penned by one of ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... lives and survives? Like the Comtists he has managed to obtain objective immortality. The work, after all, is for the most part all we ever have to go upon. 'I have my own theory about the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey,' said Lewis Carroll (of 'Alice in Wonderland') once in Christ Church common room: 'it is that they weren't really written by Homer, but by another person of the same name.' There you have the Iliad in a nutshell as regards the authenticity of great works. All we know about the supposed Homer ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... diphros. The cross-legged diphros prolonged became the folding bed; that with perpendicular legs the couch. The former could easily be moved and replaced; they are perhaps identical with the beds frequently mentioned in the "Odyssey," which were put into the outer hall for guests. One of them is shown as the notorious bed of Prokrustes in a picture on a vase. The diphros corresponds to the couch resting on four legs, at first without head and foot-board, which were afterwards added at both ends. By the further ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... story told by Zonaras and repeated by Pancirole, of the burning, in the reign of the Emperor Basilisc, of the library of Constantinople, containing one hundred and twenty thousand volumes, and among them a copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey, written in golden letters on parchment made from the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... is that form of prose narrative in which the characters, scenes, and incidents are partly or entirely imaginary. In its highest form it is a sort of prose epic; and Homer's "Odyssey" finds a parallel in Fenelon's "Telemachus." In the arrangement of characters and incidents to form a plot, fiction resembles the drama; and at the present time every notable work of fiction is ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... would have it, she took a fancy to read Homer in the original, and Lancelot could do no less than offer his services as translator. She would prepare for him portions of the Odyssey, and every day that he came up to the Priory he used to comment on it to her; and so for many a week, in the dark wainscoted library, and in the clipt yew-alleys of the old gardens, and under the brown ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Homer's life, there has been much difference of opinion about him among learned men. Many have believed that Homer never existed. Others have thought that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed not by one author, but by several. "Some," says the English poet, Walter Savage Landor, "tell us that there were twenty Homers, some deny that there was ever one." Those who believe that there were "twenty Homers" think that different parts of the two great poems—the Iliad and ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... Br[oo]me ever asserted or complain'd, he was not gratify'd with a competent Sum for his Share in the Odyssey; nay did not own that he ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... and next morning—if not the next morning, certainly not later than a few mornings after—I was writing 'Homesickness,' while the story of 'The Exile' was taking shape in my mind. 'The Exile' was followed by a series of four stories, a sort of village odyssey. 'A Letter to Rome' is as good as these and as typical of my country. 'So on He Fares' is the one that, perhaps, out of the whole volume I like the best, always excepting 'The Lake,' which, alas, was not included, but which belongs so strictly to the aforesaid stories ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... opens the Odyssey, he will find that the Phaeacians, three thousand years ago, were wonderfully like these youthful Marbleheaders. The blue-eyed Goddess who convoys Ulysses, under the disguise of a young maiden of the place, gives him some ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... English)— Homer: Iliad. Translated by Lang, Leaf, and Myers. Homer: Odyssey. Translated by Butcher and Lang. Herodotus: Translated by Rawlinson. Text of same with abridged notes. 1897. Herodotus: Translated by Macaulay. Thucydides: Translated by Jowett. Xenophon: Dakyns' edition. 1890-7. Demosthenes: Works translated by Kennedy. Arrian: Translated ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... talked about it for a quarter of an hour, with many exclamations and expressions of regret, as though it had been some dear friend that had been stricken to the heart. This was the culminating point that Rougon had aimed at, the denouement of his wonderful Odyssey. A loud hubbub of voices filled the yellow drawing-room. The visitors were repeating what they had just heard, and every now and then one of them would leave a group to ask the three heroes the exact truth with regard to some contested incident. The ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... "paper-sparing" Pope's Third Book of the "Odyssey," deposited in the Museum, is written upon the back of a letter signed "E. Young," which is clearly the handwriting of our Young. The letter, dated only May 2nd, seems obscure; but there can be little doubt that the friendship he requests was a literary one, and that ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... caught a glimpse of it at a friend's house and did not rest the next day until he had procured a copy for himself, and Andrew Lang said: "This is the kind of stuff a fellow wants. I don't know when, except Tom Sawyer and the Odyssey, that I ever ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... document in the manner of its transmission to posterity. Many a good judge believes that the Homeric poems are older than the art of writing, and, consequently, that they were handed down to posterity orally. Yet no one would say that the Iliad and Odyssey were Greek traditions. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... Concordance to the Odyssey and Hymns of Homer, to which is added a Concordance to the parallel passages in the Iliad, Odyssey and Hymns. By Henry Dunbar, ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... Patronage was laid aside for the moment, and THE ABSENTEE appeared in its place in the second part of TALES OF FASHIONABLE LIFE. We all know Lord Macaulay's verdict upon this favourite story of his, the last scene of which he specially admired and compared to the ODYSSEY. [Lord Macaulay was not the only notable admirer of THE ABSENTEE. The present writer remembers hearing Professor Ruskin on one occasion break out in praise and admiration of the book. 'You can learn more by ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure. He looked wildly up, and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast; and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer's polypus in the Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts, over ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... ought to be, a new Iliad or Odyssey; in other words, a poetic representation of a course of events consistent with the highest laws of moral government, whether it delineate the general history of a people, or narrate the fortunes of a chosen hero. If we pass in review the romances of the last three centuries, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... this wise, when there appeared among them a veiled woman, very tall and goodly, whom they conceive to be a goddess and worship. By her was Phanes delivered out of their hands; and "she kept him in her hollow caves having a desire that he should be her lover," as Homer says in the Odyssey, if the Odyssey be Homer's. And Phanes reports of her that she is the most beautiful woman in the world, but of her coming thither, whence she came or when, she would tell him nothing. But he swore to me, by him who is buried at Thebes (and whose name in such a matter ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... hired the Kestrel, my old friend of the Cretan days, and I decided to follow the track of Ulysses in his return to Ithaca from Troy. Beginning at Santa Maura we examined every point in the Ionian Islands to which any illusion is made in the "Odyssey" as far as Cerigo and Cerigotto, meeting a storm off the former island which might well have ended our trip. A well-found Greek brig foundered only a short distance from us in the gale, and we drifted all day and till ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... "Le Gentilhomme Bohemien" (an essay which appears in his Ecrivains Modernes de l'Angleterre, between studies on "Mistress Browning" and Alfred Tennyson), Montegut remarks of Borrow's "humoristic Odyssey":— ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... alledged that Homer was made up of detached fragments. Dr Johnson denied this; observing, that it had been one work originally, and that you could not put a book of the Iliad out of its place; and he believed the same might be said of the Odyssey. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... mind—it would be presumptuous to call it the best type of mind—which prefers Euripides to Sophocles, and Heine to Schiller, prefers also Emily Bronte to Charlotte Bronte, and Oliver Onions to Compton Mackenzie. Given the mind that in compiling such a list would at once drag in The Odyssey and The Psalms, and run hastily on to Sir Thomas Browne and Charles Lamb, we are instinctively conscious that when it reaches, with its arbitrary divining rod, our own unlucky age, it will skip quite lightly over Thackeray; wave an ambiguous hand in the ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... extraordinary plant? It has often been called a Nepenthe, and we are under belief that some have even imagined that the tobacco leaf forms a principal ingredient in the wondrous and potent mixture which Helen prepares for her guests in the fourth Odyssey.— ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... small shrine containing silver Lares, a marble Venus, and a golden casket by no means small, which held, so they told us, the first shavings of Trimalchio's beard. I asked the hall-porter what pictures were in the middle hall. "The Iliad and the Odyssey," he replied, "and the gladiatorial games given under Laenas." There was no time in which to examine ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... preoccupations. Something quite charming, too. Women ought to be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... "The beautiful distich upon Ajax puts me in mind of a description in Homer's 'Odyssey,' which none of the critics have taken notice of. It is where Sisyphus is represented lifting his stone up the hill which is no sooner carried to the top of it, but it immediately tumbles to the bottom. This double motion of the stone is admirably described ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... conditions as do social and political liberty. The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the "Odyssey." He is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside "Henry V." Such a literary man is simply outside all literature: he is more of a prisoner than any bigot. For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... transfiguration that is being wrought. Experiences which were painful or grievous to the actors and sufferers become in the representation the source of keen pleasure to the hearers or readers. The Iliad is mainly a story of men destroying one another. The Odyssey depicts a long strife with hardship and danger. The men who heard those songs were themselves familiar with the fight, with the wounds and terrors mixed with its energies and elations; they had tasted the perils of shipwreck and of pirates. But as they listened, the rehearsal of trials the counterpart ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... he went into the street after reading it, men seemed ten feet high. Pope averred that the translation of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written by Homer before he arrived at years of discretion; and Coleridge declares the version of the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the Faery Queen. Chapman himself evidently thought that he was the first translator who had been admitted into intimate relations with Homer's soul, and caught by direct contact the sacred fury of his inspiration. He says finely of those who had attempted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... Adventure and discovery are lurking on every side. These painted clouds with their floating banners and citadels, yonder mysterious headlands that creep into the landscape at this hour, those islets emerging, like flakes of bronze, out of the sunset-glow—all the wonder of the ODYSSEY is there!" ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... in the Odyssey who cared for hogs and cattle etc. were certainly in a better condition in many respects than the peasants of Attica, who were free, but buried in debt until the time of Solon. Concerning the mildness of the treatment of slaves in very early Roman ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... encyclopaedia of life and knowledge at a time when knowledge, indeed, such as lies beyond the bounds of actual experience, was extremely limited, but when life was singularly fresh, vivid, and expansive. The only poems of Homer we possess are the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," for the Homeric hymns and other productions lose all title to stand in line with these wonderful works, by reason of conflict in a multitude of particulars with the witness of the text, as well as of their poetical inferiority. They evidently belong to the period ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... day when I have a clear mind and a couple of hours to spare, you can explain the connection between Homer's Odyssey and a flea-bitten semi-airdale." ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... suitable person was this truculent old lord on the woolsack to enact the part of shepherd—Corydon, suppose, or Alphesibus—to this goodly set of lambs! How he must have admired the hero of the "Odyssey," who in one way or other accounted for all the wooers that "sorned" upon his house, and had a receipt for their bodies from the grave-digger of Ithaca! But even this wily descendant of Sisyphus would have found it no ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... arise very much out of a lurking love for him; since George, though a most amiable boy, and ill of the same fever in another room, was left to get well in the usual way, by medicine and slops, without any thumping certainly, but also without any extra consolations from either Iliad or Odyssey. But what ministered perpetual fuel to the thumping-mania of Francis Coleridge was a furor of jealousy—strangely enough not felt by him, but felt for him by his old privileged nurse. She could not inspire her own passions into Francis, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... but probably with the vaguest ideas of their relations to one another, or their respective positions in the world's chronology. Or it may be that the whole of one term is devoted to one or two books of 'the Iliad' and 'the Odyssey,' 'the AEneid' or the 'Odes,' which are ground out line by line and word by word, all the interest and flavour of the complete work being inevitably and hopelessly dissipated in the process. Even 'the college prizeman, ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... me, although she made fun of him as she did so, about that 'Odyssey' of the barricades and of the hulks which made up Bakounine's history, and which is, nevertheless, the exact truth; about his adventures as chief of the insurgents at Prague and then at Dresden; of his first death sentence; about his imprisonment at ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... was extravagance, caprice, boastfulness, and display of all kinds.... The Greeks hated all monsters. The quaint phrase in the "Odyssey" about the Queen of the Laestrygones—'She was tall as a mountain, and they hated her'—would have seemed to them most reasonable.... To read Greek is to have a perpetual witness to the virtue of pruning—of ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... "comeliness," "graciousness"—when he visualises or focusses his object. Does not that untranslatable liparos aither of Homer—the shining upper air—suggest not only the physical atmosphere breathed by the gods of Olympus and the great-hearted Odysseus, but also the poetic atmosphere of the Odyssey itself? ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... a oir que nule autre') a chronicle of Venice. It is of the water, watery, Canale's chronicle, like Ariel's dirge; he has indeed, 'that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the elements which it contemplates.' Here is nothing indeed, of 'the surge and thunder of the Odyssey', but the lovely words sparkle like the sun on the waters of the Mediterranean, and like a refrain, singing itself in and out of the narrative, the phrase recurs, 'Li tens estoit clers et biaus ... et lors quant il furent en mer, li mariniers drecerent les voiles au ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... compiled somewhere near the close of the legal period. The five books, purporting to have been written by Moses, are the Hebrew epic, and contain no more truth than the great epic of the Greeks. As the Iliad and Odyssey are the production of the rhapsodists, so is the Pentateuch, with the exception of the Decalogue, the continuous and anonymous work of the priesthood. Abraham and Isaac are equally fabulous with Ulysses and Agamemnon. A Canaanitish ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... hills, soft meadows, fertile fields, neat gardens, hanging grapes, cloudy mountains, constant cheerfulness of plains, cliffs and ridges, and the surrounding sea, with such manifold variety are present in my mind; now is the "Odyssey" for the first time become ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the invention of such a story would be little short of miraculous. Prescott's work, if removed from its place among histories, must stand in the first rank among works of imagination,—must be classed with the "Odyssey" and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... somewhat sad-coloured school of Socrates, and its discipline towards apathy or contempt in such matters, he had brought capacities of bodily sense with the making in them of an Odyssey; or (shall we say?) of a poet after the order of Sappho or Catullus; as indeed also a practical intelligence, a popular management of his own powers, a skill in philosophic yet mundane Greek prose, which might have constituted him the most successful of Sophists. You cannot ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... some of us from seeing the character of the original. But at the same time, either I have no skill in criticism, and have been reading Greek for fifty years to none effect, or Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language. He is nearer in the Iliad than in the Odyssey—an advantage resulting from his choice of vehicle. In the Odyssey he chose the heroic couplet, which never can give the rise and fall of the hexameter. In the Iliad, after some hesitation between the two (he began as early as 1598), he preferred the fourteener, which, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... the greatest work does not stand at the end of a long period of development, but the first and oldest is the greatest. Nothing has ever been produced to equal the Iliad and Odyssey, written 900 B. C. We have epics that will always hold a prominent place in literature, Virgil's Aeneid, Milton's Paradise Lost, but neither these nor the many flights attempted into epic poetry before or since will be seriously considered as ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... would only sit down and write this absurd Odyssey in the vivid manner in which he has related bits of it to me, he would produce the queerest book of travel ever written. But he never will. As a matter of fact, although he saw Albania as few Westerners have done and learned useful bits of language and made invaluable ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... fire of Vesuvius. Above the trees of the garden shone white crags, unsubstantial, unearthly in the divine moonlight. There was no sound, yet to intense listening the air became full of sea-music. It was the night of Homer, the island-charm of the Odyssey. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Agamemnon is murdered on his arrival at Mycenae, by his wife Clytaemnestra and her paramour AEgisthus. But of these wanderings the most celebrated and interesting are those of Ulysses, which form the subject of the Odyssey. After twenty years' absence he arrives at length in Ithaca, where he slays the numerous suitors who devoured his substance and contended for the ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... neither read nor write. No more, most probably, could the author of the Odyssey. No more, for that matter, could Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though they were plainly, both in mind and manners, most highly-cultivated men. Reading and writing, of course, have now become necessaries of humanity; and are to be given to every human being, that he may start fair ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... over the stories of great exploits of the past, and dreaming his own day dreams. But his sword was not for France. He pictured himself as her conqueror! One of his favorite books was Plutarch's "Lives of Illustrious Men." He devoured the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" whole. "With my sword by my side, and Homer in my pocket, I hope to carve my way through the world," he wrote to his mother. Another well-thumbed volume was Caesar's ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... as homogeneous even as the Iliad and Odyssey, which give us a fairly consistent and truthful picture of a single age, we should be in a very happy position. Unfortunately this is not the case. Our epic began as a Bharata, or Tale of the Bharata Clan, probably of very moderate bulk, not later than 600 B.C., and perhaps considerably earlier; ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... a vision of the backs of the books in the bookcase in the dining-room at home.... Iliad and Odyssey... people going over the sea in boats and someone doing embroidery... that little picture of Hector and Andromache in the corner of a page... he in armour... she, in a trailing dress, holding up ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... On the coast, near Terracina. The Promontoria Circeo is the traditional site of the palace and grave of Circe, whose story is told in the Odyssey.—D.O.] ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... his literary merchandise upon the stall in such a way as was best calculated to attract notice. Here was Addison's Spectator, a long row of little volumes; here was Pope's translation of the Iliad and Odyssey; here were Dryden's poems, or those of Prior. Here, likewise, were Gulliver's Travels, and a variety of little gilt-covered children's books, such as Tom Thumb, Jack the Giant-queller, Mother Goose's Melodies, and others which our great-grandparents ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... excellence is all his own, and they possess the rare and distinguished quality of being as true to fact and nature, as they are brilliant in poetical expression. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is the most faithful descriptive poem which has been written since the Odyssey; and the occasional scenes introduced into the other poems, when the action is laid in Greece, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Grote, from whom we quote these instances, adds that he has the misfortune to dissent both from Lachmann and Ulrici; for to him it appears a mistake to put (as Ulrici and others have done) the Iliad and the Odyssey on the same footing. The sort of compromise which Mr Grote offers seems very fair; but, for our part, we beg to reserve the point; we will not commit ourselves on so delicate a subject, by a hasty assent. But we promise to read our Homer again with an especial regard to these boundaries ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... eighteenth century, of jesters at the courts of the barons? What should we do without the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' the 'Compleat Angler,' 'Pepys' Diary,' and all the rest of the ancient books? And, going back a few centuries, what an amount we should miss had we not 'AEsop's Fables,' the 'Odyssey,' the tales of the Trojan War, and so on. It is from the archaeologist that one must expect the augmentation of this supply; and just in that degree in which the existing supply is really a necessary part of our ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... Ajax in the foregoing Lines, puts me in mind of a Description in Homer's Odyssey, which none of the Criticks have taken notice of. [3] It is where Sisyphus is represented lifting his Stone up the Hill, which is no sooner carried to the top of it, but it immediately tumbles to the Bottom. This ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... in Greek music is that of Homer. The hexameters of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" were quite probably chanted, but the four-stringed lyre which we associate with the ancient Greek singers was only used for a few preluding notes—possibly to pitch the voice of the bard—and not during the chant ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... Gila Rivers, Washington, 1848. Emory's own vivid report is only one item in Executive Document No. 41, 30th Congress, 1st Session, with which it is bound. Lieutenant J. W. Albert's Journal and additional Report on New Mexico, St. George Cooke's Odyssey of his march from Santa Fe to San Diego, another Journal by Captain A. R. Johnson, the Torrey-Englemann report on botany, illustrated with engravings, all go to make this one of the meatiest of a number of meaty government publications. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... formulate its own organization, which fact has been one cause of the frequent assaults upon its unity. Still the architectonic principle is powerful in the Iliad, though more instinctive, and far less explicit than in the Odyssey. It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the poet has reached a profounder consciousness of his art in his later poem; he has come to a knowledge of his constructive principle, and he takes the trouble to unfold the same ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... minor writings which belong to the earlier years of Lord John Russell, it is enough to name 'Essays and Sketches of Life and Character,' 'The Establishment of the Turks in Europe,' 'A Translation of the Fifth Book of the Odyssey,' and an imitation of the Thirteenth Satire of Juvenal, as well as an essay on the 'Causes of the French Revolution,' ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... gilded lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of literature; but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to build our definitions on some more fundamental ground then binding. Why, then, are we to add "in prose"? THE ODYSSEY appears to me the best of romances; THE LADY OF THE LAKE to stand high in the second order; and Chaucer's tales and prologues to contain more of the matter and art of the modern English novel than the whole treasury of Mr. ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... road whereby a burial procession is to take its way. {228} Though we most frequently hear the term 'second sight' applied as a phrase of Scotch superstition, the belief in this kind of ominous illusion is obviously universal. Theoclymenus, in the Odyssey, a prophet by descent, and of the same clan as the soothsayer Melampus, beholds the bodies and faces of the doomed wooers, 'shrouded in night'. The Pythia at Delphi announced a similar symbolic vision of blood-dripping walls to the Athenians, during the Persian War. Again, symbolic visions, especially ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... actual heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey wore; but we do know that what Homer describes, he must have seen. Was Homer, therefore, the contemporary of the siege of Troy?—or does he not rather speak of the customs and costumes of his own time, and apply them to the traditions of ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Pipe and Book at close of day, Oh, what is sweeter, mortal, say? It matters not what book on knee, Old Izaak or the Odyssey, It matters ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... other Arabian poets, give us some idea of the importance attached by the women of Asia to this beautiful ornament, and of the extraordinary money value which it sometimes bore: and from the case of the necklace of gold and amber, in the 15th Odyssey, (v. 458,) combined with many other instances of the same kind, there can be no doubt that it was the neighboring land of Phoenicia from which the Hebrew women obtained their necklaces, and the practice of ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... political crisis and, enraged at the fickleness of fortune, more than one has given up to poetry what was obviously meant for party. It would be unjust, however, to regard Lord Carnarvon's translation of the Odyssey as being in any sense a political manifesto. Between Calypso and the colonies there is no connection, and the search for Penelope has nothing to do with the search for a policy. The love of literature alone ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... she said, 'that it is a bracing place; that Homer—isn't it a funny name for a woman, it was her surname, and the boys used to call her all manner of nonsense because of it—"Iliad" and "Odyssey" of course,—I've a feeling that Homer wrote something about moors and fresh air. If I ...
— The Girls and I - A Veracious History • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... Monmouth at last, 'this is a young Ulysses, though his Odyssey doth but take three days in the acting. Scudery might not be so dull were she to take a hint from these smugglers' caves and sliding ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to graze in herds, namely horses, mules, asses, oxen, sheep, and goats. It is settled, too, that swine come under its operation, for they are comprehended in 'herds' because they feed in this manner; thus Homer in his Odyssey, as quote by Aelius Marcianus in his Institutes, says, You will find him sitting among his swine, and they are feeding by the Rock of Corax, over against ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... false than the popular notion that the great authors throw off their works with the pleasantest ease, that creation is an act of pure enjoyment. Beethoven's sketch-books tell a different story; so do also Balzac's proof-sheets and the manuscripts of Pope's version of the Iliad and Odyssey in the British Museum. Dr. Johnson speaking of Milton's MSS. observed truly: "Such reliques show how excellence is acquired." Goethe in writing to Schiller asks him to return certain books of "Wilhelm Meister" that he may go over them A ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the classics provided him with the pabulum his growing mind hungered for. His Greek professor took a special interest in him, which is not surprising when we remember that at the age of thirteen he translated twelve books of the Odyssey as a holiday task. Besides this he worked at philology and the ordinary school curriculum. It is just possible—just, I say—that had the family remained longer in Dresden he might never have turned to the Scandinavian sagas at all, but have become an eminent scholar ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Nature seemed gently to fold us in her matron's mantle. On such days the fall of the leaf does not bring sadness, only meditation. Earth seemed to loose the record of past summer hours from her permanent life, as lightly, and spontaneously, as the great genius casts behind him a literature,—the Odyssey he has outgrown. In the evening the rain ceased, the west wind came, and we went out in the boat again for some hours; indeed, we staid till the last clouds passed from the moon. Then we climbed the hill to see the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... perhaps, more than suspect, tends to confirm this opinion. I think, somewhere, Sir Walter Scott recommends the translating Homer into short measure—you forget, perhaps, my making the trial upon the two first books of the Odyssey which I sent to you, and you returned, condemned; although, to tell you the truth, I was not displeased with my attempt, and expected your flattering commendation, and would even now deceive myself into ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was couching his Iliad and Odyssey, had any thought upon those allegories which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, Phornutus, squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again from them? If you trust it, with neither hand nor foot do you come near to my opinion, which judgeth them to have been as little dreamed ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson |
