"Poem" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conversation for sole amusement, one will find some of the pleasantest society in Paris. You do not get champagne and boned turkey and the German, but you hear sometimes a little music, such as one pays untold gold to hear at the opera, or a fragment of declamation by some noted elocutionist, or a new poem fresh from the pen of some celebrated writer. And you have always conversation; that is to say, the wit and sparkle of the wittiest and brightest nation on the face of the earth. In a world that is becoming more and more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... language who treat the subject very minutely, a great number might be cited. [1] The most important are Terentianus Maurus, who wrote, perhaps about the third century, a poem on letters, syllables, feet, and metres, which is twice quoted by St. Augustine; Verrius Flaccus, the tutor to the grandchildren of the Emperor Augustus and author of a work on the meaning of words which has come down to us in a later abridgment; Aulus Gellius, who, toward ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... had to be restrained by chains of flesh, and then for many ages being turned about through a succession of female conditions, she became also that Helen who proved so fatal to Priam, and after to the eyes of Stesichorus, for she had caused his blindness on account of the insult of his poem, and afterwards had removed it because of her pleasure at his praise. And thus transmigrating from body to body, in the extreme of dishonour she had stood, ticketed for hire, a Helen viler [than her predecessor]. She was, therefore, the "lost sheep," to ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... violent effort to subdue her rising wrath; and, with a sort of convulsive smile, addressed Lady Juliana: "Your Ladyship, I perceive, is not of the opinion of our inimitable bard, who, in his charming poem, 'The Seasons,' says' Beauty needs not the foreign aid of ornament; but is, when unadorned, adorned the most.' That is a truth that ought to be impressed ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... Prince, went to Armadale to her mother, after a very fatiguing journey across the country. Her emotions on separating from Charles have been expressed in a poem entitled "The Lament of ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... poems. Those recommendatory verses with which thou didst grace the Lives of Dr. Donne and others of thy friends, redound more to the praise of thy kind heart than thy fancy. But what or whose was the pastoral poem of "Thealma and Clearchus," which thou didst set about printing in 1678, and gavest to the world in 1683? Thou gavest John Chalkhill for the author's name, and a John Chalkhill of thy kindred died at Winchester, being eighty years ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... had excellent notices in the papers, and one poem in especial "How God spoke to Jones at Breakfast-time" was selected for especial praise because of its admirable realism and force. One paper said that the British breakfast-table lived in that poem "in all its tiniest most insignificant details," as no breakfast-table, save possibly that of ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... only acquaintances. Sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, they would walk out in company, stroll down to the Battery, and there smoke their cigars and watch the ships, but beyond this point of sociability, which neither enjoyed, there was nothing more. Never had Bixby read Bangs any poem he had made, nor did ever Bangs invite Bixby to meet his convivial friends of an evening to play whist or to partake of his mulled ale. In fact, Mr. Bixby had been often and with great enthusiasm voted an unsocial fellow by the cronies of Mr. Bangs, but he rose somewhat in their estimation ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... doing just now, and doing for us! But Peace being the normal condition of man's activity, I look around me for a vindication of what is noblest in What Does and am content with a passage from George Eliot's poem "Stradivarius", the gist of which is that God himself might conceivably make better fiddles than Stradivari's, but by no means certainly; since, as a fact, God orders his best fiddles of Stradivari. Says the ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... to him in high excitement with a book of verse. "He has written a poem," she cried, "about our own woods, about our lost road! Listen" she commanded, ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... longings of his spirit; he is telling us of a thought that shadowed his soul for an hour. Let us look into this mood of his. It is not his in any unique or even peculiar sense. In moods, as in manners, history is wont to repeat itself. The writer of this poem has voiced one of the great common experiences of humanity. But let us be quite clear as to what that experience really is. Let us not be misled by the music and the seeming unworldliness of these words ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... of Congress in Washington, there is a picture called "The Boy of Winander." When looking at this, or some copy of it, it is pleasant to remember the lines of Wordsworth's poem:— ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... contemporaries, that his wit was framed and fashioned by the Muses themselves. After his return from France and Italy, he became tutor to many noblemen's sons, and for his excellent endowments was much esteemed and reverenced by them. He writ a poem called the Life and Death of Hector, from which I shall give a specimen of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... out a red-flannel tongue with quixotic violence at a windmill on the opposite corner of the mantelpiece. Everything had a story of its own. Indeed the whole room must have been redolent with the sweet story of childhood, of which the toys were the illustrations, or like a poem of which the toys were the verses. She used to have children to play with them sometimes, and this was a high honour. She is married now, and has children of her own, who on birthdays and holidays will forsake the newest of their own possessions ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... lucky girl," I said, "to have so much secured. A girl brought up in a house full of books, always able to turn to this or that author and look for any passage or poem when she thinks of it, doesn't know what a blank a house without ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... play of Shakespeare's, probably no other play or poem of a high degree of merit, is so much neglected as "Troilus and Cressida" is. I have met intelligent readers of Shakespeare, who thought themselves unusually well acquainted with his writings, and who were so, who understood him and delighted in him, but who yet had never read "Troilus and Cressida." ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... and he could make songs in English as well as in Irish; Raftery would run from where Callinan was. And he was a nice respectable man, too, with cows and sheep, and a kind man. He would never put anything that wasn't nice into a poem, and he would never run anyone down; but if you were the worst in the world, he'd make you the best in it; and when his wife lost her beetle, he made a song of fifteen verses ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... exact particulars about the mode in which Rameses II made war, from the poem of Penta-Our, a Theban writer of the fourteenth century B.C. It is only by a figure of speech that this poem can be called an epic; it is rather a historical narrative couched in terms of poetic exaggeration with the object of flattering the royal ...
— Egyptian Literature
... wide domains of mere prose. Were I bidden to say how the highest genius could be most advantageously employed for the best display of its own powers, I should answer, without hesitation—in the composition of a rimed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order of true poetry exist. I need only here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... in the habit of spending the afternoon in Madame de Maintenon's salons, and also despatching state business therewith his ministers until a late hour at night. Here a poem was presented to him in the name of the jeopardised lovers, complaining that, whenever gallantry bid them honour their mistress with a present, they had always to risk their lives on the fulfilment of the injunction. ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Harte wrote that thing about 'The Luck of Roaring Camp,' which the lady proofreader said was indecent, he's had offers from the Eastern magazines. John Carmony's paying him $5,000 a year to edit the Overland and $100 for each poem or story ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... let the piano be played very softly in running chords that resolve into the key of a Christmas carol which is taken up and sung by the entire school at the end of the poem.) ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... 'He did not dance, or even remain half an hour in the ball-room; for he soon met with his friend Anderson, who is just come from the country. Their conversation fell upon literature. As Anderson had not yet seen the new poem, Roderick would not rest till they had opened one of the back rooms for him; and there he now is, sitting with his companion beside a solitary taper, and declaiming the whole poem to him, beginning with the ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... CHRISTMAS. By CLEMENT C. MOORE. Never before has this popular poem—a favorite with both the old and the young—been presented in such a beautiful dress. It is elegantly illustrated with twenty-two engravings, from original drawings by F. B. Schell, W. T. Smedley, A. Fredericks and H. ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... to have lived on the shore of one of the Great Lakes. Before the white men sold fire water to the Indians, there were many happy homes in the forest. The ways of living were the same as we read about in Longfellow's poem, and the children were trained to be brave and honorable ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor
... Fly.—Can any of your readers, gentle or simple, senile or juvenile, inform me, through the medium of your useful and agreeable periodical, in what collection of nursery rhymes a poem called, I think, "The Spider and Fly," occurs, and if procurable, where? The lines I allude to consisted, to the best of my recollection, of a dialogue between a fly and a spider, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... the corner of an initial letter; where one may find a small picture of the Deluge or of the flaming Cities of the Plain. One of the specially short poems sees the universe overthrown and the good angels conquered. Another short poem sees the newsboys in Fleet Street shouting the news of the end of the world, and the awful return of God. The writers seem unconsciously to have sought to make a poem as large as a revelation, while it was nearly as short as a riddle. And though Francis ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... of Athelstane in a doleful panegyric; another, in a Saxon genealogical poem, rehearsed the uncouth and harsh names of his noble ancestry. Jesters and jugglers were not awanting, nor was the occasion of the assembly supposed to render the exercise of their profession indecorous or improper. Indeed the ideas of the Saxons ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... more properly to another generation, but the feeling against the union was rather exaggerated than diminished between the date of its adoption and that of his poem, 'The Tears of Scotland,' into the concluding stanza of which he has condensed the ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... caught up her violin again. "We will have no more of this sad music this night. I will sing the wild song of the Ukraine, most beautiful of all our country, alas, ours no more—Like that other, the music is my father's, but the poem is written by a son of ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... the contemporary authorities agree that the Saxons did actually fight in this solid order. For example, in the "Carmen de Bello Hastingensi," a poem attributed to Guy, Bishop of Amiens, living at the time of the battle, we are told that "the Saxons stood fixed in a dense mass," and Henry of Huntingdon records that "they were like unto a castle, impenetrable to the Normans;" ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... Education. Published by JOHN BRIGHTLAND, for the Use of the Schools of Great Britain and Ireland." It is ingeniously recommended in a certificate by Sir Richard Steele, or the Tattler, under the fictitious name of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., and in a poem of forty-three lines, by Nahum Tate, poet laureate to her Majesty. It is a duodecimo volume of three hundred pages; a work of no inconsiderable merit and originality; and written in a style which, though not faultless, has ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... thinks he wrote a poem called "Petrarch and Laura." But someone told her it's the right thing to do; and when Janet thinks anything is the right thing—!' He took his hat and stick. 'Try and forgive Cecil. I'm sure he adores you. ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... of Mrs. Meadowsweet's voice. It distressed him, for anything not ultra refined jarred upon this sensitive young officer's nerves; but he trusted that the result would be satisfactory, and that Beatrice, whose motions he began to liken to a poem, would put in a ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... still and sunny, the old man sat among his books; open before him the great poem of Dante. His much-lined face, austere in habitual expression, yet with infinite possibilities of radiance in the dark eyes, of tenderness on the mobile lips, was crowned with hair which had turned iron-grey but remained wonderfully ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... this curious theory of Americanism in its application to Washington may now be found in many places. You shall hear historians describe him as a transplanted English commoner, a second edition of John Hampden. You shall read, in a famous poem, of Lincoln as ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... been fond of poetry from boyhood, and had gradually made himself familiar with large parts of Shakespeare's plays and the works of other great writers. He now discovered, in a strange collection of verses, the one poem which seemed best to express the morbid, troubled, sore condition of his mind, . . . the lines ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... humility so great, that many of those who came in contact with him never realized how great a man he was, not being able to perceive that the very deepest thoughts might be clothed in the plainest language. Some felt, in the words of the poem,— ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sycamores spread a grateful shade over a rich profusion of wild flowers that grow among the boulders, from the edge of the pool a mile or more down the dell-like bottom of the valley, the whole forming a charming little poem of wildness—the vestibule of these ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... Swift's lines on him, 'demanded whether he was the author of that poem. "Mr. Bettesworth," answered he, "I was in my youth acquainted with great lawyers, who knowing my disposition to satire advised me that if any scoundrel or blockhead whom I had lampooned should ask, Are you the author of this paper? I should tell him that I was ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... of French Acadia, now known as Nova Scotia, not only do we tread on historic ground, but we see in these days a landscape of more varied beauty than that which so delighted the gentlemen-adventurers of old France nearly three centuries ago. In this country, which the poem conceived by Longfellow amid the elms of Cambridge has made so famous, we see the rich lands reclaimed from the sea, which glistens a few miles to the north, and every day comes rushing up its estuaries. There to the north ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... beloved of Scottish poets. In his earlier life, when scarcely known to his countrymen, Burns had dined with Basil, Lord Daer, Thomas Douglas's eldest brother and heir-apparent of the Selkirk line. This was the occasion commemorated by Burns in the poem of which ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... sagas, none of that enjoyment of life which shines out everywhere in Greek poetry, even through its deepest tragedies. Not in complacency with Nature's beauty, but in the fierce struggle with her wrath, does the Norseman feel pleasure. Nature to him was not, as in Mr. Longfellow's exquisite poem, {3} the kind old nurse, to take him on her knee and whisper to him, ever anew, the story without an end. She was a weird witch-wife, mother of storm demons and frost giants, who must be fought with steadily, warily, wearily, over dreary ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... madam, she has wealth, and rank, and all that a poor girl would call great glory. Yet her step is like the step of an aged woman, and her head is bent, though not with the weight of years. I think of a little poem I knew when I was a child. I believe I heard it before I could speak the words thereof, yet it is so perfect on my mind. Did you ever hear it, madam? it is called 'The ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... annual meeting took place in Worcester at Trinity Church. Letters were read from Colonel Thomas W. Higginson and Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Miller, the only two survivors of the 89 men and women who signed the Call for the first National Woman's Rights Convention, held in Worcester in 1850; and a poem from the Rev. Antoinette L. Brown Blackwell, D. D., the only survivor of the speakers on that occasion. Dr. Shaw gave an address and conducted a question box and there was a symposium on Why I am a Suffragist ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... had, after a hundred years and more of Norwegian habitation, not one drop of pure Norse blood to inherit from his parents. His grandfather, Henrik, was wrecked in 1798 in his own ship, which went down with all souls lost on Hesnaes, near Grimstad; this reef is the scene of Ibsen's animated poem of Terje Viken. His father, Knud, who was born in 1797, married in 1825 a German, Marichen Cornelia Martie Altenburg, of the same town of Skien; she was one year his senior, and the daughter of a merchant. It was in 1771 that the ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Greek poetry and Scotch is very marked in this point. There is not one Greek lyric devoted to what we should designate love, with perhaps something like an exception in Alcman. In fact, while moderns rarely make a tragedy or comedy, a poem or novel, without some love-concern which is the pivot of the whole, all the great poems and dramas of the ancients revolve on entirely different passions. Love, such as we speak of, was of rather rare occurrence. Women were in such a low ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... could think of a poem at a time like this? [Advancing toward her.] Estelle! I can ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... simple that there is scarcely anything to tell, and perhaps it will not convey anything to you. But it has been part of my life—that time when I was Out on the Hillside. That is what I call The Dream to myself, 'Out on the Hillside,' as if it were a kind of unearthly poem. But it wasn't. It was more real than anything I have ever felt. It was real—real! I wish that I could tell it so that you would know how real ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... phrase of which the wily flatterer makes use, as he bows with affected humility to his sovereign, is, "Oh, Father of Beauty," by which indirect compliment he generally gains his wishes. The early German writers have also chosen him as the principal hero of various histories, and the poem of "Reynard, the Fox," will live as long as printers and illustrators ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... in their way than the fragment of paper containing the poem from which the motto to this chapter is a quotation. Among the dusty business manuscripts of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury, in the oldest division, relating to the affairs of the Priory of Christ Church, were found by the Historical Commission two songs, scribbled on scraps of paper. One ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... A delightful poem! Men, although they say with their mouths, "Yes, yes, your wishes shall be obeyed,—certainly, certainly, you are perfectly right," are like frogs, with their eyes turned upwards. Vain fools! meddlers ready to undertake any job, however much ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... that the voice was that of a girl. The song was barely at an end, when he soon espied in the opposite direction, a beautiful girl advancing with majestic and elastic step; a girl quite unlike any ordinary mortal being. There is this poem, which gives an adequate description ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... from time to time those rallying days, wherein Sadie confidently pronounced her to be improving rapidly. And so it came to pass that so sweet was the final message that the words of the wonderful old poem proved a ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... the history of them is related. To set down in writing the circumlocutions, oratorical precautions, protracted conversations, and honeyed words glossed over the venom of intentions, would make as long a book as that magnificent poem called ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... troubles are over for you and me and we have nothing to do but to enjoy the happiness granted us by this wonderful, beautiful thing we call life. I know I am not any poet and the one I tried to write about you the day of the picnic was fearful but the way I THINK about you is a poem. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... Now, listen again. It is a grand old poem, and I am grieved and distressed, Thomas, to find that you refuse to accept it as one of the gems of truth thrown up to us out of the ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... won by Winthrop Mackworth Praed. William Charles Wentworth stood second.] The concluding lines of his poem are: ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... under the name of morbus gallicus, while the French in return called it morbus neapolitanus or mal d'Italie. The name of syphilis was said to have been first given to it by a physician of Verona, in a poem describing the disease. Inspired by heroic epics Fracastor places before us the divinities of paganism, and supposes that a shepherd, whom he called Syphilus, had addressed words offensive to Apollo, and had deserted his altars. To punish him the God ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... enter it you hear a sound—a sound as of some mighty poem chanted. Listen long enough, and you will learn that it is made up of the beating of human hearts, of the nameless music of men's souls—that is, if you have ears. If you have eyes, you will presently see the church itself—a ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy
... clump of those lovely great tree-ferns. The way their young fronds come up with a graceful curl, like the top of a bishop's staff, is a poem; but being at present fractious, I will observe that they are covered with horrid spines, as most young vegetables are in Africa. But talking about spines, I should remark that nothing save that precious climbing palm—I never like to say what I feel about ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... say, what is no doubt abstractedly true, that whatever is possible becomes probable, if only time enough be allowed. There are improbabilities so great that the common sense of mankind treats them as impossibilities. It is not, for instance, in the strictest sense of the word, impossible that a poem and a mathematical proposition should be obtained by the process of shaking letters out of a box; but it is improbable to a degree that cannot be distinguished from impossibility; and the improbability of obtaining an improvement in an organ ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... medium A'ali Pasha Abyssinia, Italians in Adams, Charles Francis, minister to England during the Civil War Adirondack Club Adirondacks, life in the Adirondacs, The, poem by Emerson Adowah, defeat at, the decisive event in the decline of Italy circumstances which led to it results After the Burial Agassiz, Louis is pleased with one of Stillman's pictures first meets Stillman makes excursion with ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... adequately represented. In one poem (ix.) the miracles of Christ in His earthly ministry and His descent into Hades are narrated with considerable spirit and eloquence. Besides being a student of the Bible, Prudentius is a theologian. His theology is that of the Nicene Creed. The Fall of man, the personality of the Tempter, ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... the points to be expressed, the kernel, as I may say; but to work out of it a beautiful, animated whole, belongs to the poet. You know Fuernstein, called the Poet of Nature; he has written the prettiest poem possible, on the cultivation ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... those which most attracted her were of a dark and grim character. One poem, called "The Dream of Eugene Aram," So thrilled and excited her that she learned it at once by heart and repeated it to her brothers and sisters. It would have had a great effect upon Ambrose at any time, but just now he saw a dreadful fitness in it to his own secret. Pennie ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... has been successfully unrolled. This and a few other treatises have been published. The library in which this was found appears to have been rich in treatises on the Epicurean philosophy. The only Latin work which it contained was a poem, attributed to Rabirius, on the war of ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... boorish way of thanking you for the premiere representation of your little poem. "To Delia in Girton" you call it, "recommending her to avoid the Muses, and seek the society of the Graces and Loves." An old-fashioned preamble, and of the lengthiest, and how do ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... spying among many precious treasures a beautifully ornamented little volume, which, to say nothing of its gay appearance, promised to occupy no great room in the pocket, with the conviction that I was doing a good action, I picked it up. On opening it I found that it was neither a bible, nor a poem, nor a congurare (?), as I had anticipated, but simply a pocket memorandum-book in which his Majesty had been accustomed to note his parties de chasse, and the numbers of game he killed. I immediately thrust it into my pocket, and have since preserved it as a keepsake—but shall be most happy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... a quill plucked from a screech-owl were required for the enchantments of Canidia, ossa ab ore rapta jejunae canis, plumanque nocturna strigis. And yet it was just at that period Rome had inherited from Greece the Philosophy of the Epicureans and that of the Sceptics and was maturing the poem ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... god Rama.] The character of Rama—or Ramachandra—is possessed of some high qualities. The great poem in which it is described at fullest length—the Ramayana of Valmiki—seems to have been an alteration, made in the interests of Hinduism, of early Buddhist legends; and the Buddhist quality of gentleness has not ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... think that such beauty is not immortal, and that years will alter those divine outlines, that admirable hymn of forms, that poem whose strophes are contours, and which no one in the world has ever read or may ever read save myself; to be the sole depositary of so splendid a treasure! If I knew even by imitating the play of light and shadow with the aid of lines ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... amongst the nobility attached themselves to their better-situated brethren, becoming their dependents and willing tools. The relation of the nobility to the peasantry is well characterised in a passage of Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz, where a peasant, on humbly suggesting that the nobility suffered less from the measures of their foreign rulers than his own class, is told by one of his betters that this is a silly remark, seeing that peasants, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... makes them fall on the far side of the summit, upon the fields of Roncesvalles, with the sun setting right at them along the hills. And that is as it should be, for it is evident that (in a poem) the hero fighting among hills should die upon the enemy's side of the hills. But that is not the place where Roland really died. The place where he really died, he and Oliver and Turpin and all the others, was here in the very recess of the Northern Valley. It was here ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... done some work for the booksellers, and his friend Lloyd had had some success with a didactic poem, "The Actor." His intimate knowledge of the theatre was now turned to account in the Rosciad, which appeared in March 1761. This reckless and amusing satire described with the most disconcerting accuracy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... some superb or unique example of ancient typography, of a book which has belonged to a famous person, or of a manuscript like the Bedford Missal or the Hours of Anne of Brittany. One can understand, again, the enthusiasm for an unrecorded old poem, romance, or play, for a production by an eminent author supposed to have perished, or for a precious relic such as the Manesse MS., presented by the German Emperor Frederic to the library at Heidelberg, from which it had ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... excursion out across Hampstead Heath they lost their copy of "Shelley" in the leaves, and a wit has told us that it sprouted, and as a result—the flower and fruit—we have Browning's poem of "Pauline." And this must be so, for Robert and Miss Flower (he always called her "Miss Flower," but she called him "Robert") made many an excursion, in search of the book, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... considerably exceeded him in general information, I suddenly took it into my head to attempt the style by which he had raised himself to fame." Sir Walter next hearing a striking passage from Mr. W. Taylor's translation of Buerger's Leonore, was induced to procure a copy of the original poem from Germany, and "the book had only been a few hours in my possession, when I found myself giving an animated account of the poem to a friend, and rashly added a promise to furnish a copy in English ballad verse. I well recollect that I began my ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... poet of my acquaintance, who in the midst of war's obsessions still finds time and taste for the exercise of his art (he is in a Government office), has allowed me to see the opening couplet of what I understand to be a very ambitious poem. It ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, every one recognized Him. That might be one of the best passages in the poem. I mean, why they recognized Him. The people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround Him, they flock about Him, follow Him. He moves silently in their midst with a gentle smile of infinite compassion. The sun ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... October 7, 1889, he writes to her: "A new poem begins to dawn in me. I will execute it this winter, and try to transfer to it the bright atmosphere of the summer. But I feel that it will end in sadness—such is my nature." Was this "dawning" poem Hedda Gabler? Or was it rather The Master Builder that was ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... his regimen of whey, and did not omit to quote from the same poem, apropos of that mild Anacreontic drink, the lines which happen to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... history of the Confirmation to Margaret. "It was a beautiful thing to watch," he said, "the faces of our own set. Those four were really like a poem. There was little Meta in her snowy whiteness, looking like innocence itself, hardly knowing of evil, or pain, or struggle, as that soft earnest voice made her vow to be ready for it all, almost as unscathed and unconscious of trial, as when they ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... consider ought to take the first place? Does she seriously think the success of women in business or politics, as municipal councillors, as writers, artists, thinkers, is of more importance than the success of women as mothers? Is it possible? . . . I recall a poem of W. E. Henley's on the woman question, one line of which runs 'God in the garden laughed outright.' Surely there must often be uproarious laughter in heaven nowadays when the woman question is being discussed ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... esteem, and affection of the people of Little Primpton. James Brown, who has the honour to bear the same Christian name as yourself, and is also the top boy of the Parish School, will now recite a short poem entitled 'Casabianca.' ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... "Vulcan hath fallen from the clouds and lieth halting below. The apple which was rosy is become green, and the Dutchman who of late flew is now become ship's ballast. Nay, my poor ruin, thank me not for coming; 'tis the common debt the high oweth to the low, the sound to the broken, the poem to the prose; nay, 'tis the duty a knight oweth to his lady's ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... in Dante's poem, of his voyage to the southern hemisphere. The pleasure of watching unfamiliar constellations rise from the east and sweep across the sky, is a keen one, which often ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... to give a few of the poetical pictures, we shall be very brief with the prose, and merely quote an outline of the poem. Mr. Bowles, it appears, is a native of the district in which he resides, and this circumstance introduces some ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... emphasized by a magazine-writer; but it is not at all universally known that between the years 1835 and 1845 Mr. Ruskin figured somewhat largely as a poet, in the popular sense of that much abused word. During that time he produced a good deal of verse, in addition to the prize poem which has always been ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... entered the church, though he does not seem to have prosecuted his theological course with great zeal. For many years he resided at Mantua, and superintended the education of the celebrated Lucrezia Gonzaga, in whose honour he composed a long poem. The decisive battle of Pavia, which gave Lombardy into the hands of the emperor, compelled Bandello to fly; his house at Milan was burnt and his property confiscated. He took refuge with Cesare Fregoso, an Italian general in the French service, whom he accompanied ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... the passionate patriotism of the South, her dearest sentiments, her pathos and regrets, her splendid progress and her triumphant future. This poem is a popular favorite throughout the South, and has been adopted officially in some states. The author is one of her truest sons. All the pages of the book are decorated with original drawings, including seven exceedingly fine ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... present dominant in man exasperated Gabriel; it was the great stumbling-block to all his generous views of the future, and he explained to his astonished listeners the transformations of natural creatures and of the origin of man, and the wondrous poem of the evolution of nature from the original protoplasm to the infinite varieties of life. We still carry in us the marks of our origin. One could not help laughing at the God of the Jews, who had modelled a man from clay, like a sculptor. Unlucky artist! Science pointed out ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... consolation—for was not Jesus my only Friend? To Him alone could I open my heart; all conversation with creatures, even on holy subjects, wearied me. It is true that in these periods of loneliness I sometimes felt sad, and I used often to console myself by repeating this line of a beautiful poem Papa had taught me: "Time is thy barque, and not ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... his funeral in the paper. All the court were present. And here's a poem too, of Prince Kovrizhkin's on ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... this poem are universal; that is, such as may be appropriated by every polished nation. In all the most beautiful oriental systems of religion, including our own, may be found such beings as its characters. The early fathers of Christianity not only ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... the alternative supposition we have ultimately to think of God and man either as All plus something or All plus zero—which is absurd. Mr. Chesterton has rendered useful service by insisting that in creating the world God distinguishes Himself from the world, as a poet is distinct from his poem—a truth which he has condensed into an aphorism, {28} "All creation is separation"; but on the part of the Deity such "separation" implies of necessity the self-limitation just spoken of. Just as a billion, minus the billionth fraction of a unit, is no longer ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... a decidedly friendly turn of mind. We determined that we would. We joined Alois on the stony, waste hillside, crowned by two trees with a crucifix in the centre, which formed from the house, with its background of mountains, ever a melancholy, soul-touching little poem. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... poem that makes your heart throb with gladness and gratitude, you are simply partaking of the emotion that the author felt when he wrote it. To possess a piece of work that the workman made in joyous animation is a source of joy ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... the heroes introduced is carefully preserved. The reader is every where reminded of Homer; and yet, as a German critic has observed, there is an under current of sentiment which betrays the thoughtful Northern minstrel. This detracts from the art of the Poem viewed as an imitation, but constitutes its very charm as an original composition. Its inspiration rises from a source purely Hellenic, but the streamlets it receives at once adulterate and enrich, or (to change the metaphor) it has the costume and the gusto of the Greek, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... "A poem about an eagle by a man named Alfred Tennyson. Ain't it the way a feller feels, though, up on the top of ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... a brave man was a brave man to Lumsden, be his birth or caste what it might be. Most English-speaking people have read Mr. Rudyard Kipling's poem about Gunga Din the bhisti, or water-carrier, who by the unanimous verdict of the soldiers was voted the bravest man in the battle. Whether Mr. Kipling got that incident from the Guides or not his poem does not show, but there it actually occurred. ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... There was never a poem to me like those words, but they did not leave themselves in continuity. I could not say the sentences again. I seem to remember the vibration—some sense of the mysterious, kindred with all creatures—and a vast flung scroll of wisdom ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... M. Talleyrand, a diploma of good breeding which is the commencement of fame and the promise of a fortune. Under such an "instructress" it is evident that deportment, gesture, language, every act or omission in this mundane sphere, becomes, like a picture or poem, a veritable work of art; that is to say, infinite in refinement, at once studied and easy, and so harmonious in its details that its perfection conceals ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... said. "But I can't look at the mountains. They take my breath away and make me stand still inside. Maybe some day I'll be able to look straight at them, but not now, and some day when I'm a woman I'm going to come back here and make a poem and set it to a ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... was to be circumvented, and finally hit on a scheme which was, for them, more than usually tactful. Anton created a new medal and scholarship, to be presented thereafter annually for the best musical setting of a classic poem which was to be the same for all. It was an exercise in which Ivan delighted; and there was little doubt as to the destination of the prize of the first year. Fate treated him kindly, at last; for he managed to keep up till after the contest. His setting of Schiller's "Ode ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... as the statue of Patrick Henry, which seems instinct with that memorable utterance, "Give me liberty or give me death!" The inventive felicity of the design for one of the pediments of the Capitol might be unfolded as a vivid historic poem; and it requires no imagination to show that Jefferson looks the author of the Declaration of Independence. The union of original expression and skill in statuary and of ingenious constructiveness in monumental designs, which Crawford exhibited, may be regarded as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... of a poem, but though it was wittily done, its lightness jarred so terribly on both reader and listener that it was speedily thrown aside. For some time they remained in gloomy silence, then Elsie began to moan and move restlessly about, then Mellen tried to rouse ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... the phrase, "These are not good rhymes." He translated any passages that struck him in his reading, excited by the examples of Ogilby's Homer and Sandys' Ovid. His boyish ambition prompted him before he was fifteen to attempt an epic poem; the subject was Alcander, Prince of Rhodes, driven from his home by Deucalion, father of Minos; and the work was modestly intended to emulate in different passages the beauties of Milton, Cowley, Spenser, Statius, Homer, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Edinburgh is picturesque and romantic, but it affects a lower class of our associations. It is, compared to that of London, what the poem of the Seasons is with respect to Paradise Lost—the castellated descriptions of Walter Scott to the Darkness of Byron—the Sabbath of Grahame to the Robbers of Schiller. In the approach to Edinburgh, leisure and cheerfulness are on the road; large spaces ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... the other direction, all is fable. Colchis seems to have been known, though not so accurately as the recent Argonautic expedition might have led us to suppose it would have been. The west coast of Asia Minor, the scene of his great poem, is of course completely within his knowledge; the Phoenicians and Egyptians are particularly described, the former for their purple stuffs, gold and silver works, maritime science and commercial ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... O Don!—a famous school, in Goldsmith's Rents, near Red-Cross Street, in the Parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate. Those were stirring times; but Aleyn managed to write, before he died, in 1640, a rousing great poem, intituled, "The Battailes of Crescey and Poictiers, under the Fortunes and Valour of King Edward the Third of that Name, and his Sonne, Edward, Prince of Wales, surnamed The Black." 8vo. 1633. Let me give you a taste of his quality, in the following elaborate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... thee."[253] On another day he compared Burns with Shakspere as excelling all other poets in "the power of exciting the most varied and discordant emotions with such rapid transitions."[254] Again, "The Jolly Beggars, for humorous description and nice discrimination of character, is inferior to no poem of the same length in the whole range of English poetry."[255] Scott wished that Burns might have carried out his plan of dramatic composition, and regretted, from that point of view, the excessive labor at songs which in the nature of things ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... expression of monarchy, as conceived by Louis XIV. It is the only epic produced in his reign—a reign so fertile in the other forms of poetry, and in talent of all kinds. What epic ever chronicled the destiny of an epoch in a manner more brilliant and complete? In this poem of stone the manners of heroic and familiar life mingle at every step. Besides the halls and galleries, the theaters of royal estate, there are mysterious passages and sequestered nooks that whisper a thousand ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... astounding! The most wonderful first novel she had ever read. How had he been able to make one feel Cornwall so? She had been once to Cornwall, to Mullion and it had been just like that! Those rocks! it was like a poem! And then so exciting! ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... strange that he, a Bushman, preferred Gordon's sea poems to his horsey and bushy rhymes; but so he did. I fancy his favourite poem was that one of Gordon's ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... English, the same word, such as spiritus, esprit, and spirit bear very different significations. The great need is that there should be some work going on in which the boys should not be conscious of dragging an ever-increasing burden of memory. Let me take a concrete case. A poem like the Morte d'Arthur, or The Lay of the Last Minstrel, is well within the comprehension of quite small boys. These could be read in a class, after an introductory lecture as to date, scene, dramatis personae, with ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... wills are free.' I will say nothing of Renouvier's line of reasoning; it is contained in many volumes which I earnestly recommend to your attention.[10] But to enforce my doctrine that the number of volumes is not what makes the philosophy, let me conclude by recalling to you the little poem of Tennyson, published last year, in which the speculative voyage is made, and the same conclusion reached in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... knew when the Dean's rides took him that way, my Mrs Prue being courted by his man Samuel, and all he did trickling through that channel. 'T was at this time also that copies were handed about of his poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa," and 't was the very top of talk and admiration. Many might guess who was the lady, and the Dean was mighty angry, and said 'twas but a jest, and no friend to him ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... were too depressed to enjoy jokes, and Highboy, with tears streaming down his cheeks, was composing a poem bidding a sad farewell to home and friends. Hortense could hear him trying rhymes to find one which would fit—"home, ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... Linton. Unlike Drummond, Linton bore marks of the encounter. As in the case of the hero of Calverley's poem, one of his speaking eyes was sable. The swelling of his lip was increased. There was a deep red bruise on his forehead. In spite of these injuries, however, he was cheerful. He was whistling when Sheen collided ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... to point the shot at a mark. Shakespeare's meaning is, my poem is not a satire written with any particular view, or levelled at any single person; I fly like an eagle into the general expanse of life, and leave not, by any private mischief, the ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson |
