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Canto   /kˈæntoʊ/   Listen
Canto

noun
(pl. cantos)
1.
The highest part (usually the melody) in a piece of choral music.
2.
A major division of a long poem.



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"Canto" Quotes from Famous Books



... Macauly's Essays with me in which I read a little on the Sabbath. On rainy days I stole away to the hay mow and read one of Jane Porter's novels which I found in the house. I attempted to commit to memory the whole of the Lady of the Lake, but got no farther than the first canto, and the songs interspersed through the others. These songs I recited in the field, and they were a great comfort to me. Little do the poets know in what strange, obscure places, and in what lonely, unknown hearts their verses find lodgment. ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... attacks of Mr. Worthington's organ, the Newcastle Guardian. These amenities are much too personal to reproduce here, now that the smoke of battle has rolled away. An epic could be written upon the conflict, if there were space: Canto One, the first position carried triumphantly, though at some expense, by the Worthington forces, who elect the Speaker. That had been a crucial time before the town meetings, when Jethro abdicated. The Worthington Speaker goes ahead with his committees, and it is needless ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... fancy of the existence of two souls within one bosom would seem at all adequately to account for the varieties, both of power and character, which the course of his conduct and writings during these few feverish years displayed. Without going back so far as the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold, which one of his bitterest and ablest assailants has pronounced to be, "in point of execution, the sublimest poetical achievement of mortal pen," we have, in a similar strain of strength ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... in which the fanaticism of the Crusader was mingled with the cruelty of the conqueror, and they are so germane to the present subject, that I would willingly quote the passage were it not too long. See La Araucana, Parte 2, canto 24.] I have already spoken of the person and the qualities of Atahuallpa. He had a handsome countenance, though with an expression somewhat too fierce to be pleasing. His frame was muscular and well-proportioned; his air ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott

... Hawaiian who furnished the meles which, in their translated forms, are designated as canto I, canto II, and so on, spoke of them as pale, and, following his nomenclature, the term has been retained, though more intimate acquaintance with the meles and with the term has shown that the nearest English synonym to correspond with ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... papers, found nothing, and bade him rise and go to prison. After the peace of Villafranca he was liberated, and left the Austrian states, retiring first to Brescia, and then to Florence. His publications since 1859 have been a Canto Politico and I Sette Soldati. He was condemned for his voluntary exile, by the Austrian courts, and I remember reading in the newspapers the official invitation given him to come back to Verona and be punished. But, oddly enough, he ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... the Anchor, to the memory of Giammaria Ghedini, the founder of the art-schools of Cortina. There was music by the band; and an oration by a native Demosthenes (who spoke in Italian so fluent that it ran through one's senses like water through a sluice, leaving nothing behind), and an original Canto sung by the village choir, with a general chorus, in which they called upon the various mountains to "re-echo the name of the beloved master John-Mary as a model of modesty and true merit," ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... Lib. I, chap. x, under 'Sal Stypticum Rabelli'. Salmon, who edited this pharmacopoeia, was himself an irregular practitioner of some notoriety. He took part in the great controversy with the doctors which raged about 1698 and earlier. He finds a sorry place in Garth's Dispensary, canto III, l. 6, wherein his works are ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... 'largo vivacissimo', and as the general expressive signature, 'tempo rubato'." Tennyson realized the musical effect of "Paradise Lost" when he spoke of Milton as "England's God-gifted organ-voice"; and he himself in such lyrics as those in the "Princess" and the eighty-sixth canto of "In Memoriam" wrought musical effects with verse. Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton says of Poe's "Ulalume" that, if properly intoned, "it would produce something like the same effect upon a listener knowing no word of English that it produces ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... library at my disposal, consisting of some romances of Scuderi, Piazzi, and worse books still; but my mind was too deeply agitated to apply to any kind of reading whatever. Every day, indeed, I committed a canto of Dante to memory, an exercise so merely mechanical, that I thought more of my own affairs than the lines during their acquisition. The same sort of abstraction attended my perusal of other things, except, occasionally, a few passages of scripture. I had always felt ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico

... succeeding anniversaries of Hallam's death stir the old pain in varying degree. But we must not suppose that each section was composed at the time represented in this scheme. Seventeen years went to the perfecting of the work; it is impossible to tell when each canto was first outlined and how often it was re-written; and we must be content with general notions of its development. The poet's memory was fully charged. As he could recall so vividly the Lincolnshire landscape when he was living in the south, so he could portray ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... it was levelled. If some of the versification is rough and wanting in "go," I must plead in excuse the difficult form of the stanza, and in many instances the inelastic nature of the subject matter to be versified. Stanza XXXV Canto II forms a good example of the latter difficulty, and is omitted in the German and French versions to which I have had access. The translation of foreign verse is comparatively easy so long as it is confined to conventional poetic subjects, but when it embraces ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... living engines on. For as whipped tops and bandy'd balls, The learned hold are animals: So horses they affirm to be Mere engines made by geometry, And were invented first from engines As Indian Britons were from Penguins." —Hudibras, Canto ii. ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... the word 'painted ones' or 'painted men'. Demersay, in his 'Histoire du Paraguay',* thinks it probable that the word is an alteration of the word 'guaranai', i.e., numerous. Barco de la Centenera** ('Argentina', book i., canto i.) says the word means 'hornet', and was applied on account of their savageness. Be that as it may, it is certain that the Guaranis did not at the time of the conquest, and do not now, apply the word to ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... in a foreign language to each other. Indeed, many of these gentlemen appear to me to be a sort of tinkers, who, unable to make pots and pans, set up for menders of them, and, God knows, often make two holes in patching one. The sixth canto is altogether redundant; for the poem should certainly have closed with the union of the lovers, when the interest, if any, was at an end. But what could I do? I had my book and my page still on my hands, and must get rid of them at all events. Manage them ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... nothing for poetry. Virgil was too troublesome to be enjoyed; and in English he had met with nothing but the dried leaves and gum-flowers of the last century. Miss Letty once lent him The Lady of the Lake; but before he had read the first canto through, his grandmother laid her hands upon it, and, without saying a word, dropped it behind a loose skirting-board in the pantry, where the mice soon made it a ruin sad to behold. For Miss Letty, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... history of man had not been embodied in a popular form capable of impressing itself on every mind without the help of letters. He begged Edmee to explain to him a stanza of Jerusalem Delivered. As he took a fancy to it, she read him a canto in French. A few days later she read him another, and soon Patience knew the whole poem. He rejoiced to hear that the heroic tale was popular in Italy; and, bringing together his recollections of it, endeavoured to give them an abridged form in rude prose, but he had no ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... in many other poems, even in his almost vile poem, "Don Juan." The most notable instance is in the fifteenth canto, where he is speaking of persecuted ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee

... change of countenance, and with a promptness which proved her to be prepared for the request, Miss Lombard began to recite, in a full round voice like her mother's, St. Bernard's invocation to the Virgin, in the thirty-third canto of the Paradise. ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... Assuredly, if I had had the faintest inkling of it last evening, I would have cut off my right hand sooner than sign that deed by which I have henceforth bound my fate to that of an unknown man whose past and future may be as gloomy as a canto of Dante's Hell, and who may drag me down with him into ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... da a su llanto Cuanto el hombre le ofrece; Ya la risa en sus labios no florece, Y olvido la nativa voz del canto. ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... incident closes the first canto of the poet's "Recollections." The second opens with a description of his wretched dwelling, and the scanty support gained by labour and begging, shared by nine persons: his grandfather's wallet, from which he had so often received a piece of bread, unknowing how it had been obtained, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... why these two, the grave and gallant Knight and the sad and lovely Lady, are riding forth together we should not know until the middle of the seventh canto, were it not for a letter which Spenser wrote to Raleigh and printed in the beginning of his book. In it he tells us not only who these two are, but also his whole great design. He writes this letter, he says, "knowing how doubtfully all allegories may be construed," and this book ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... that enlarge, ennoble, move, or mend the heart! Insomuch so, that I know a person whose name would be an ornament to these papers, if I were suffered to insert it, who, after reading a book of the Dunciad, always soothes himself, as he calls it, by turning to a canto of the Faery Queene." There is no denying that satire is apt to excite the emotions the Doctor complains of, and few more strongly than the Dunciad. Yet what would it be without them—and what should we be? But other emotions, too, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... conditions is necessary to perfect happiness, if happiness exists in the world. The element lacking in my case was success in work, or at least the inward assurance of progress. There was our beautiful island home, in itself as much a poem as a canto of "The Lady of the Lake," with its ancient oaks, its rocky shore, its green, undulating, park-like pasture; there was the lake for sailing and the mountain for climbing, and all around us a country of unlimited wealth of material for the sketcher. Amidst all this, with a too earnest ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... combined Greek armies against the destructive invasion of the Gauls by provoking a panic among the latter. I actually began my heroic poem in hexameter verse, but could not get through the first canto. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... swore were the early works of that master. Thence up a toilsome valley I journeyed to the Ampezzan country, valley where indeed I saw my white mountains, but, alas! no longer Celestial. For it rained like Westmorland for five endless days, while I kicked my heels in an inn and turned a canto of Aristo into halting English couplets. By-and-by it cleared, and I headed westward towards Bozen, among the tangle of rocks where the Dwarf King had once his rose-garden. The first night I had no inn but slept in the vile cabin of a forester, who spoke a tongue half Latin, half Dutch, which I ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... takes pleasure in quoting them. When Father Michael, the apostolic prefect to Erithrea, was taking his leave, with the other Franciscans who accompanied him to Africa, his Holiness recited to them, with great spirit, Dante's canto ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... certainly have hesitated to speak of the Polonaise, after the exquisite verses which Mickiewicz has consecrated to it, and the admirable description which he has given of it in the last Canto of the "Pan Tadeusz," but that this description is to be found only in a work not yet translated, and, consequently, only known to the compatriots of the Poet. [Footnote: It has been translated into German.—T.] It would have been presumptuous, even under another form, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt

... vehemence of the satire. It has been compared," he adds, "to the geysers propelling a vast column of boiling water by the force of subterranean fire;" and he speaks of some one who after reading a book of the Dunciad, always soothes himself by a canto of the Faery Queen. Certainly a greater contrast could not easily be suggested; and yet, I think, that the remark requires at least modification. The Dunciad, indeed, is beyond all question full of coarse ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... fine chivalric mansion, "Place aux dames!" we have necessarily been compelled to elbow the cavaliers from the stage, and pass by in silence, without listening to them. Now, however, when we have written our pastoral canto, and duly spoken of the sayings and doings of Miss Redbud and Miss Fanny—used our best efforts to place upon record what they amused themselves with, laughed at, and took pleasure in, under the golden trees of the beautiful ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke

... not now in fortune's power; He that is down can fall no lower. Hudibras, Pt. I. Canto ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... likewise drew out the scheme and the contents for each of the three books or cantos, of which the work was to consist, and which, the reader is to be informed, was to have been finished in one night! My partner undertook the first canto: I the second: and which ever had done first, was to set about the third. Almost thirty years have passed by; yet at this moment I cannot without something more than a smile moot the question which of the two things was the more impracticable, for a mind so eminently original ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... am anxious to suggest in "Notes and Queries" whether a character in the Second Canto of Part iii. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various

... further that Kalidasa travelled widely in India. The fourth canto of The Dynasty of Raghu describes a tour about the whole of India and even into regions which are beyond the borders of a narrowly measured India. It is hard to believe that Kalidasa had not himself made such a "grand tour"; so much of truth there may be in the tradition which ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa

... harmonious beauty. Byron's love of Nature was quite different in kind from Wordsworth's. Of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that national theme, the sea, as witness among many other passages, the famous apostrophe to the ocean, which closes Childe Harold, and the opening of the third canto in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... this which leads one to suffer for another! Nothing so kindles enthusiasm or awakens eloquence, or chimes poetic canto, or moves nations. The principle is the dominant one in our religion—Christ the Martyr, Christ the celestial Hero, Christ the Defender, Christ the Substitute. No new principle, for it was as old as human nature; but now on a ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... by Naples. Leghorn was garrisoned with French troops; all the English goods lying in this harbor, to the value of twelve million pounds, were confiscated. The strongly fortified city of Mantua, defended by the Austrians under their gallant leader, Canto d'Irles, was besieged by Bonaparte. A fresh body of Austrian troops under Wurmser crossed the mountains to their relief; but Wurmser, instead of advancing with his whole force, incautiously pressed forward with thirty-two ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... ombra da l' un canto sola Dicendo 'Colui feese in grembo a Dio Lo cuor che'n su Tamigi ancor si cola.'" ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge

... new Dante, and sing me the befitting corner of perdition for the man who sitteth in the house in his stockinged feet. Sisters of Patience who by reason of ties or duty have endured it in silk, yarn, cotton, lisle thread or woollen—does not the new canto belong? ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... from 1767 to 1769, he published a Sermon; The Ninth Satire of Horace, a meaningless trifle of a hundred lines, swollen, by printing the original and notes, into a quarto; a volume of Fugitive Pieces; and the first canto of The Battle of Minden, a Poem in three Books, enriched with critical Notes by Two Friends, and with explanatory Notes by the Author. Of the latter work, as of the Tour, I have never seen but one copy, a splendid specimen of typography, splendidly bound, containing the first ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various

... haveano, et l'elmo in testa, Due di questi guerrier, de' quali io canto; Ne notte o di, d' appoi ch' entraro in questa Stanza, gl'haveano mai messi da canto; Che facile a portar come la vesta Era lor, perche in uso ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... to the others; and he read very well, as I know. Nobody in the circle knew a line of the poem, only it was all magic and Border chivalry, and was ten thousand years ago. Poor Nolan read steadily through the fifth canto, stopped a minute and drank something, and then began, without a thought ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale

... however, seems to me to contain more than the psychological content of these lines from the fifth canto of the "Inferno." ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... eighteen hundred, fifteen, (Just beyond my canto's limits,) Saw the good work of improvement, Still progressing, moving forward, Still advancing, ever onward. In the suburbs of the city, Rose a noted house of worship, Large and generous in model, Called ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... the Frati del Zoccolo, without Prato, he painted a panel; and in the Audience Chamber of the Priori in that territory he executed a little panel containing the Madonna, S. Stephen, and S. John the Baptist, which has been much extolled. On the Canto al Mercatale, also in Prato, in a shrine opposite to the Nuns of S. Margherita, and near some houses belonging to them, he painted in fresco a very beautiful Madonna, with a choir of seraphim, on a ground of dazzling light. In ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari

... saintly soul, that shows The world's deceitfulness, to all who hear him, Is, with the sight of all the good that is, Blest there. The limbs, whence it was driven, lie Down in Cieldauro; and from martyrdom And exile came it here."—Paradiso, Canto X. ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith

... brother of Donato. This man, after the work of the door, made the bronze tomb of Pope Martin. He likewise made some castings that were sent to France, of many of which the fate is not known. For the Church of the Ermini, in the Canto alla Macine in Florence, he wrought a life-size Crucifix for carrying in processions, and to render it the lighter he made it of cork. In S. Felicita he made a terra-cotta figure of S. Mary Magdalene in Penitence, three braccia and a ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari

... church, tradition says that James IV. was warned, by a strange apparition, against that expedition to England which cost him his life. Scott has worked this incident up into a beautiful description, in the fourth canto ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... a certain number of Italian words, as 'balcony', 'baldachin', 'balustrade', 'bandit', 'bravo', 'bust' (it was 'busto' as first used in English, and therefore from the Italian, not from the French), 'cameo', 'canto', 'caricature', 'carnival', 'cartoon', 'charlatan', 'concert', 'conversazione', 'cupola', 'ditto', 'doge', 'domino'{17}, 'felucca', 'fresco', 'gazette', 'generalissimo', 'gondola', 'gonfalon', 'grotto', ('grotta' is the ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... of the black Friar, He still retains his sway, For he is yet the Church's heir by right, Whoever may be the lay. Amundeville is lord by day, But the monk is lord by night, Nor wine nor wassel could raise a vassal To question that friar's right. Don Juan, CANTO XVII. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... Cain with fork of thorns confine On either hemisphere, touching the wave Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight The moon was round." (Hell. Canto xx., line 123.) ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... sat down disconsolate enough. I found some Spanish books, and a volume of Lord Byron's poetry, containing the first canto of Childe Harold, two numbers of Blackwood, with several other English books and magazines, the names of the owners on all of ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... ends this canto.—Need I sing, or say, How Juan naked, favour'd by the night, Who favours what she should not, found his way, And reach'd his home in an unseemly plight? The pleasant scandal which arose next day, The nine days' wonder which was ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... Milton some sixty years later—that there prevailed some misunderstanding between him and the scholastic authorities. He mentions his university with respect in the Faerie Queene, in book iv. canto xi. where, setting forth what various rivers gathered happily together to celebrate the marriage of the Thames and the ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales

... Similarly, there was a statue at Venice said to have performed great miracles. A merchant vowed perpetual gifts of wax candles in gratitude for being saved by the light of a candle on a dark night, reminding us of Byron's description of a storm at sea, in 'Don Juan' (Canto II.): ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... in the Pilgrim's Progress. But the pleasure which is produced by the Vision of Mirza, or the Vision of Theodore, the genealogy of Wit, or the contest between Rest and Labour, is exactly similar to the pleasure which we derive from one of Cowley's Odes, or from a Canto of Hudibras. It is a pleasure which belongs wholly to the understanding, and in which the feelings have no part whatever. Nay, even Spencer himself, though assuredly one of the greatest poets that ever lived, could not succeed in the attempt ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various

... Apparently the Echo-song which now precedes canto iv. of the Princess, though one is surprised at the opinion here expressed of it. It will be remembered that this and the other lyrical interludes did not appear in the original edition ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... would have been a proud memorial at any time, but at such a time, when "all the world and his wife," as the proverb goes, were trying to trample upon me, was something still higher to my self-esteem—I allude to the Quarterly Review of the Third Canto of "Childe Harold," which Murray told me was written by you—and, indeed, I should have known it without his information, as there could not be two who could and would have done this at the time. Had it been a common criticism, however eloquent or panegyrical, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various

... to a certain sad conservatism as he discussed with his son those events of the week last passed which had left their impress on his mind. But what pleased Custer best was when his father, ceasing to be gently discursive and becoming vigorously personal, added yet another canto to the stirring epic ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester

... had notes associated with them have been numbered. The notes have been moved to the end of the canto.] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... thought that the following poem, especially its opening Canto is too minute and circumstantial in its descriptions. Yet the habitudes of a past and peculiar generation, fast fading from remembrance, are worthy of being preserved, though little accordant with romance, perhaps with poetry. So rapid has ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney

... mother was allowed no study time in school, and committed thirty pages of history as a daily lesson. For myself, at a time when we were pursuing languages and the higher mathematics, we took a whole canto of Dante three times a week, and were required to give an explanation of every historical allusion. I had no study time in school; but neither my mother, nor myself, nor any girls in my class, were ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... for granted these lines were written, not only on the fly-leaf of Wordsworth's copy of the 'Castle of Indolence', but also by way of Supplement to that poem; i. e. as an 'addendum' to the descriptive list of the denizens of the Castle given in stanzas LVII-LXIX of Canto I.; that, in short, they are meant to be read as though they were an after-thought of James Thomson's. Their author, therefore, has rightly imparted to them the curiously blended flavour of 'romantic ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... 'The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian, the philosopher, the historian and the humble listener, ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson

... execrable verses could be written by a philosopher), enchanted castles and flying horses are not easily feigned as Ariosto and Spenser feigned them; and that just makes all the difference. For proof, see the accounts of Spenser's enchanted castle in Book the Third, Canto Twelfth, of the Faerie Queene; and let the reader of Italian open the Orlando Furioso at its first introduction of the Hippogriff (Canto iii, st. 4), where Bradamante, coming to an inn, hears a great noise, and sees all the people looking up at something ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... done. Of the earth earthy as she is, she has driven you and me into the realms of abstract truth. We have thus no right to despise her" This discourse is interrupted by a contemptuous allusion to a passage in "Childe Harold," (fourth canto), in which the human intelligence is challenged to ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... posy, anthology; disjecta membra poetae song[Lat], ballad, lay; love song, drinking song, war song, sea song; lullaby; music &c. 415; nursery rhymes. [Bad poetry] doggerel, Hudibrastic verse[obs3], prose run mad; macaronics[obs3]; macaronic verse[obs3], leonine verse; runes. canto, stanza, distich, verse, line, couplet, triplet, quatrain; strophe, antistrophe[obs3]. verse, rhyme, assonance, crambo[obs3], meter, measure, foot, numbers, strain, rhythm; accentuation &c. (voice) 580; dactyl, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... cantos of the poem of Izdubar or Nimrod refer to the twelve months of the year and the twelve representative signs of the Zodiac. Dr. Haupt afterward pointed out that Eabani, the wise bull-man in the second canto, corresponds to the second month, Ijjar, April-May, represented in the Zodiac by the bull; that the union between Eabani and Nimrod in the third canto corresponds to the third month, Sivan, May-June, represented ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... he quoted Virgil, and talked of Hobbs of Malmsbury, beside repeating poetry by the canto, especially Hudibras. He was, moreover, a man who had seen the world. In the easiest way imaginable, he could refer to an amour he had in Palermo, his lion-hunting before breakfast among the Caffres, and the quality of the coffee to be drunk in Muscat; and about these places, and a hundred ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... G. Cooper, in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1858, and the Report of the United States Patent Office, Agricultural Division, for 1860.] and some other North American genera are almost equally diversified. [Footnote: Although Spenser's catalogue of trees occurs in the first canto of the first book of the "Faery Queene"—the only canto of that exquisite poem actually read by most students of English literature—it is not so generally familiar as to make the quotation of ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... queto caud! Beu tems per la Cigalo, Que, trefoulido, se regalo D'uno raisso de fio; beu tems per la meissoun. Dins lis erso d'or, lou segaire, Ren plega, pitre au vent, rustico e canto gaire; Dins soun gousie, la ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... hope you have Italian enough to appreciate the singular perfection in expression. If not, look to Fairfax's Jerusalem Delivered, Canto 12, Stanza 77; but Rousseau says these lines have no connection with what goes before, or after; they are preceded, stanza 76, by these three lines, which he does not ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... such men that the poem should be continued, but to do that, I must return to Greece and Asia; I must have a warm sun and a blue sky; I cannot describe scenes so dear to me by a sea-coal fire. I had projected an additional Canto when I was in the Troad and Constantinople, and if I saw them again, it would go on; but under existing circumstances and sensations, I have neither harp, 'heart, nor voice' to proceed. I feel that you are all right as to the metaphysical part; but I also feel that I am sincere, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... translator could not please himself with the outset of his undertaking, and hence the recorded substitution; but it is not known that he carried his fastidiousness so far as to furnish a third version of the first stanza, as well as of the "Argument" of the introductory canto, differing from both the others. In the instance pointed out by T. N. the substitution was effected by pasting the approved stanza over the disapproved stanza; but the third version was given by reprinting the whole leaf, which contains other variations of typography, besides such as it was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various

... philosophical, historical, scientific, &c., cyclopaedia), ed. Chabaille, Paris, "Documents inedits," 1863, 4to. Dante cherished "the dear and sweet fatherly image" of his master, Brunetto, who recommended to the poet his "Tresor," for, he said, "in this book I still live." "Inferno," canto xv. ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... character of Mr. Jonathan Wild, such a figure being hardly admissible among the dignified personages who usually push all others out from the possession of the historical page; but a chapter of that gentleman's memoirs, as they are recorded in that exemplary recueil—the "Newgate Calendar;" nay, a canto of the great comic epic (involving many fables, and containing much exaggeration, but still having the seeds of truth) which the satirical poet of those days wrote in celebration of him—we mean Fielding's "History ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered" (Canto XVIII, 17-40), who enters an enchanted wood, and, by cutting down a tree in spite of the nymphs and phantoms that endeavor in every way to stop him, breaks the spell; the Christian army are thus enabled to enter the grove and obtain timber for ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... his mask; whereas Byron, whose English sense of humour must have fought against taking himself so very seriously, relieved his conscience by lapses into epigram, irony, and persiflage. Thus in the same year (1818), and from the same place (Venice), he produced the fourth canto of Childe Harold, full of deep longing ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... it:—"It is situated much like Fontainbleau, in France, capable of being made a noble seat, accommodated as it is with brave woods and streams; it has yet remaining the front of a glorious abbey church." Lord Byron thus beautifully describes the family seat, in the thirteenth canto of Don Juan: ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... te causas espanto, ne admiracion, Que los que te cantan, tus amigos son. Y abrime la puerta, que estoy en la calle; Que diran la gente?—Que es un desaire! Cuatro rosas traigo, en cada mano dos, No te canto mas, porque ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman

... sections that the poem takes its name. At first sight such a work seems to be a miscellany of myths, technical advice, moral precepts, and folklore maxims without any unifying principle; and critics have readily taken the view that the whole is a canto of fragments or short poems worked up by a redactor. Very probably Hesiod used much material of a far older date, just as Shakespeare used the "Gesta Romanorum", old chronicles, and old plays; but close inspection will show that the "Works and Days" has a real unity ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... mediaeval potentates, had probably not lost its meaning. Dante, in the Divina Commedia, not only plans his Inferno on the supposition of a spherical earth, but takes for granted the same conception, on the part of his readers. [Footnote: Inferno, canto 34, lines 100-108.] ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney

... are sorry equivalents for the Homeric hexameter, blank verse is superior to them only in a negative way. The real equivalent, if any, is the romance metre of Scott, parts of whose poems, notably the last canto of Marmion and some passages in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, are about the most Homeric things in our language. Cowper brought such poetic gifts to his work that his failure might have deterred others from making ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... the midway.] That the era of the Poem is intended by these words to be fixed to the thirty fifth year of the poet's age, A.D. 1300, will appear more plainly in Canto XXI. where ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... thought and bright satire, of playful malice and epicurean joy in life, and have always won the admiration of his fellow-poets. As has been said, they show a fine taste, quite in advance of the age. Cervantes, his greater contemporary, acknowledged his power with cordial praise in the Canto de Caliope. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... into its several stages, the judgment of the writer should emulate that of the experienced Jehu, who so proportions his work, that all and several of his required teams do their own share and no more—fifteen miles (or lengths) to a first canto, and five to a second, is as far from right as such a distribution of mile-stones would be to the overworked prads. The great fault of modern poetasters arises from their extreme love of spinning out an infinite deal of nothing. Now, as "brevity is the soul of wit," their productions ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various

... Sabbath afternoons write Sabbath-school hymns, adding to the batch of infinite nonsense that the children are compelled to swallow. For others a beautiful curl is a corkscrew pulling out canto after canto. Nine-tenths of the rhyme that comes to a printing office cannot be used. You hear a rough tear of paper, and you look around to see the managing editor adding to the responsibilities of his chip-basket. What a way that is to treat ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... well, with the exception of Mr. Southey (an exception, we fear, that will be little palatable to either of these gentlemen). His prose writings, however, display more consistency of principle than the laureate's: his verses more taste. We will venture to oppose his Third Canto of the Story of Rimini for classic elegance and natural feeling to any equal number of lines from Mr. Southey's Epics or from Mr. Moore's Lalla Rookh. In a more gay and conversational style of writing, we think his Epistle to Lord Byron on his going abroad, is a masterpiece;—and the ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... think that these stanzas, which form a part of the 12th canto of the Second Book of the Faerie Queene have seldom been read to a more appreciative audience, nor by a more musical voice. After a moment's silence, ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall

... suppose that Dante had this passage in his mind when he wrote that bitter apostrophe to his own city with which the sixth canto of the Purgatory ends:— ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler

... O sine luctibus, O sine lite, Splendida curia, florida patria, patria vitae. Urbs Syon inclita, patria condita littore tuto, Te peto, te colo, te flagro, te volo, canto, saluto." ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Canto 2. Compare the description of Huriyeh (Liberty) given by Sir Mark Sykes in The Caliphs' Last Heritage. I quote the following from a review in The Spectator, of November 27th, 1915: Sir Mark Sykes saw Huriyeh (Liberty) at work in the distant provinces of the Empire. ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... one has ever attempted a mathematical novel, though the great Mr. Higgins of St. Mary Axe, as we all know, wrote a beautiful mathematical poem, of which the extant fragments are, alas! too few. If he had only lived a generation later, how charming would have been the fytte or canto on Quaternions! But, really, such a thing would not be more than a "farthest" on a road on which heredity-and-selection novels travel far. It is no use to say, "Oh! but human beings exemplifying those things ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... Our boatman, a fine handsome athletic figure, was very talkative and intelligent. He had been in the service of Lord Byron, and was with him in that storm between La Meillerie and St. Gingough, which is described in the third canto of Childe Harold. He pointed out among the beautiful villas, which adorn the banks on either side, that in which the empress Josephine had resided for six months, not long before her death. When he spoke of her, he rested upon his ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... lived at a time when books were comparatively scarce, in a district remote from easy access to well-filled libraries; when the cost of transportation often equalled the advertised price for the newest canto of "Childe Harold," or the latest novel by the "Great Unknown." But what would have been disadvantages to many a beginner proved to have been of incalculable benefit to Gerald Griffin. His knowledge of books and authors was limited to the extent of his mother's library, and it contained, ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... who trusts the word of a Pope." And what figure haunts Palazzo Altovite, the home of that fierce Ghibelline house loved by Frederick II, if not that hero who expelled the Duke of Athens. Palazzo Pazzi and Palazzo Nonfinito at the Canto de' Pazzi where the Borgo degli Albizzi meets Via del Proconsolo, brings back to me that madman who first set the Cross upon the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, and who for this cause was given some stones from Christ's sepulchre by Godfrey de Bouillon, which he brought ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... play, is not conceived with his usual judgment. There is no analogy or resemblance whatever between the fairies of Spenser, and those of Shakespeare. The fairies of Spenser, as appears from his description of them in the second book of the Faerie Queene, Canto 10. were a race of mortals created by Prometheus, of the human size, shape, and affections, and subject to death. But those of Shakespeare, and of common tradition, as Johnson calls them, were a diminutive race of sportful beings, endowed with immortality and supernatural power, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line and colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he becomes the illustrator of Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481, the blank spaces, left at the beginning of every canto for the hand of the illuminator, have been filled, as far as the nineteenth canto of the Inferno, with impressions of engraved plates, seemingly by way of experiment, for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the three impressions it contains has been printed upside down, and much awry, in ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... to compose his 'Recollections' in 1830, but the two first cantos were not completed until two years later. The third canto was added in 1835, when the poem was published in the first volume of his 'Curl-Papers' (Papillotes). These recollections, in fact, constitute Jasmin's autobiography, and we are indebted to them for the description we have already given of ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles

... I wrote a question addressed to the supposed Intelligence, in which I ask in what canto of Ariosto I should find the day of my deliverance. I then made a reversed pyramid composed of the number formed from the words of the question, and by subtracting the number nine I obtained, finally, nine. This told me that I should find my fate in the ninth canto. I followed ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... yes; and I don't complain of poverty. Canto coram latrone. Well, Mr. Smith, don't let me detain you any longer in a sick room. Ha! that reminds me of a story I once heard in my younger days.' Here the vicar began a series of small private laughs, and Stephen looked ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... saintly, it appears that the figures that he made of saints, and above all of the Virgin, breathe out a certain quality of the saintly and the divine, which moves men to hold them in supreme reverence; as it may be seen, apart from the said figure, in the Madonna that is on the Canto degli Albergotti, and in that which is on an outer wall of the Pieve in the Seteria, and in one of the same sort, likewise, that is on the Canto ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari



Words linked to "Canto" :   voice part, verse form, section, poem, bel canto, subdivision



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