"Cowper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have tried. Byron wrote letters. So did Cowper. For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communications of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... his letters, the poet Cowper says: 'The ballad is a species of poetry, I believe, peculiar to this country.... Simplicity and ease are its proper characteristics.' Here we have one of the earliest attempts to define the modern meaning of a 'ballad.' Centuries ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... not make anything either of Byron or Cowper; and he did not even try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil which his father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the small copperplates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion to him. Afterwards he read Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," and he formed ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... know, except The Home Book of Verse. Here in nearly 900 pages are specimens of light verse from Chaucer to Chesterton. Modern writers, such as Bert Leston Taylor and Don Marquis, share the pages with Robert Herrick and William Cowper, Charles Lamb and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Verses whimsical, satiric, narrative, punning—there is no conceivable variety overlooked by Miss Wells in what was so evidently a labour of love as well as of the most careful industry, an industry directed ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... William Cullen Bryant, like those of all young poets, were colored by the books which he read. Among these were the works of Pope, as I have already intimated, and, no doubt, the works of Cowper and Thomson. The latter, if they were in the library of Dr. Bryant, do not appear to have impressed his son at this time; nor, indeed, does any English poet except Pope, so far as we can judge from his contributions to the Hampshire Gazette, which were continued ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... above the wicket of the prison in the seignorial mansion of Tourville, Sileto et spera; in Ireland, beneath the armorial bearings which surmount the grand door to Fortescue Castle, Forte scutum, salus ducum; in England, over the principal entrance to the hospitable mansion of the Earls Cowper: Tuum est. At that time ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... in his public readings, first brought into notice the humorous tale of John Gilpin, which he recited with such spirit and comic effect that it drew public attention to the poems of Cowper in general, which, excellent as they are, particularly The Task, were but little known at the time, though they are now justly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... difference in the general progress of affairs. The political power was now chiefly in the hands of responsible Ministers, and without their advice the Governor could do nothing. The Ministry of the period—headed by Charles Cowper and John Robertson—prepared a bill to alter the regulations for the sale of land, and to give to the poor man an opportunity of obtaining a small farm on easy terms. Any person who declared his readiness to live on his land, and to cultivate it, was to be ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... High. If we must betake ourselves to such symbols, let us have those which inspire lofty thoughts. What is there in these grotesque idols to help us in rising to the living God? Hindus who know English have quoted Cowper's address to his mother on getting her picture, "Oh that those lips had language," and we have been asked, "Was not Cowper helped in realizing his mother when looking at her picture?" To which there is the obvious reply, "Cowper's mother was truly represented. Is God truly ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... a bull.] [GREEK HERE] Homer Il. xvii 522 As when some vig'rous youth with sharpen'd axe A pastur'd bullock smites behind the horns And hews the muscle through; he, at the stroke Springs forth and falls. Cowper's Translation. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... afternoon, swinging in my hammock in the grove reading a book of poetry, I came across those beautiful verses by Cowper, entitled, "Alexander Selkirk," and could not but think how true they were to my own lot in many points; in fact, few persons reading the poem could appreciate it as I did in my solitude, with nought but the sea and sky with their teeming ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... inking appliances were devised and patented, the most notable of which were those of Rutt, Bacon, Cowper, Applegath, and Napier, but the mechanical imperfections of these presses unfitted them for the better ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... Regent-street china-shop to all the dingy chefs-d'oeuvre of a Wedgwood, or the quaint shepherds and shepherdesses of Chelsea. As for books, were there not four or five resplendent volumes primly disposed on one of the tables; an illustrated edition of Cowper's lively and thrilling poems; a volume of Rambles in Scotland, with copper-plate engravings of "Melrose by night," and Glasgow Cathedral, and Ben Nevis, and other scenic and architectural glories of North Britain; a couple of volumes of Punch, and an illustrated "Vicar ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... institutions adopted for the common welfare, by the representatives of a free people. Turn to any of the works which describe the manners of the age, from the works of Richardson or Fielding, to the bitter satire of Churchill and the melancholy remonstrances of Cowper, and you are struck with the delineation of a state and manners, and a tone of feeling which, in the present day, appears scarcely credible. "'Sdeath, madam, do you threaten me with the law?" says Lovelace ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... February Mr. Forster introduced the Elementary Education Act. It passed the second reading without a division. In Committee the Cowper-Temple Clause ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... and forms a striking contrast to the social hero, the triumphant dialectician of Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, and Madame D'Arblay. Yet it is relieved by its inherent humanity, its fellowship and feeling. Dr. Johnson's piety is delightfully full of human nature—far too full to please the poet Cowper, who wrote of the Prayers ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... end, if he could have continued his annual plunder. But Swift, I suppose, did not yet know what he has since written, that a commission was drawn which would have appointed him General for life, had it not become ineffectual by the resolution of Lord Cowper, who refused ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... Cowper, but I'm not sure," answered Hester. "It can't be quite true though. I suspect man has more to do with the unmaking than the making of either. We have reason to be glad he has not come near enough to us yet to destroy either our river ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... London Mathematical Society is discussed by Mrs. De Morgan in her Memoir (p. 281). The idea came from a conversation between her brilliant son, George Campbell De Morgan, and his friend Arthur Cowper Ranyard in 1864. The meeting of organization was held on Nov. 7, 1864, with Professor De Morgan in the chair, and the first regular ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... discipline and attainment. Still, I cannot help being struck with an impression that Mr. Huxley appears to cite these terms of Micah as if they reduced the work of religion from a difficult to an easy program. But look at them again. Examine them well. They are, in truth, in Cowper's words: ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... months, my strength strongly returning, though the weather has been very uncertain. What with the interruption occasioned by the cholera and other inconveniences, I have not done much. I have sent home only the letters by L.L. Stuart and three volumes of the Siege of Malta. I sent them by Lord Cowper's son—Mr. Cowper returning, his leave being out—and two chests of books by the Messrs. Turner, Malta, who are to put them on board a vessel, to be forwarded to Mr. Cadell through Whittaker. I have hopes they will ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... district, and sent forth stirring appeals on subjects of social reformation and agricultural improvement. Devoted to his duties as a journalist, he continued to cherish his literary enthusiasm. In 1817 he published an edition of Cowper, with an elegant memoir of the poet's life. "The Scrap-Book," a work of selections and original contributions in prose and verse, appeared in 1820, and was speedily followed by a second volume. In 1823 he composed a memoir of Goldsmith for an edition of the "Vicar ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... bald men in the history of human society, and this list has grown until it includes the names of thousands, representing every profession and vocation. Homer, Socrates, Confucius, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Pliny, Maecenas, Julius Caesar, Horace, Shakespeare, Bacon, Napoleon Bonaparte, Dante, Pope, Cowper, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Israel Putnam, John Quincy Adams, Patrick Henry—these geniuses all were bald. But the baldest of all was the philosopher Hobbes, of whom the revered John Aubrey has recorded that "he was very bald, yet within dore he used ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... will be devoutly thankful. If we have gotten any good from the life which he lived before us, we can show it by the growing warmth and completeness of our own enlistment in the same cause. Cries Mrs. Browning at Cowper's grave: ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... Cowper has drawn a capital picture of the ease and perfection with which the clownish chrysalis may be metamorphosed into the scarlet moth of war. Catch the animal young, and you may turn him into any shape you ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... day, and give over all his time to a perusal of the recognized classics of English verse, the result would immediately be reflected in his own compositions. As yet, he claims to be independent of scholarly tradition, but we must remind him of the Latin epigram of Mr. Owen, which Mr. Cowper thus translated ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Establishment in the town, and who condescended to take a Private View with eight chosen young ladies, to be quite startling from their extreme correctness. Mr Pitt in a nightcap and bedgown, and without his boots, represented the poet Cowper with perfect exactness; and Mary Queen of Scots in a dark wig, white shirt-collar, and male attire, was such a complete image of Lord Byron that the young ladies quite screamed when they saw it. Miss Monflathers, however, rebuked ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... convention and the public meeting in the evening, over which Mrs. Daniels presided. Twenty-four leagues were reported, largely the fruit of the organization work done during the year by Mrs. Mary O. Cowper of Durham, who had the assistance of Miss Mary E. Pidgeon, a national organizer. During the year a series of related suffrage papers were prepared by members of the Greensboro league and distributed by the State league among the different branches. Miss Weil was continued as president. Reports ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... favour. Two translators, Smart and Boscawen, have rendered the whole, or nearly the whole of these poems in that and no other way: Francis occasionally adopts it, though he generally uses the longer measure: Swift and Pope, as every one knows, employ it in three or four of their imitations: Cowper, in his original poems perhaps the greatest master we have of the Horatian style, translates the only two satires he has attempted in the shorter form: Mr. Martin uses it as often as he uses the heroic: perhaps Mr. ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... had been seen in England, was made a great deal of by people of all ranks. He was introduced to George the Third, who settled on him a pension while he remained in England. He had his portrait painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Cowper mentions him in one of his poems, while he was constantly in the society of Dr Johnson, Madame d'Arblay, Sir Joseph Banks, Dr Burney, Lord Sandwich, Lord Mulgrave, Granville Sharpe, and many other illustrious persons. The power of ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... translated, transmuted, and then answered till our cup was too full; sweet changed to bitter, and bitter changed to sweet, so wonderfully, so graciously, and so often, that words fail us, and we can only now laugh and now weep over it all. Poor Cowper knew something ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... more distressing than the sight of human misery when we are unable to silence it, I returned as speedily as possible to Bruxelles with Cowper's lines in my head: ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... the loop-holes of retreat To peep at such a world; to see the stir Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd." —Cowper ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... have converted his vaulting Pegasus into a rocking-horse. Read any other blank verse but Milton's,—Thomson's, Young's, Cowper's, Wordsworth's,—and it will be found, from the want of the same insight into "the hidden soul of harmony," ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... exactly that, even in default of a special stimulus, there need be no surprise at the rapidity of his composition after he had fairly begun to move forward with it. Dryden, it may be remembered, was so held and fascinated by his 'Alexander's Feast' that he wrote it off in a night. Cowper had a similar experience with 'John Gilpin,' and Burns's powerful dramatic tale, 'Tam O'Shanter,' was produced with great ease and rapidity. De Quincey records that, in his own case, his very best ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... of your curious readers would oblige me with a little information concerning the personage mentioned in these lines of Cowper:— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... poet Cowper who sang of domestic happiness as the only bliss that has survived the Fall. One of the burning and unsolved questions of to-day is,—will it survive the twentieth century? Will it survive rapid transit and bridge ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... much from William Cowper. His poems—graceful always, and often devout even when playful—have few amongst them that are expressly religious, while the best of his hymns are known to every reader of such. Born in 1731, he was greatly influenced by the narrow theology that prevailed in his circle; and most of his hymns ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... present time. Chaucer is anterior; and on other grounds, too, he cannot well be brought into the comparison. But taking the roll of our chief poetical names, besides Shakespeare and Milton, from the age of Elizabeth downwards, and going through it,—Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, Keats (I mention those only who are dead),—I think it certain that Wordsworth's name deserves to stand, and will finally stand, above them all. Several of the poets named have gifts and excellences ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... since that there lived on the Borders a jolly, rattling horse-cowper, who was remarkable for a reckless and fearless temper, which made him much admired, and a little dreaded, amongst his neighbours. One moonlight night, as he rode over Bowden Moor, on the west side of ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... of names of those educated at Westminster includes Dryden, Bishop Atterbury, Cowley, Warren Hastings, Gibbon, Thomas Cowper, Charles Wesley, Lord John Russell, and many others well known wherever the English ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... which was Cowper's fondest memory of his mother, and which should be perpetually flowing out from the hearts of all mothers toward all children. These poor children had never known ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Memory. The only one who, so far as I have seen, has given any idea of his little cavilling style, is Mrs. Trench in her Letters; her excellent Letters, so far as I can see and judge, next best to Walpole and Cowper in our Language. . ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... of the hymns of the church but of many poems that are not suitable for singing. English poetry is especially rich in meditative and devotional elements, and of no period has this been more true than of the nineteenth century. Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, on the other side of the sea, with Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Lanier, Sill and Gilder on this side—these and many others—have made most precious additions to our store of religious poetry. The century ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... was, it appears, published in two parts, making three small duodecimo volumes. The price, bound, was six shillings. There was no author's name; but it was said to be "by E.M." (i.e. Edgeworth, Maria), and the publisher was Cowper's Dissenter publisher, Joseph Johnson of No. 72, St. Paul's Churchyard. Part I. contained "The Little Dog Trusty; or, The Liar and the Boy of Truth"; "The Orange Man; or, the Honest Boy and the Thief"; "Lazy Lawrence"; ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... worn since the day when the decision of Mr. Flint had separated him from his friend. When risen, he searched in a white wooden box, which stood at the foot of his bed, and contained his few possessions. He drew thence a pair of sempstress's scissors. These, with an odd volume of Cowper's poems, were all that remained to him of the woman he had loved—of the mother of his child—of his happy little home of other days. Two articles, totally useless to Sam; the scissors could only be of service to a woman—the book to a lettered ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... we have not yet thoroughly shaken off the notion that poison is the natural food of disease, as wholesome aliment is the support of health. Cowper's lines, in "The Task," show the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... imitative school began to prove too much. If all the insipid verses which they wrote were poetry, what was the use of writing poetry at all? A reaction succeeded, which asserted that poetry depends on emotion and not on polish; that it consists precisely in those things which frigid imitators lack. Cowper, Burns, and Crabbe, (especially in his Sir Eustace Grey), had preceded Wordsworth as leaders of this reaction. But they had acted half unconsciously, or had even at times themselves attempted to copy the very ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... not? de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis [Lat]. jumbled, confused, mixed up, discordant; inharmonious, unmatched, unrelated, nonuniform. omniform[obs3], omnigenous[obs3], omnifarious[obs3]; protean (form) 240. Phr. "harmoniously confused" [Pope]; " variety's the very spice of life" [Cowper]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Charles, Frances Ridley Havergal, Anna Letitia Waring, Jean Ingelow, Adelaide Anne Procter, Mme. Guyon, Theodore Monod, Matthew Arnold, Edwin Arnold, William Shakespeare, John Milton, George Gordon Byron, Robert Burns, William Cowper, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Francis Quarles, Frederick W. Faber, John Keble, Charles Kingsley, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, John Gay, Edward Young, Thomas Moore, John Newton, John Bunyan, H. Kirke White, Horatius Bonar, James Montgomery, ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... the same period, the time when he was yet in the early twenties of his age, Lamb shows himself an apt disciple of Cowper (to whom, by the way, he addressed a brief poem in this form "On His Recovery from an Indisposition"). These, however, were but the steps of a born writer learning his craft by more or less conscious imitation, and Lamb was not long in finding his feet and indicating his peculiar individuality. ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... Kimball's Heaven. Valuable Works on Missions. Haven's Mental Philosophy. Buchanan's Modern Atheism. Cruden's Condensed Concordance. Eadie's Analytical Concordance. The Psalmist: a Collection of Hymns. Valuable School Books. Works for Sabbath Schools. Memoir of Amos Lawrence. Poetical Works of Milton, Cowper, Scott. Elegant Miniature Volumes. Arvine's Cyclopaedia of Anecdotes. Ripley's Notes on Gospels, Acts, and Romans. Sprague's European Celebrities. Marsh's Camel and the Hallig. Roget's Thesaurus of English ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... more, please. Nations, kindreds, and peoples are individuals in mass; and here the existence of an overlooked boiling-point is the one thing that makes history interesting. Cowper puts on paper a fine breezy English contempt for the submissiveness and ultra-royalism of the pre-Revolutionary French—and lives to wonder at the course of events. Macaulay's diction rolls like the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... language!" cried Cowper. "Oh, that those lovely figures would combine anew—change their light—do anything, anything!" cries the aesthete after awhile. "Oh, that the wind would rise upon that glorious sea; the summer green would fade to autumn yellow; that night would ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... gotten away down east. I had rode a little ways on the outside of Cowper's wheel. We had all got out of the carriage, in front of uncle's house, went up to the door and knocked and all went in. I asked if Mr. Light lived there. Uncle said he was the man. Aunt brought chairs for the ladies and they sat down. She asked them if they would take off their things, they ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... choose evil rather than good; hence, as foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, the rod of correction must be used to drive them from it. He must be restrained, corrected, educated under law. In the language of Cowper— ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... his annual plunder. But Swift, I suppose, did not yet know what he has since written, that a commission was drawn which would have appointed him general for life, had it not become ineffectual by the resolution of lord Cowper, who ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... had been well received in England, where all such plots—their name was legion—had always been fostered; he was very young, and he risked everything. Only his method was new—that of strict secrecy. He had previously spoken to Mr. Cowper, minister of Perth, in a general way, about the failure of plots for lack of deep secrecy, and through the admission of too many confederates. Cowper told this to Spottiswoode, at Falkland. Mr. Rhynd, Gowrie's tutor, told Cowper and the Comptroller, 'unrequired' (not under torture, nor ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... been in the habit of talking about the good old times of their ancestors, and the degeneracy of their contemporaries. This is in general merely a cant. But in 1756 it was something more. At this time appeared Brown's Estimate, a book now remembered only by the allusions in Cowper's Table Talk and in Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace. It was universally read, admired, and believed. The author fully convinced his readers that they were a race of cowards and scoundrels; that nothing could save them; that they were on the point of being ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... farthing candles to comfort us, while these very resources keep us back from seeking the radical remedy. How easy it is to write or tell the diagnosis of such a case! but to be reconciled to the true mode of treatment, the prognosis, as doctors say, there is the difficulty, while I doubt not Cowper ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... neck or nought, Away went hat and wig; He little dreamt, when he set out, Of running such a rig. —COWPER. ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... glory to injustice, heroism to the assassins of the champions of liberty, or wisdom to the mischievous prejudices of weak princes; and who, by asserting in every line the moral dignity of his art, became an example of poetical renown, which has been ably followed by Glover, Akenside, Cowper, Robinson, Burns, Barlow, Barbauld, Wolcot, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... "James's Powder". This was a famous patent panacea, invented by Johnson's Lichfield townsman, Dr. Robert James of the 'Medicinal Dictionary'. It was sold by John Newbery, and had an extraordinary vogue. The King dosed Princess Elizabeth with it; Fielding, Gray, and Cowper all swore by it, and Horace Walpole, who wished to try it upon Mme. du Deffand 'in extremis', said he should use it if the house were on fire. William Hawes, the Strand apothecary who attended Goldsmith, wrote an interesting ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... enter on my list of friends, (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility), the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. COWPER. ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... racy brogue. "That's just what I should have had to listen to all the morning but for my thinking of that album, which I'm glad has amused you both, my dears, so well. Ah, children, children, there's nothing like having something to do. I'll tell you something one of the poets, Cowper I think, has written about this in his ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Cowper, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and the many other poets who have contributed to superstitious lore, would swell this portion of our work (The Poets and Superstition) to an undue proportion; and therefore we take leave of the poets, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... Critics would call the language prosaic; the fact is, it would be bad prose, so bad, that it is scarcely worse in metre. The epithet 'church-going' applied to a bell, and that by so chaste a writer as Cowper, is an instance of the strange abuses which Poets have introduced into their language, till they and their Readers take them as matters of course, if they do not single them out expressly as objects of admiration. The two lines 'Ne'er sighed at the sound,' &c., ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... that downpressed mood of despair and reprobation, which we saw in his youth, but the outcome of pre-eminent thoughtful gentleness, affections too keen and fine? It is the course such men as the poor Poet Cowper fall into. Luther to a slight observer might have seemed a timid, weak man; modesty, affectionate shrinking tenderness the chief distinction of him. It is a noble valour which is roused in a heart like this, once stirred-up into ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... at winter when we hear The grim old churl about our dwellings rave: Thou, from that "ruler of the inverted year," Shalt pluck the knotty sceptre Cowper gave, And pull him from his sledge, and drag him in, And melt the ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... later on. When Armstrong brings in an apostrophe to the Naiads, it is in the course of a Poetical Essay on the Art of Preserving Health. And again, when Cowper stirs himself to intone an Ode to Apollo, it is in the same ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... perhaps more sarcastic and more witty; Cowper undoubtedly more tender and more gentle; but Lady Mary had qualities all her own. She had powers of observation and the gift of description, which qualities are especially to be remarked in the letters she wrote when abroad with her husband on his Mission to the Porte. She had an ironic wit which ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... might have the full sunlight. So cheery a nature must have sunshine. Here life went on quietly and happy. Many papers and books were on her table, and she read carefully and widely. She loved especially Milton and Cowper. Arnold's Light of Asia was a great favorite in later years. The papers were sent to hospitals and infirmaries, that no good reading might be lost. She liked to read aloud; and if others were busy, she would copy extracts to read to them ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... by William Cowper in the year 1782, when Lady Austin was lodging in the Vicarage at Olney, and spent every evening with Cowper and Mrs. Unwin, cheering Cowper greatly by her liveliness. One evening she told the story of John Gilpin's ride in a way that tickled the poet's ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... relict of the worthy editor of the Paston Letters. It is better known in literary history as the last resting-place of a sad and unquiet spirit, escaped from a world in which it had known nought but sorrow, of "England's sweetest and most pious bard," William Cowper. But Destiny was weaving a robuster thread to connect East Dereham with literature, for George Borrow {1} was born there on July 5th, 1803, and, nomad though he was, the place was always dear to his ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence—French and English—the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters, and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray, and Cowper—belong wholly to it; and 'Lady Mary'—our most famous she-ditto—belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does Chesterfield, whom some not bad judges would put not far if at all below the three men just mentioned. The rise of the novel in this century is hardly more ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... degradation are but an outgrowth of your status in the Bible. When you express your aversion, based on a blind feeling of reverence in which reason has no control, to the revision of the Scriptures, you do but echo Cowper, who, when asked to read Paine's "Rights of Man," exclaimed "No man shall convince me that I am improperly governed while I feel ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... learn how in their carpentry class at school, and they did them to surprise me on my birthday. I keep all my books here. Father is giving me the poets now as Christmas presents. I have Longfellow and Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and I expect it will be either Cowper or Goldsmith next time. This is my paint-box. I daren't leave it in the schoolroom for fear of the little ones getting hold of it. Isn't it a beauty? Miss Johnson, our governess, gave it to me as a prize for passing the ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... weather for transplanting, as Master Gridley used to say. Susan had a fluent natural gift for tears, as Clement well knew, after the exercise of which she used to brighten up like the rose which had been washed, just washed in a shower, mentioned by Cowper. ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the birthplace of that William Enfield, whose 'Speaker' was the terror and delight of more than one generation of England's ingenuous youth. Lord Chancellor Thurlow, of the rugged eyebrows and the savage look, and fellow-clerk with the poet Cowper, was born at Ashfield, an obscure village not far off. Robert Bloomfield, who wrote the 'Farmer's Boy,' came from Honington, where his mother kept a village school, and where he became a shoemaker. Capel Loft, an amiable gentleman ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... Cambridge, remembered as having written the “New Bath Guide,” and as having been deemed worthy a cenotaph in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, and William Hayley, appear to have been among the best-known to fame at “the fanciful and romantic institution at Bath-Easton.” The latter was a friend of Cowper, Romney and Southey, and published the lives of the two former. In “English Bards and ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... passage from Cowper that my sister used to quote to us, because, she said, she often repeated it to herself, and found that ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... near to the Most High God as a heavenly father, rich in mercy to all them that call upon him. True, indeed, it is that "all have sinned," but a "new and living way" is provided whereby we may "draw near with boldness to a throne of grace to obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need." Cowper never penned a ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... of the chapter I find many pages of information concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli—a fact which shows that into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is shoveled every year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... which are nine hundred and eighty-eight in number, are selected from the great mass of hymn-writers; although Watts and the Wesleys furnish the foundation, and the materials of the superstructure are largely drawn from Doddridge, Cowper, Toplady, Montgomery, and others of kindred spirit, yet many beautiful things have been added from the later religious poetry, which are no less fervid in feeling, while less pronounced in doctrinal expression. These hymns are arranged in judicious general divisions, which are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... did Dr. Weatherby, the great authority in all that concerned the health of the neighborhood, lift up his voice against the mild feminine dram-drinking of these modern days, denouncing it in no measured terms: the ladies of Oldfield listened incredulously, and, softly quoting Cowper's lines as to the "cup that cheers and not inebriates," still presided over their dainty little tea-tables, and vied with one another in the beauty of their china and the flavor of their ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... through the reading she had to do before her return to town. Now there were only the well-bound little-read English Classics, which were weeded out of her father's library to fill up the small book-shelves in the drawing-room. Thomson's Seasons, Hayley's Cowper, Middleton's Cicero, were by far the lightest, newest, and most amusing. The book-shelves did not afford much resource. Margaret told her mother every particular of her London life, to all of which Mrs. Hale listened with interest, sometimes amused ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... comes— Yet careless what he brings; his one concern Is to conduct it to the destined inn; And having dropp'd the expected bag, pass on—— To him indifferent whether grief or joy." COWPER: Description ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Diana. The doctor smiled at her, and finished his oyster. Brave child! Had that odious young woman been behaving in character that morning? He would like to have the dealing with her! As for Diana, her face reminded him of Cowper's rose "just washed by a shower"—delicately fresh—yet eloquent of some past storm.—Good Heavens! Where was that fellow Marsham? Philandering with politics?—when there was ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... carried me through my facts, and, being repeated deliberately, with long intervals, often eked out the two first bells. Then came the ten commandments; the thirty-ninth chapter of Job, and a few other passages from Scripture. The next in the order, that I never varied from, came Cowper's Castaway, which was a great favorite with me; the solemn measure and gloomy character of which, as well as the incident that it was founded upon, made it well suited to a lonely watch at sea. Then his lines to Mary, his address to the jackdaw, and a short extract ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... impatience, her longings to be with them, were such as to bring a line or two of Cowper's Tirocinium for ever before her. "With what intense desire she wants her home," was continually on her tongue, as the truest description of a yearning which she could not suppose any schoolboy's ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Gilpin."—It happened one afternoon, in those years when Cowper's accomplished friend, Lady Austen, made a part of his little evening circle, that she observed him sinking into increased dejection. It was her custom, on these occasions, to try all the resources of her ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... milky fluid of the consistency of mucus. It is secreted by the testicles and is intermixed with the fluids secreted by the prostate and by Cowper's glands. Its fertilizing property depends on the presence of minute bodies, termed spermatozoa. These consist of little polliwig-shaped bodies (Fig. 3), having large heads and long filaments or tails. Under the microscope these little ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... when he left in 1788. Beyond these facts, Winchester seems to retain no impressions of her brilliant son, in this respect contrasting strangely with other Public Schools. Westminster knows all about Cowper—and a sorry tale it is. Canning left an ineffaceable mark on Eton. Harrow abounds in traditions, oral and written, of Sheridan and Byron, Peel and Palmerston. But Winchester is silent ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... Governor Bragg, of our State, just prior to the war, and who was afterwards president of our leading life insurance company, a gentleman of high character, and of the best memory, was present at the time that Johnson made the address from which you quote the rumor. Mr. Cowper wrote an article for The News and Observer, giving the story and relating that Johnson said that "he was glad to come to Raleigh to erect a tablet to his father." The truth is that while his father was a man of little or no education, he held ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... artificial thing, with no more originality in it than there would be in a picture a hundred times copied, the copyists never reverting to the original. You cannot look into this eighteenth century poetry, excepting, of course, a great proportion of the poetry of Cowper and Thompson, without being struck with the sort of agreement that nothing should be said naturally. A certain set form and mode was employed for saying things that ought never to have been said twice in the same way. Wordsworth resolved to go back to the root of the thing, to the natural ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... departed friend. Dear me! Labuntur anni, indeed!" His fig tree, which some one else had planted, his laburnum—a slip from one at Rickmansworth, the seat of the late Lord Mayor Burgess—a catalpa seedling from Panshanger, which the late Lady Cowper did him the honour to present with her own hands: as Sanchia said afterwards to Melot, his garden was rather like a cemetery ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... close of the sixteenth, and Methodists at the close of the eighteenth. Doubtless the vintners and the shipmen of Chaucer's day, the patrons and purveyors of the playhouse in Ben Jonson's, the fox-hunting squires and town wits of Cowper's, like their successors after them, were not specially anxious to distinguish nicely between more or less abominable varieties of saintliness. Hence, when Master Harry Bailly's tremendous oaths produce the gentlest of protests from the "Parson," the jovial "Host" incontinently ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... horses.' But these are no recreations for me. True they are healthy to the body; but not to the morals. This I say confidently, although some of my readers may smile, and call it an affectation of sensibility. Yet with Cowper, ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... all my fault," continued Phoebe; "and if anybody is to go to prison, you ought to send me. I had been reading about Cowper's hares, and I wanted a young hare to tame: I took a fancy for one, and told poor Jesse! And to think of his going to ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... actively and unremittingly on his course of intellectual training. While a boy he had become familiar, under the guidance of his father, with the classics of Addison, Johnson, Swift, Cowper, and Pope, and he now plunged into the domain of history. He had begun at Kenyon to make flanking forays into the fields of historic investigation which lay so invitingly on each side of the regular march of his college course. As he acquired more information and ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... of the eunuchs and of Velutti, mentioned by Mondat, and consisted of an azooespermic discharge, made up mainly from the secretion of the seminal vesicles, the accessory glands of the urethra, the prostate, and Cowper's glands, as well as the discharge from the secretory glands distributed along the course of the urethral mucous membrane. Some of the cases of this form of impotence have exhibited wonderful copulating desire and power of endurance, and, even if unfecundating, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Even their love of nature, though thoroughly genuine as far as it went, did not imply that minute and exact knowledge of her charms which characterizes some of our best British poets. They had no Thompson or Cowper. Their country seats were richer in architectural than floral beauty. Tully's Tuscan Villa, so fondly and minutely described by the proprietor himself, would appear to little advantage in the eyes of a true worshipper of Flora, if compared with ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Domestic, Clerical, and Literary; in which are included letters of Charles II, Cromwell, Fairfax, Edgecumbe, Macaulay, Wolcot, Opie, Whitaker, Gibbon, Buller, Courtenay, Moore, Downman, Drewe, Seward, Darwin, Cowper, Hayley, Hardinge, Sir Walter Scott, and other distinguished characters. ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... we suspect oftener purchased than read; and his 'Seasons' are not unfrequently spoken of with admiration by those who know little of them but the episodes. The chief interest of the 'Task' is to be sought for in other sources than its descriptions, notwithstanding the curiosa felicitas of Cowper's diction. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... this last passage, it is worthy of note that in the year 1584, strange news came out of Somersetshire, entitled "A Dreadful Discourse of the Dispossessing of one Margaret Cowper, at Ditchet, from a Devil in the ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... side. He afterwards moved to the corner of Yates and Government, where the B. C. Market now does business. The second is the store of Webster and Co., Yates Street, the building now occupied by Bissinger and Co., hide dealers. Mr. Jesse Cowper, who was a resident of Menzies Street, James Bay, was a partner in the firm, and a cousin of the Websters, and after many years' connection with the concern retired to enjoy the results of his success in this business. He ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... to back the Past Generation against the Present Generation, at any feat the Present Generation chooses, and give the long odds. Say Poetry. Well, we bring to the scratch a few champions—such as, Beattie, Cowper, Crabbe, Rogers, Bowles, Burns, Baillie, Campbell, Graham, Montgomery, Scott, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hunt, Hogg, Shelley, Keates, Pollok, Cunningham, Bloomfield, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... offended at the Coronation with the ladies that did walk, than with those that walked out of their place; yet I was not so perilously angry as my Lady Cowper, who refused to set a foot with my Lady Macclesfield; and when she was at last obliged to associate with her, set out on a round trot, as if she designed to prove the antiquity of her family by marching as ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... and many on some pages, have—contrary to all good usage—the superfluous eleventh syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a weakness. Can it be that Mr. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... concerning the "Vision and the Faculty divine," when employed on divine subjects, have arisen within us, on reading—which we have often done with delight—"The Christian Year," so full of Christian poetry of the purest character. Mr Keble is a poet whom Cowper himself would have loved—for in him piety inspires genius, and fancy and feeling are celestialised by religion. We peruse his book in a tone and temper of spirit similar to that which is breathed ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... new ministers arrived from St. Paul's; the chief of whom in station, as in talent, is Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva. According to the opinion entertained of him by the people here, I should say that Cowper had described ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... Wordsworth's days people were sometimes touched by dawn or sunset. The morning cheered, the moon lent pathos and sentiment, and the stars awoke unanswerable interrogations in Cowfold, although it knew no poetry, save Dr. Watts, Pollok's Course of Time, and here and there a little of Cowper. Under the avenue, too, whose slender columns, in triple rows on either side, rose to an immense height, and met in a roof overhead with all the grace of cathedral stone, and without its superincumbent weight and imprisonment—a roof that was not impervious to the sunlight, ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... of evening. And ever as it made a motion onwards, it found the nation more civilized, (else the change would not have been effected,) and raised them to a still higher civilization. The next relay on that line of road, the next repeating frigate, is Cowper in his poem on Conversation. He speaks of four o'clock as still the elegant hour for dinner—the hour for the lautiores and the lepidi homines. Now this was written about 1780, or a little earlier; perhaps, therefore, just one generation after Pope's Lady Suffolk. But then Cowper ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... arrived at the Antilles with twelve ships, was joined by Hood, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, restored the British flag to its proper place at sea. Nearer home, Kempenfeldt, the admiral whose tragic end is famous in Cowper's verse, dealt the enemy a severe blow. He was sent, in December, 1781, with only twelve ships to intercept a French fleet consisting, as the admiralty knew, or ought to have known, of seventeen ships with a convoy bound for ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... not appear in the pedigrees of the Clinche or Clench family of Bealings and Holbrook, co. Suffolk, in the Heralds' Visitations, in the British Museum. His daughter married Roger Donne, Esq., of Ludham, co. Norfolk, and was the maternal grandmother of the poet Cowper. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... passages from the Spectator, very excellent articles from the Rambler, highly interesting in their day no doubt, but which lose some of their point after an interval of nearly a century; or, worse than all, Pope's "Homer" or Cowper's "Task," running the lines into each other, so as to avoid what she called "the sing-song of the rhymes," till the poet's effusions sounded like the most extraordinary prose, cut into lengths, as we ladies should say, for no earthly purpose but to make nonsense of the whole thing. ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... self-condemnation as evidence of truth; for what man of moral feeling would proclaim that he had been an habitual liar, except conscious that the avowal was incumbent on him to substantiate the truth? This was done by Bunyan, the author of the Pilgrim's Progress, and by Cowper, the truly Christian poet:—they are respected accordingly. But in these narratives, except a little cant in Ward's, we find nothing approaching to a sense of shame or remorse. Vidocq, like Homer's Ulysses, has a lie ready for every occasion, and appears, like that hero, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various |
