"Elegy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he could distinguish by their countenances the different kinds of poetry in which they exercised the muse. He saw Tragedy conspicuous in a grave solemnity of regard; Satire louring in a frown of envy and discontent; Elegy whining in a funeral aspect; Pastoral dozing in a most insipid languor of face; Ode-writing delineated in a distracted stare; and Epigram squinting with a pert sneer. Perhaps our hero refined too much in his penetration, when he affirmed, that, over and above these discoveries, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... The LYRIC ELEGY which concludes this little Collection is, I think, animated and pathetic in no common degree. On the Merits of VACCINE INOCULATION I do not think myself qualify'd to offer an opinion. Great Doubts have been entertain'd ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... scholars, and the whole yelling mass precipitated, many of them headlong, among the snow. Well do we know the fire-eyed Poet pedagogue, who, more outrageous than Apollo, has "ravished all the Nine." Ode, elegy, epic, tragedy, or farce—all come alike to him; and of all the bards we have ever known—and the sum total cannot be under a thousand—he alone, judging from the cock and the squint of his eye, labours under the blessing ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... with much liveliness a little Gaelic song, the burlesque elegy of a countryman on the loss of his cow, the comic tones of which, though he did not understand the language, made Waverley laugh more than once. [Footnote: This ancient Gaelic ditty is still well known, both in the Highlands and in Ireland ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... cried I, then let us have it: where's little Dick? let him up with it boldly.'—'My brother Dick,' cried Bill my youngest, 'is just gone out with sister Livy; but Mr Williams has taught me two songs, and I'll sing them for you, pappa. Which song do you chuse, the Dying Swan, or the Elegy on the death of a mad dog?' 'The elegy, child, by all means,' said I, 'I never heard that yet; and Deborah, my life, grief you know is dry, let us have a bottle of the best gooseberry wine, to keep up our spirits. I have wept so much at ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... Epic and Elegy.—Epic poetry narrates in grand style the achievements of heroes—the poet telling the story as if present. It is simple in construction and uniform in meter, yet it admits of the dialogue and the episode, and though not enforcing a moral ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... exercising myself in writing, improving my style, arranging my thoughts, and enabling myself to communicate the knowledge I might amass. Of sermons I had written some dozens; and the most arduous of the efforts of poetry had been attempted by me; from the elegy to the epic poem, each had suffered my attacks. And, though I myself was not so well satisfied with my performances as to complete these daring labours, yet, I had so far familiarised myself to a selection of words, and phrases, as to be able to compose with much ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... you and flattery falls sweet on your ear, and you are in danger of forgetting the final end of all ambition read "Grays Elegy." ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... the want. The reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could not fail, if he had any thoughts at all, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as a specimen of Sir John Denham's Poetry, his Elegy on his much loved and admired friend Mr. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... which Franklin exercised his skill in repairing, and a small worn-out font of type. Keimer himself, who seems to have been a grotesque compound of knave and crank, was engaged at once in composing and setting up in type an elegy on the death of a prominent young man. He is the only poet to my knowledge who ever used the composition-stick instead of a pen for the vehicle of inspiration. The elegy may still be read in Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia, and on perusing it we may well ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... himself almost drunk, was seized with the notion of satirizing bald pates and branded rascals, but when he had exhausted his chilly wit, he returned at last to his poetry and recited this little elegy upon hair: ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... clear give variety to the sameness of the English words. —Gray, in the Elegy, has ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... elegy, sir, fairly enough; I find no fault with your interpretation. What I mean is this: Are you not ashamed to be ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... yarahui or mournful elegy, of which there are so many in the Quichua language. The singers of them were known ...
— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham
... perhaps no funeral was ever so poetically attended. Dryden, indeed, as a man discountenanced and deprived, was silent; but scarcely any other maker of verses omitted to bring his tribute of tuneful sorrow. An emulation of elegy was universal. Maria's praise was not confined to the English language, but fills a great part ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... to all educated men, such as the fact that the alphabet was invented by Mercury, who designed the letters from figures made in their flight by the cranes of Strymon. Though so ardent a lover, he had composed no lyric or elegy in Veranilda's honour; his last poetical effort was made in his sixteenth year, when, to his own joy, and to the admiration of his friends, he wrote a distich, the verses of which read the same whether you began from the left hand or the right. Nowadays ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... with Horace, who addressed to him Od. i. 33 and Ep. i. 4. Horace was doubtless attracted by the frank nature of Tibullus (Ep. i. 4, 1, 'Albi, nostrorum sermonum candide iudex'), and by the community of taste which led them both to imitate the classical Ionic rather than the Alexandrian elegy. Horace corroborates the statement of Life i. ('insignis forma cultuque corporis observabilis') that Tibullus had a ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... that Shakespeare wrote the line "that wreathes its old fantastic roots so high." This he said because he had been kept in ignorance by Priests; or, perhaps, because he thought craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious and forgotten rhyme called 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'. Anyhow, that orthodox gentleman made a howling error; and received some twenty-five letters and post-cards from kind correspondents who pointed out ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... other elegy is shorter and less striking in conception, but gives a similar impression of the importance assigned to Louis de Berquin's ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... suffered a heavier fate. The latter class, consisting of his commentary on his consulship and his history of his own times, is altogether lost. Of the former, which consisted of the heroic poems Halcyone, Limon, Marius, and his Consulate, the elegy of Tamelastes, translations of Homer and Aratus, epigrams, etc., nothing remains, except some fragments of the Phaenomena and Diosemeia of Aratus. It may, however, be questioned whether literature has suffered much by these losses. We ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Teutonic, and they modulate only from Berlin to Braunschweig and around to Leipzig. While the songs repay study, they are rather marked by a pianistic meditation than a strictly lyric emotion. "Aufmunterung zur Freude" is a tame allegretto; "Wehmuth" is better; "Taeuschung" is a short elegy of passion and depth; "Ruhe in der Geliebten" is best in its middle strain where it is full of rich feeling and harmony. The ending is cheap. "Der gefangene Saenger" is only a slight variant at first on the "Adieu" credited to Schubert; ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Sundays my class was largely increased, for the children keenly enjoyed their competitive examinations. I would also give them bits of poetry to get by heart for the following Sunday - lines from Gray's 'Elegy,' from Wordsworth, from Pope's 'Essay on Man' - such in short as had a moral ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... "I was never strong at literature. To save my life I could not tell you who wrote 'Gray's Elegy.'" ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... Two Poets of Croisic (1878) brings the work of this decade to a close.[119] La Saisiaz, the record of thoughts that were awakened during that solitary clamber to the summit of Saleve after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith, is not an elegy, but it remains with us as a memorial of friendship. In reading it we discern the tall white figure of the "stranger lady," leaning through the terrace wreaths of leaf and bloom, or pacing that low grass-path which she had loved and called her own. It serves Browning's purpose in the poem ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... transcribe some of Sir Philip Sidney's work. There is no irreverence in it. Nor can I take it as any sign of hardness that Raleigh should treat the visual image of his own anticipated death with so much coolness, if the writer of a little elegy on his execution, when Raleigh was fourteen years older than at the presumed date of the foregoing verses, describes ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... poet can read, first Andre de Chenier's Idyll Neere, then Le Malade, following on with the Elegy on a Suicide, another elegy in the classic taste, and the ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... deeply-drawn sigh. "You cannot, at least, prevent her image from being enshrined in my heart. No, Julia! even when thou descendest to the grave, thy remembrance will cause thee to live in my imagination, and I shall thus write thine elegy: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... the three little children remained seven years in pickle, whereas it is usual to begin withdrawing the pieces of flesh from the tub, with a wooden fork, at the end of about six weeks. The text is explicit: according to the elegy, it was seven years after the crime that St. Nicolas entered the accursed hostelry. He asked for supper. The landlord offered him a piece ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France
... I found, consisted of an old shatter'd press, and one small, worn-out font of English which he was then using himself, composing an Elegy on Aquila Rose, before mentioned, an ingenious young man, of excellent character, much respected in the town, clerk of the Assembly, and a pretty poet. Keimer made verses too, but very indifferently. He could not be said to write them, for his manner was to compose ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... palace, the palace! That is what Richard Baxter called "The Saints' Everlasting Rest." That is what John Bunyan called the "Celestial City." That is Young's "Night Thoughts" turned into morning exultations. That is Gray's "Elegy in a Churchyard" turned to resurrection spectacle. That is the "Cotter's Saturday Night" exchanged for the Cotter's Sabbath morning. That is the shepherd of Salisbury Plain amid the flocks on the hills of heaven. That is the ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... an ancient poem, printed among those of Taliesin, called the "Elegy of Owain ap Urien," and containing several very beautiful ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... just rising to the glories of empire, was to be sacrificed to the mad notion of petty "State Sovereignty," by a sworn band of desperadoes. How sad when other generations would ask, where is the Federal Government, to be answered only by poets, who would sing her elegy, as in the past they have sang that of the ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... enabled him to embellish truth, and to present it with all its graces and attractions to the understandings of all those who are endowed with an innate love of the beautiful. His pictures, like Gray's Elegy in a Country Church-yard, may with equal truth be said 'to abound in images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... chance acquaintances was a sparrow, whose elegy he also sings, comparing the bird to Lesbia's sparrow, much to the latter's disadvantage. All of Herrick's geese were swans. On the authority of Dorothy King, the daughter of a woman who served Herrick's successor at Dean Prior in 1674, we are told that the poet kept a pig, which he had taught ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... winter slew him, we do not know. In 1601 Fitzgeoffrey published a short Latin elegy on Nash in his "Affaniae," alluding in happy phrase to the twin lightnings of his armed tongue and his terrible pen; and Nash had six lines of tempered praise in "The Return from Parnassus." But all we know of the cause or manner of Nash's death has to be collected ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... neither the names of the professors at the Bourges College, nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy, melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called Tristesse (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems Paquita la Sevillane and Le Chene de la Messe; three sonnets, a description of the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... up; thoughts hushed quiet into one great thought; in the ripple of the perpetual waters, under the grim cliffs and the eternal stars. Conversing with his people, he was heard to recite some passages of Gray's ELEGY, lately come out to those parts; of which, says an ear-witness, he expressed his admiration to an enthusiastic degree: "Ah, these are tones of the Eternal Melodies, are not they? A man might thank Heaven had he such a gift; almost as WE might for succeeding here, Gentlemen!" [Professor ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... through. I said to myself—the best or none! And I found her, Piers; I found her sitting at a cottage door by Enniscorthy, County Wexford, where for a time I had the honour of acting as tutor to a young gentleman of promise, cut short, alas!—'the blind Fury with the abhorred shears!' I wrote an elegy on him, which I'll show you. His father admired it, had it printed, and gave me twenty pounds, ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... years, spelt by th' unletter'd muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... an elegy, the first of the poems in Anna Seward’s “Poetical Works,” having reference to ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... classical perfection. Grainger, who translated Tibullus, discusses the possibility of using the "alternate" stanza, but ends by saying that he has generally "preferred the heroic measure, which is not better suited to the lofty sound of the epic muse than to the complaining tone of the elegy."[441] Hoole chooses the couplet for his version of Ariosto, because it occupies the same place in English that the octave stanza occupies in Italian, and because it is capable of great variety. "Of all the various styles used by the best poets," he says, "none seems so well adapted to the mixed ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... bed, and thereafter dispatched him with a three-sided dagger. He then went in to his father and confessed his fault. "Then you had best kill me too," said the father; to whom the son, "Sir, I have done enough." He was hanged at Maidstone, full of penitence and edifying discourse. The elegy ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... great enough be sought For this sad ruin which the Fates have wrought, Unless the Fates themselves should weep and wish Their curbless power had been controlled in this? For thy loss, worthiest Lord, no mourning eye Has flood enough; no muse nor elegy Enough expression to thy worth can lend; No, though thy Sidney had survived his friend. Dead, noble Brooke shall be to us a name Of grief and honour still, whose deathless fame Such Virtue purchased as makes us to be Unjust to ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... hand-shaker, but he grew more and more unsocial with his mates, and we heard his short, sharp, angry double bark at night more frequently than we used to. He reminded me of the complaining owl in Gray's "Elegy." He resented any dog even approaching the sled, resented the dogs moving about at all to disturb his ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... tradition credits the Queen with unconcealed enthusiasm for Falstaff, who came into being a little later. Under Elizabeth's successor he greatly strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the Queen's appreciation equalled that of James I. When Jonson wrote in his elegy on Shakespeare of ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... feeling of the poets, also, attaching itself with tenderness to graceful scenes of country life. Tito Strozza, about the year 1480, describes in a Latin elegy the dwelling of his mistress. We are shown an old ivy-clad house, half hidden in trees, and adorned with weather-stained frescoes of the saints, and near it a chapel, much damaged by the violence of the river Po, which flowed hard ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... fellow-authors. There, if anywhere, one would have expected to find a sense of proportion. Yet his conclusions would seem monstrous to a modern taste. "Shakespeare," he said, "never wrote six consecutive good lines." He would only admit two good verses in Gray's exquisite "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad ones. "Tristram Shandy" would not live. "Hamlet" was gabble. Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" was poor stuff, and he never wrote anything good except "A Tale ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not tell you what I am doing. My father is employed making out Charts of History and Chronology, such as are mentioned in Practical Education. He has just finished a little volume containing Explanations of Poetry for children: it explains "The Elegy in a Country Churchyard," "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and "The Ode to Fear." It will be a very useful schoolbook. It goes over to-night to Johnson, but how long it will remain with him before you see it in print ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... Naples and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in 1864, and Mr. Gray (as he of the "Elegy" used to be called on his title-pages) found them in 1740. "The streets," he wrote home to his mother, "are one continued market, and thronged with populace so much that a coach can hardly pass. The common ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Beaumont and Fletcher never wrote anything of the kind more lovely. Herrick, of course, lives simply by virtue of his songs; his more ambitious or pretentious lyrics are merely magnified and prolonged and elaborated songs. Elegy or litany, epicede or epithalamium, his work is always a song-writer's; nothing more, but nothing less, than the work of the greatest song-writer—as surely as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist—ever born of English race. The apparent or external variety ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... nobleness of thought, a courageous aim at high and, in a strict sense manly, excellence in many of the writers:—nor can that period be justly termed tame and wanting in originality, which produced poems such as Pope's Satires, Gray's Odes and Elegy, the ballads of Gay and Carey, the songs of Burns and Cowper. In truth Poetry at this as at all times was a more or less unconscious mirror of the genius of the age; and the brave and admirable spirit of Enquiry which made the eighteenth century the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... at all times interesting, if not constantly reliable. After a reading of Gray's "Elegy" by a fourth standard class, the boys were asked what was meant by "fretted vaults," and one youth replied—"The vaults in which these poor people were buried; their friends came and fretted over ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... Dryden died, and with him a dramatic age passed away. What Miss Trotter's exact relations with the great poet had been is uncertain; she not only celebrated his death in a long elegy, in which she speaks on behalf of the Muses, but wrote another and more important poem, in which she gives very sound advice to the poetical beginner, who is to take Dryden as a model, and to be particularly careful to disdain Settle, Durfey, and ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... "Sunrise" is an elegy to James A. Garfield, 20th President of the United States, who died on September 19, 1881, from a gunshot wound received in an assassination attempt in July of ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... that member of the poetic hierarchy. It is not the most popular poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry. Gray's "Elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that length. But what shall we say to the "Ars Poetica" of Horace? It is crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... was magnificently buried in the sepulcher of his fathers, when he had lived thirty-nine years, and of them had reigned thirty-one. But all the people mourned greatly for him, lamenting and grieving on his account many days; and Jeremiah the prophet composed an elegy to lament him, [10] which is extant till tills time also. Moreover, this prophet denounced beforehand the sad calamities that were coming upon the city. He also left behind him in writing a description ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Chronicle. His papers in the Connoisseur have been preserved; they are mainly imitations of the lighter papers of the Spectator by a student who affects the man of the world. He also dallied with poetry, writing verses to "Delia," and an epistle to Lloyd. He had translated an elegy of Tibullus when he was fourteen, and at Westminster he had written an imitation of Phillips's Splendid Shilling, which, Southey says, shows his manner formed. He helped his Cambridge brother, ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... Mr. Shelley. After a perplexing search his mother found the desired poems, most of them in first editions, at the Olliers, Vere Street, London. She took home also three volumes by another poet, John Keats, who, she was told, was the subject of an elegy by Shelley. Browning never forgot the May evening when he first read these new books, to the accompaniment, he said, of two nightingales, one in a copper-beech, one in a laburnum, each striving to outdo the other in ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... read parts of Homer, parts of Thucydides, parts of Tacitus, parts of the tragedians, at school, but now he had it in his power to study a great author entire, and as a whole. Never before did he fully appreciate the "thunderous lilt" of Greek epic, the touching and voluptuous tenderness of Latin elegy, the regal pomp of history, the gorgeous and philosophic mystery of the old dramatic fables. Never before had he learnt to gaze on "the bright countenance of truth, in the mild and dewy air of delightful studies." Those who decry classical education, do so from inexperience of its ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... whose sacred lays The learned ghosts admire, and throng To catch the subject of his song. Then Randolph in those holy meads, His Lovers and Amyntas reads, Whilst his Nightingale, close by, Sings his and her own elegy. From thence dismiss'd, by subtle roads, Through airy paths and sad abodes, They'll come into the drowsy fields Of Lethe, which such virtue yields, That, if what poets sing be true, The streams all sorrow can subdue. Here, on a silent, shady green, The souls of ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... Nancy was gone; and Harry Esmond blushed that he had not a single tear for her, and fell to composing an elegy in Latin verses over the rustic little beauty. He bade the dryads mourn and the river-nymphs deplore her. As her father followed the calling of Vulcan, he said that surely she was like a daughter of Venus, though Sievewright's wife was an ugly shrew, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... be remembered that when Mr. Webster, one of the greatest of American statesmen, was on his death-bed, in October last, he requested his son to read to him that far-famed "Elegy" of Gray: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... Crevel is at Corbeil with Monsieur Lebas; so I am sure he will bring no princess to his little palace. I have made arrangements here to be free for the night and get back before Marneffe is awake. Answer me as to all this, for perhaps your long elegy of a wife no longer allows you your liberty as she did. I am told she is still so handsome that you might play me false, you are such a gay dog! Burn this note; I am ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... hand as the rest. To be sure, these two are not numbered, so that I was long undecided as to just what their proper position might be. At one time I imagined they must belong at the middle of the cycle where at the end of Elegy XIII Priapus' mother summons her son. Obviously Goethe, just returned north from his two years in Italy (1786-88), and alienated from prim, courtly friends (especially since he had taken a girlfriend into his cottage), had no thought of publication when he indited ...
— Erotica Romana • Johann Wolfgang Goethe
... theme in the bass, may be likened to a 'cello solo of a mildly bravura nature. (Note the fantastic accents on weak beats in measures 18, 22, 23, and 24.) In the third variation comes a complete contrast in mood; the key is changed to A-flat minor and the theme is transformed into an elegy, all its joy crushed out. The movement abounds in impassioned dissonances, always emphasized by sf marks, and the throbbing pulsations of the bass—in the second phrase—give a tragic intensity ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Astrophel and Stella, of which his latest critic says: "As a series of sonnets, the Astrophel and Stella poems are second only to Shakespeare's; as a series of love-poems, they are perhaps unsurpassed." Spenser wrote an elegy upon Sidney himself, under the title of Astrophel. Sidney's prose is among the best of the sixteenth century. "He reads more modern than any other author of that century." He does not use "ink-horn terms," or cram his sentences with Latin or French or Italian words; but both his words and his idioms ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... much as children, when we advised that a great deal of poetry should not be read by very young pupils; the labour and difficulty of explaining it can be known only to those who have tried the experiment. The Elegy in a country church-yard, is one of the most popular poems, which is usually given to children to learn by heart; it cost at least a quarter of an hour to explain to intelligent children, the youngest ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... 17-27 (R.V.). This elegy is described as a quotation from Jasher, the "Book of the Upright." Many modern writers attribute its authorship to David himself; others reject this view; all agree in regarding it as extremely ancient. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and 1369), and a few years earlier the poet of the "Vision" had given voice to the sufferings of the poor. It was not, however, the mothers of the people crying for their children whom the courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the year 1369; the woe to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a princely widower temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first wife. In 1367 the Black Prince was conquering Castile (to be lost again before the year was out) for that interesting protege ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... paternal farm of Leasowes, fairly rivalled the best of the landscape-gardeners,—and who, by the graces and the tenderness which he lavished on his verse, made no mean rank for himself at a time when people were reading the "Elegy" of Gray, the Homer of Pope, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... sculptor, who made a reproduction of it in white marble, with the little urn concealing the feet. This was placed in St. Paul's Cathedral, of which King was chief residentiary, and may still be seen in the present Cathedral King's elegy is very prosy in starting, but improves as it goes along, and is most ingenious throughout. These are the words in which he refers to the appearance of the ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... among the "Poems of the Fancy," but in the edition of 1837, and afterwards, the last, "Bright Flower! whose home is everywhere," is ranked among the "Poems of Sentiment and Reflection." They should manifestly be placed together. Wordsworth's fourth poem 'To the Daisy', which is an elegy on his brother John, and belongs to a subsequent year—having no connection with the three preceding poems, will be found ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... the Tower where such memorable dramas have occurred; the castles that have stood since the days of chivalry; and Oxford; and the green fields of England that poets have written of, and the churchyard of Gray's Elegy; and all ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... at first confin'd To speak in broken verse the mourner's mind. Prosperity at length, and free content, In the same numbers gave their raptures vent; But who first fram'd the Elegy's small song, Grammarians squabble, and ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... Elizabethan "Billingsgate" that has come down to us. It was a versatile pen that could turn from passages like these to the epic narrative of the duel, or Tamyra's lyric invocation of the "peaceful regents of the night" (II, ii, 158), or Bussy's stately elegy upon himself, as he dies standing, propped on his ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... bright; and the general, under the clear starlight, visited his stations, to make his final inspection and utter his last words of encouragement. As he passed from ship to ship, he spoke to those in the boat with him of the poet Gray, and the 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' "I," said he, "would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow;" and, while the oars struck the river as it rippled in the silence of the night air under the flowing tide, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the long summer days? Away, in the smooth "Flying Dutchman"; past Windsor's glorious towers and Eton's playing-fields; past the little village and churchyard where a century and a half ago the famous "Elegy" was written, and where, hard by "those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade," yet rests the body of the mighty poet, Gray. How those lines run in one's head this bright summer evening, as from our railway carriage we note the great white dome of Stoke House peeping out amid the elms! whilst every ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... in his Hist. of Eng. Poet (III. p. 435) of an Elegy being prefixed to it on the death of Marlowe; but no such is found in either of those copies. In answer to my inquiries on this subject he informed me by letter, [crossed-out text] that a copy of this play was in Osborne's catalogue in the year 1754, ...
— The Tragedy of Dido Queene of Carthage • Christopher Marlowe
... "English provincial poet—in the sense that America still was a literary province of the mother country." To this amazing statement one can only rejoin that if "The Biglow Papers," the "Harvard Commemoration Ode," "Under the Old Elm," the "Fourth of July Ode," and the Agassiz elegy are English provincial poetry, most of us need a new map and a new vocabulary. Of both series of "Biglow Papers" we may surely exclaim, as did Quintilian concerning early Roman satire, "This is wholly ours." It is true that Lowell, like every young poet of his generation, had steeped ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... the general concern, To track our hero on his path of fame: He must his laurels separately earn; For fifty thousand heroes, name by name, Though all deserving equally to turn A couplet, or an elegy to claim, Would form a lengthy lexicon of glory, And what is worse still, a ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... The time was April's end, and had been squally, with violent storms; but the last onslaughts of the north-wester had routed the rain-clouds. The day was dying under a clear saffron sky, and a thrush piped its mellow elegy. Miss Percival heard him, and listened, smiling with her lips, and with her eyes also which the serene light soothed. Her lips barely moved, just relaxed their firm embrace, but no more. She held the light gratefully with ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... appears applicable to those amphibious animals that haunt the banks of rivers and the shores of the sea, and was probably used by the prophet with a reference to the seal species, which suckle their young in the manner described in his pathetic elegy. ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... true innovator, in the broadest and most meritorious sense of the word: he was the creator of philosophic poetry in France. Until Jocelyn appeared, in 1836, the form of poetic expression was confined chiefly to the ode, the ballad, and the elegy; and no poet, with the exception of the author of 'Moise' and 'Eloa', ever dreamed that abstract ideas and themes dealing with the moralities could be expressed ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... population, is a magnificent spectacle; and Montcalm laying down his life to lose Quebec is not less affecting than Wolfe dying to win her. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on the eve of his costly victory, the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," which he would "rather have written than beat the French to-morrow;" but it aches for the defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered, when told how brief his time was, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... when he had been nominated for the Presidency he was asked for material for an account of his early life. "Why," he said, "it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence; and that sentence you will find in Gray's 'Elegy':— ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... black hair streaked with white, might have taught me much which I could have learned from no ordinary friend. My cousin often went with me to Mrs. A.'s, but I was never at rest when he was there. I fancied then that if I could have rendered a dozen lines of Gray's Elegy into correct Greek, life would have nothing more to give me. Mrs. A. was too well-behaved to encourage conversation in my cousin's presence which disclosed my inferiority to him, but without premeditation ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... dreary twelvemonth. With the ripe autumn closed the quiet struggle; and "in the bleak December" the mortal remains were followed from the temple where his youth worshipped, to the snow-clad knoll at Greenwood; garlands and tears, the ritual and the requiem, eulogy and elegy, consecrated the final scene. By a singular coincidence, the news of his decease reached the United States simultaneously with the arrival of the ship in James River with the colossal bronze statue of Washington, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... broadcloth! But it takes very little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover. There are a great many cruel things besides poverty that freeze the genial current of the soul, as the poet of the Elegy calls it. Fire can stand any wind, but is easily blown out, and then come smouldering and smoke, and profitless, slow combustion without the cheerful blaze which sheds light all round it. The one Reader's hand may shelter the flame; the one blessed ministering spirit with the vessel ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is supposed to have proceeded, not from his fall last year, but from a blow with a tennis-ball some years ago. The grief for the dead brother is affectedly great; the aversion to the living one as affectedly displayed. They cried about an elegy,(232) and added, "Oh, that it were but his brother!" On 'Change they said, "Oh, that it ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Ode or Elegy rhymed couplets numbering more than thirteen: If shorter it is called a "Ghazal." I have not thought it ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Saunders, a plan for scaling the Heights of Abraham—news of the repulse and subsequent success of, received by Pitt on the same day (note)—presentiment of death upon the mind of, i. 297; impromptu stanzas composed by, on the eve of the attack—Gray's Elegy quoted by, on his way to the Heights of Abraham, i. 298; last words and death of, i. 299; and Montcalm, joint monument erected to the memory of—biographical notice ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... whose spotless fame Invites a stone to learn her name: The rigid Spartan that denied An epitaph to all that died, Unless for war, in charity Would here vouchsafe an elegy. She died a wife, but yet her mind, Beyond virginity refined, From lawless fire remain'd as free As now from heat her ashes be: Keep well this pawn, thou marble chest; Till it be call'd for, let it rest; For while this jewel here is set, The ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... years of his residence at Kilcolman at work on this masterpiece, which had been begun in England, under the encouragement of Sidney, probably before 1580. The knightly Sidney died heroically at the battle of Zutphen, in 1586, and Spenser voiced the lament of all England in the beautiful pastoral elegy Astrophel which he composed in memory of "the most noble and ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... looking down the long aisles and arches that had stood so many centuries the political changes of Europe. One morning when the sun was flooding the building and casting the colours of the windows in rich patterns on the floor, I sat under the gallery at the west end and read Shelley's great elegy. I remember those wonderful last lines and I thought how, like an unshattered temple, the great works of literature survive the tempests of national strife. My mind was carried far away, beyond the anxieties and ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... by th' unlettered muse, The place of fame and elegy supply; And many a holy text around she strews, That teach ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... feelings so congenial to each other, as to throw the reader into the very mood over which the personified being so beautifully designed presides. No other poem on the same subject has the same magic. It assuredly suggested some images and a tone of expression to Gray in his Elegy. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... representing the abandon of the dance, it seems rather to depict a melancholy lover allowing his eyes to travel slowly around the ballroom in a futile search of his heart's desire. The prevailing tone of the composition rather is that of an elegy—the burial of fond hopes. Stephen Heller, pianist and composer, tells of meeting Chopin in the store of a Paris music publisher. Heller had come in to order all the valses. Thereupon Chopin asked him which he liked best, and when Heller mentioned this sad one in slow time, Chopin exclaimed, ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... you when you are out of your own ambry. I have nothing new to tell you that is very old; but you can inform me of something within your own district. Who is the author, E. B. G. of a version of Mr. Gray's Latin Odes into English,(237) and of an Elegy on my wolf-devoured dog, poor Tory? a name you will marvel at in a dog of mine; but his godmother was the widow of Alderman Parsons, who gave him at Paris to Lord Conway, and he to me. The author is a poet; but he makes me blush, for he calls Mr. Gray and me congenial pair. Alas! ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... upon looking up the church which gave rise to Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," intending when we got there to have a little scene over it; Mr. S., in all the conscious importance of having been there before, assuring us that he knew exactly where it was. So, after some difficulty with our coachman, and being stopped at ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... friends we may be sure he found admiring listeners. The young General had the romance of a boy on many matters. He delighted in music and poetry. On the last day of his life he said he would rather have written Gray's Elegy than have won a battle. We may be sure that with a gentleman of such literary tastes our friend George would become familiar; and as they were both in love, and both accepted lovers, and both eager for happiness, no doubt they must have had many sentimental conversations together which ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Amalia A Funeral Fantasie Fantasie—To Laura To Laura at the Harpsichord Group from Tartarus Rapture—To Laura To Laura (The Mystery of Reminiscence) Melancholy—To Laura The Infanticide The Greatness of the World Fortune and Wisdom Elegy on the Death of a Young Man The Battle Rousseau Friendship Elysium The Fugitive To Minna The Flowers The Triumph of Love (A Hymn) To a Moralist Count Eberhard, the Groaner of Wurtemburg ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... found that his press was old and damaged, and his fount of English types nearly worn out. Possessing much more ingenuity than Keimer, and understanding a printing-press much better, he went to work, and in a short time put it into decent order for service. Keimer was composing an Elegy on Aquila Rose, an excellent young man who worked for Bradford, and who had recently died; and he agreed to send for Benjamin to print it off when it was ready. With this arrangement, Benjamin returned to Mr. Bradford to eat and lodge. A ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... Coventry's death in a long elegy, which had some repute in those days, when even Hayley was called a poet. They are dawdling and dulcified to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... short time there had appeared Gray's "Elegy," Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle," Fielding's "Amelia" and Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." Here was menu to fit most palates, and the bill-of-fare was duly discussed in all social gatherings of the upper circles. The afflicted ones fed on Gray; the repentant quoted Richardson; ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... were these tales of diablerie believed, that one William Lithgow, a bon vivant, who appears to have been a native, or occasional inhabitant, of Melrose, is celebrated by the pot-companion who composed his elegy, because ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... knowledge, tradition and personal interviews, were all laid under contribution by the author, and served as sources of his authority. These he has woven together with such judgment in selection, skill in arrangement and force of style and diction, that just as "Gray's Elegy" alone has placed him in the front rank of poets, so this one work has given the author a high and permanent place among the historians of our country. The work attempted is so well done, and withal so accurate and reliable as one of reference and authority, that in recognition of its merits ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... Prince will marry again, after divorcing his wife, and Mr. Southey will write an elegy now, and an ode then; the Quarterly will have an article against the press, and the Edinburgh an article, half and half, about reform and right of divorce; the British will give you Dr. Chalmers's funeral sermon much commended, with a place in the stars for deceased royalty; and the Morning ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... wont to trace Polish proverbs, Polish turns of phrase. Tears were seen to rise to his eyes as, gazing at the beautiful panorama from a favourite spot of his in the Jura, a French friend recited Arnault's elegy on the homeless and wandering leaf, torn from the parent oak, in which the Pole read the story of his own exile. Education of the lower classes, for which he had already made so strong a stand, continued to be one ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... Description of a Salamander To Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough On the Union On Mrs. Biddy Floyd The Reverse Apollo Outwitted Answer to Lines from May Fair Vanbrugh's House Vanbrugh's House Baucis and Philemon Baucis and Philemon The History of Vanbrugh's House A Grub Street Elegy The Epitaph A Description of the Morning A Description of a City Shower On the Little House A Town Eclogue A Conference To Lord Harley on his Marriage Phyllis Horace, Book IV, Ode ix To Mr. Delany An Elegy To Mrs. Houghton Verses written on a Window On another Window Apollo to the Dean News from ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... complains to Hobbinol of clerical abuses. October: On poetry, which Cuddy says has no encouragement, and laments that Colin neglects it, being crossed in love. November;[TN-174] Colin, being asked by Thenot to sing, excuses himself because of his grief for Dido, but finally he sings her elegy. December: Colin again complains that his heart is desolate because Rosalind loves ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... dumb with dismay and anguish. It was only a long time after, when despair had sunk into a softened recollection, that it was possible even to breathe forth that wail over the Flowers of the Forest which all Scotland knows. In the first shock of such an appalling event there is no place for elegy. There was a broken cry of anguish throughout the country, echoed from castle and cottage, where the poor women clung together, mistress and maid equal in the flood of common loss: and there was at the same time a strained and terrible rallying of all the poor defenders ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... disdain, almost one of contempt. So, too, in "Youth." A tale of the spirit's triumph, of youth besting destiny? I do not see it so. To me its significance, like that of "The Shadow Line," is all subjective; it is an aging man's elegy upon the hope and high resolution that the years have blown away, a sentimental reminiscence of what the enigmatical gods have had their jest with, leaving only its gallant memory behind. The whole Conradean system sums itself up in the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... come to this conclusion without much thought. She composed an Ode to Despair, an Elegy to an Unhappy Woman, and a Triolet to Interfering Dukes, before her mind was made up. She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a melancholy grey and holding communion only with the birds and trees; a life of ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... was born in 1535-6, he must have died in 1564. The tablet referred to also contains Buchanan's lines. Omnia quae longa, &c., celebrating his learning, and lamenting his premature fate. Dempster likewise quotes these lines and another elegy on his death, by Buchanan. (Opera, vol. ii. pp. 106, 120,) and says, that Alexander Cockburn, who had spent several years abroad, published various works, of which he had only seen three, the titles of which he specifies; but ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... productions, such as they were, were safe in his hands. One boy only was equal to the emergency; that I need hardly say was Simon. He was indeed more eloquent than ever. He offered Pembury a poem of forty verses, entitled, "An Elegy on the Wick of a Candle that had just been blown out," to begin with, and volunteered to supplement this contribution with one or two smaller pieces, such as, "My Little Lark," or "An Adventure outside the ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... she remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but Arthur seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the fire in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy and brought ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Othello. Caroline puts on the air of a martyr; her submission is positively killing. On every occasion she assassinates Adolphe with a "Just as you like!" uttered in tones whose sweetness is something fearful. No elegiac poet could compete with Caroline, who utters elegy upon elegy: elegy in action, elegy in speech: her smile is elegiac, her silence is elegiac, her gestures are elegiac. Here are a few examples, wherein every household will find ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... county, and on May 28, 1645, had the honour of entertaining his sovereign at Cotes, after which he was fined 1114l. by the parliamentary sequestrators. He was the last of the family who resided at Cotes; and amongst his poems is "An Elegy on the Death of my never enough lamented master, King Charles I." The others are chiefly of a melancholy turn. Sir Henry, his second son, died soon after his father, unmarried; whereupon his title and estate went to his next brother Sir Gray, who, after ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... period which suggest genius and influence. Edward Young had just published his "Night Thoughts," Thomson, the poet and author of "The Seasons," and Isaac Watts had just passed away, Lord Littleton had written "The Conversion of St. Paul," Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" was being eagerly read by the people, Blackstone's famous "Commentaries on the Laws of England," had made a profound impression, Johnson had completed his "Dictionary" and Oliver Goldsmith was writing his immortal works. There were others who were ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... colors, until the fashion gave way to cut-work and lace. Italy produced lace fabrics early in the fifteenth century; and the Florentine poet, Firenzuola, who flourished about 1520, composed an elegy upon a collar of raised point lace made by the hand of his mistress. Portraits of Venetian ladies dated as early as 1500 reveal white lace trimmings; but at that period lace was, professedly, only made by nuns for the service of the Church, and the term nuns' work has been the designation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... exquisite in poetical feeling and musical gifts. The character is the nearest one gets in Hebrew to the best heroines of the troubadours. Immanuel and she exchange verses, but the path of flirtation runs rough. They are parted, she, woman-like, dies, and he, man-like, sings an elegy. Even more to Immanuel's credit is his praise of his own wife. She has every womanly grace of body and soul. On her he showers compliments from the Song of Songs and the Book of Proverbs. If this be the true man revealed, ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... the haughty Lord of Sleat ended his career. ["Genealogy of the Macras" and the Ardintoul MS. "This Donald Gorme was son to Donald Gruamach, son to Donald Gallach, son to Hugh, natural son to Alexander, Earl of Ross, for which the elegy made on his death calls him grandchild and great grandchild to ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... day, he fell down in a fit, and remained long insensible. Some people imagined that the words of the anthem which his choristers were chanting had produced in him emotions too violent to be borne by an enfeebled body and mind. For that anthem was taken from the plaintive elegy in which a servant of the true God, chastened by many sorrows and humiliations, banished, homesick, and living on the bounty of strangers, bewailed the fallen throne and the desolate Temple of Sion: "Remember, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mad. He then secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy which begins thus:— ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... the great crisis which the dawn would bring, he repeated to the officers and midshipmen within hearing a number of the verses from the most finished poem in the English language, Grey's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and which had appeared a short time before. Probably the lines on which ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... brother to Alfonso Duke of Calabria, a manuscript in folio containing the 'less rude' poems of the old Tuscan writers which Lorenzo de Medici had promised him at Pisa in 1465; and in concert with the most erudite scholars of his time, that same Alessandro wrote a Latin elegy on the death of the divine Simonetta—sad and melting numbers after the manner of Tibullus. Another Sperelli—Stefano,—was during the same century in Flanders, in the midst of all the pomp, the extravagant elegance, the almost ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... Propertius Tibullus Lucan Statius Valerius Flaccus Claudian Persius Prudentius Hermesianax Destruction of Jerusalem Epic Poem German and English Paradise Lost Modern Travels The Trinity Incarnation Redemption Education Elegy Lavacrum Pallados Greek and Latin Pentameter Milton's Latin Poems Poetical Filter Gray and Cotton Homeric Heroes in Shakspeare Dryden Dr. Johnson Scott's Novels Scope of Christianity Times of Charles I. Messenger of the Covenant Prophecy Logic of Ideas and of Syllogisms ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... the best among them tells us how they also pursued him when he walked in his garden or withdrew to the privacy of his chamber, and if they failed to catch him there, would try to win him with a mendicant ode or elegy, filled, as usual, with the whole population of Olympus. For Leo, prodigal of his money, and disliking to be surrounded by any but cheerful faces, displayed a generosity in his gifts which was fabulously exaggerated in the hard times that followed. His reorganization of the Sapienza ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Honest Yorkshireman. Henry Carey From "Snaith Marsh" Anonymous When at Hame wi' Dad Anonymous I'm Yorkshire too Anonymous The Wensleydale Lad Anonymous A Song 1. Thomas Browne A Song 2. Thomas Browne The Invasion: An Ecologue Thomas Browne Elegy on the Death of a Frog David Lewis Sheffield Cutler's Song Abel Bywater Address to Poverty Anonymous The Collingham Ghost Anonymous The Yorkshire Horse Dealers Anonymous The Lucky Dream John Castillo The Milkin'-Time J. H. Dixon ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... elegy on the death of Goody Morse, who "For forty years or more ... contrived the while No little dust to raise" in the rooms of the students of Harvard College, is to be found in Harvardiana, Vol. I. p. 233. It was written by Mr. (afterwards Rev.) Benjamin ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Fiesole, provided for him by Lorenzo, Poliziano occupied his life with teaching and writing, occasionally paying visits to other cities. In 1492 Lorenzo passed away and Poliliziano wrote an elegy which is to this day regarded as unique in modern Latin verse. In 1494 the famous scholar followed his patron, even while Savonarola was setting Italy in a ferment of passionate religious reaction against the poetic and sensuous paganism infused ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... Dobson The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn Andrew Marvell On the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes Thomas Gray Verses on a Cat Charles Daubeny Epitaph on a Hare William Cowper On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bullfinch William Cowper An Elegy on a Lap-Dog John Gay My Last Terrier John Halsham Geist's Grave Matthew Arnold ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... Castle with Dr. Adams and his party, ten of us in all. We drove afterward to see the country church-yard, where Grey wrote his elegy and where he now lies buried. This was a most charming little trip and we all enjoyed it exceedingly. The young folks gathered leaves and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Then came Robert, the most attractive of the boys. A splendid athlete, compared by Anthony with a Greek statue, he had sweetness as well as depth of nature. His drawings of horses were the delight of his family; and when his favourite hunter died he wrote a graceful elegy on the afflicting event. The influence of his genial kindness was never forgotten by his youngest brother; but there was a stronger and more dominating personality of which the effect was less beneficial to ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... tone, as of one who can speak with the commanding voice of Delphic wisdom. The moralizing of Bacchylides is rather an utterance of quiet meditation, sometimes recalling the strain of Ionian gnomic elegy. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... distinguished himself there in the course of the Reformation as a pastor, a preacher, professor of Hebrew, and a professor of Theology; translated the Bible into Italian and into French; a nephew of his was a school-fellow and friend of Milton, who wrote an elegy ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... rapture that was June, And cold is August's panting heart of fire; And in the storm-dismantled forest-choir For thine own elegy thy winds attune Their wild and wizard lyre: And poignant grows the charm of thy decay, The pathos of thy beauty, and the sting, Thou parable of greatness vanishing! For me, thy woods of gold and skies of grey With speech ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... not wanting, and it cannot be said that the Northern elegies are less sweet or less thrilling in their grief than those of England in the kindred forms of verse. It is enough to think of Gudrun's Lament in the "Elder Edda," or of Sonatorrek, Egil Skallagrimsson's elegy on the death of his two sons. It was not any congenital dulness or want of sense that made the Sagas generally averse to elegy. No mere writer of Sagas was made of stronger temper than Egil, and none of them need have been ashamed of lamentation after Egil ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... poems. In the same year The Cathedral was published, a stately poem in blank verse, profound in thought, with many passages of great poetic beauty. In 1888 a final collection of poems was published, entitled Heartsease and Rue, which opened with the memorial poem, Agassiz, an elegy that would not be too highly honored by being bound in a golden volume with Lycidas, Adonais and Thyrsis. Going back to his earliest literary studies, he again (1887) lectured at the Lowell Institute on the old dramatists, Occasionally he gave a poem to the magazines ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... probable that this sad elegy would have continued for hours, had not a servant approached with letters, which he distributed, two to Arthur Mordaunt and one to Mr. Winterham. A close observer might have seen that two of the envelopes were identical. Arthur slipped one into his pocket, but tore ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... ceased to be his pupil, speaks of 'the incredible and singular gratitude he owed him on account of the services he had done him,' and calls God to witness that he reverenced him as his father. In a Latin elegy, after implying that Young was dearer to him than Socrates to Alcibiades, or than the great Stagyrite to his generous pupil, Alexander, he goes on to say: 'First, under his guidance, I explored the recesses of the Muses, and beheld the ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... length,—the drum and flageolets escort the stalwart young Memon bridegroom unto the house of the bride. Thus is it ever in this city of strange contrasts. Life and Death in closest juxtaposition, the hymn in honour of the Prophet's birth blending with the elegy to the dead. Bag-pipes are not unknown in the Musalman quarters of Bombay; and not infrequently you may watch a crescent of ten or twelve wild Arab sailors in flowing brown gowns and parti-coloured head-scarves ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... that the apples and nuts will bring you out again. Thus children are moved; but I also thought that a pretty little letter, even without bonbons, would have done the same. I have a very beautiful elegy on a lady whom you love better than any one in the world; even better, I suspect, than L. N., and I was about to send it, but I won't till I hear from you: a nice, handsome letter; none of your little white ink ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... chaplaincy, he held the office of preceptor to one of the native princes of Hindostan. He died at Bhoog, in the kingdom of Cutch, on the 25th of September 1830; and if we add that he was a man of remarkable learning, his elegy may be transcribed from ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... faith in God, but not their faith in the cause." To the young, or even the middle-aged, it has little meaning. I met a scholar-soldier in the South who had given expression to the sentiment of his race and generation in an essay—one might almost say an elegy—so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that it moved me well-nigh to tears. Reading it at a public library, I found myself so visibly affected by it that my neighbour at the desk glanced at me in surprise, and I had to pull myself sharply together. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... have been at all times extravagance and credulity itself. They looked upon this young villain as a martyr, and at once dedicated an elegy to him, in which I was compared with Medea, ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... able actually to improve the language of inspiration, whilst transmitting uninjured the poetic conception. Those stanzas in Grey's 'Elegy' which convey from him to us the psychic wave of poetic impulse, may have been hundreds of times altered in their wording, through seven years of tentative effort; and it is possible that he succeeded in retaining ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... Mr. Bridges's poems, there is a certain austere and indifferent beauty of diction and a memory of the old English poets, Milton and the earlier lyrists. I remember being greatly pleased with the "Elegy on a Lady whom Grief for the Death of ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... Tycho lost his distinguished friend and correspondent the Prince of Hesse, and astronomy one of its most active and intelligent cultivators. His grief on this occasion was deep and sincere, and he gave utterance to his feelings in an impassioned elegy, in which he recorded the virtues and talents of his friend. Prince Maurice, the son and successor of the Landgrave, continued, with the assistance of able observers, to keep up the reputation of the observatory of Hesse-Cassel; ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster |
