"Homer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Constantinople, Greek became much better known in Europe, for many learned men of the schools of Constantinople took refuge in Italy, bringing their books with them; the scholars eagerly learned Greek, and the works of Homer and of the great old Greek tragedians became more and more known, and were made part of a learned education. The Greeks at home still spoke the old tongue, though it had become as much altered from that of Athens and Sparta as Italian is ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Homer A. Payne invites Miss Eva Milton to dine with her next week Thursday at eight o'clock. Write ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... said, 'Against public stupidity the gods themselves are powerless.' Since then, that same public lifted him to the pedestal of a demi-god; now all Germany proudly claims him; and who shall tell us where sleep his long-forgotten critics? Such has been the history of the race since Homer groped through vine-clad Chios, and poor Dante was hunted from city to city. If the great hierarchs of literature are sometimes stabbed while ministering at the shrine, what can we humble acolytes expect ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... and so much the more distinctly as the star is the brighter. Sirius, which surpasses the brightest stars of the northern hemisphere full four times in lustre, shows these changes of colour so conspicuously that they were regarded as specially characteristic of this star, insomuch that Homer speaks of Sirius (not by name, but as the 'star of autumn') shining most beautifully 'when laved of ocean's wave'—that is, when close to the horizon. And our own poet, Tennyson, following ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Homer for example—was he myth or man? The Christ? Where was he and how did he pass his life from his twelfth year to the beginning of his ministry? What were the dates of his birth and death? Shakespeare? Why should ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... the Iowa State University despatched to Laysan a scientific expedition in charge of Prof. Homer R. Dill. The party landed on the island on April 24 and remained until June 5, and the report of Professor Dill (U.S. Department of Agriculture) is consumedly interesting to the friends of birds. Here is what he has said regarding the evidences ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... the narrow strait of Abydos, and so on into the Propontis, which we call Marmora now. And there they met with Cyzicus, ruling in Asia over the Dolions, who, the songs say, was the son of AEneas, of whom you will hear many a tale some day. For Homer tells us how he fought at Troy, and Virgil how he sailed away and founded Rome; and men believed until late years that from him sprang our old British kings. Now Cyzicus, the songs say, welcomed the heroes, for his father had been one of Cheiron's ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... admits, "done all which the King imputes to him. If he has not been a Homer, a Pheidias, or a Terpander, his creative sympathies have united all three; and in thus passing from the simple to the complex, he has obeyed the law of progress, though at the risk perhaps of appearing ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... words which passed between them after that would require Homer's pathos and Homer's imagination. The two old men scowled and scolded at each other, and, had Mr. Fairlawn attempted to pass, Mr. Harkaway would certainly have struck him with his whip. And behind their ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... Homer B. Morgan and wife reached Salonica in February, 1852. The brethren were of the opinion, that while for two thirds of the year the climate of that city was tolerably healthy, the low portions, where the ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... lands of their own, occupied a district of Egypt, and later took to building cities of their own and tilling Hebrew territory and the frontier-land of Syria. Yet another version assigns to the Jews an illustrious origin as the descendants of the Solymi—a tribe famous in Homer[468]—who founded the city and called it Hierosolyma ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... him. Many of these country places I came to know afterwards from the talk of the men, and many others I have travelled through, so that the names upon the banners have come to have a real meaning with me. Homer hath, I remember, a chapter or book wherein he records the names of all the Grecian chiefs and whence they came, and how many men they brought to the common muster. It is pity that there is not some Western Homer who could record the names of these brave peasants and artisans, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... see a friend, to whom he repeated long passages from Dryden. A gentleman present, who was not unnaturally sceptical about Willie's attainments, desired to test him in Greek, and took down a copy of Homer which happened to have the contracted type, and to his amazement Willie went on with the greatest ease. At six years and nine months he was translating Homer and Virgil; a year later his uncle tells us that William finds so little difficulty in learning ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... exclaimed one of the undergraduates, very thoughtlessly. "Why, my dear Colonel Prowley, you are blinder than ever he was! Don't you know that recent scholarship has demonstrated Homer to be nobody in particular? The 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are mere agglomerations of the poetical effusions of a variety of persons; and doubtless all of them could see as well as you and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... is probable, did not allow of polygamy, and as the Greeks borrowed their institutions from them, it was also forbid by the laws of Cecrops, though concubinage seems either to have been allowed or overlooked; for in the Odyssey of Homer we find Ulysses declaring himself to be the son of a concubine, which he would probably not have done, had any degree of infamy been annexed to it. In some cases, however, polygamy was allowed in Greece, from a mistaken notion ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... colours are as loosely used by the Arabs as by the Classics of Europe; for instance, a light grey is called a "blue or a green horse." Much nonsense has been written upon the colours in Homer by men who imagine that the semi-civilised determine tints as we do. They see them but they do not name them, having no occasion for the words. As I have noticed, however, the Arabs have a complete terminology ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... with in the Battle of Hastings, No.1, and No.2, at the conclusion of speeches— "Thus he;"— "Thus Leofwine;"— "He said; and as," &c? In none I am confident. This latter is a form of expression in heroick poetry, that Pope has frequently made use of in his Homer (from whence Chatterton undoubtedly copiedit), and was sometimes employed by Dryden and Cowley; but I believe it will not be easy to trace it to Harrington or Spenser; most assuredly it cannot be traced up to the fifteenth century. ——In what English poem ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... "'Mellinger,' says the man—'Homer P. Mellinger. Boys, you're confiscated. You're babes in the wood without a chaperon or referee, and it's my duty to start you going. I'll knock out the props and launch you proper in the pellucid waters of this tropical mud puddle. You'll ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... was, the world of Homer, with its indeterminate boundaries, vast regions, and immeasurable distances. The Mediterranean and the Euxine were illimitable stretches of ocean waste over which years could be spent in endless wandering. On their mysterious shores were the improbable ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Mr. Grylls, "practised the direct contrary: of whom Homer tells us that they shaved the forepart of their heads, the reason being that their enemies might not grip them by the hair in close fighting. I regret, my dear Sir John, you never warned me that you designed Prosper for a military career. We might have ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... often dwelt on parallels to be found in the works of earlier poets. In many cases Tennyson deliberately reproduced passages from Greek, Latin, and old Italian writers, just as Virgil did in the case of Homer, Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and others. There are, doubtless, instances in which a phrase is unconsciously reproduced by automatic memory, from an English poet. But I am less inclined than Mr Bradley to think that unconscious reminiscence ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it." One wonders what he would have made of a blow-fly ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... nine months' march has never been written, and it never will be, for the full data cannot be supplied. But here is material waiting for some coming English Homer or Milton to crystallize into one of the world's noblest epics; and it deserves the master hand of a great poet artist ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... Nestor, Theseus, Ulysses, and Achilles are all followers of the chase. Aristotle, sage as he was, advises young men to apply themselves early to it; and Plato finds in it something divine. Horace exalts it as a preparative exercise for the path of glory, and several of the heroes of Homer are its ardent votaries. The Romans followed the hunting customs of the Greeks, and the ancient Britons were hunters before Julius ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... from them that any change had taken place in the religion of the world; and even Milton often pains one by introducing second-hand pagan mythology into the very shadow of the eternal throne. In some parts of the Paradise Lost, the evident imitations of Homer are to me the poorest and most ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... primarily great gymnasiums—very good things, too, in their way, against which I have not a word of blame; and, secondarily, places for imparting a sham and imperfect knowledge of some few philological facts about two extinct languages. Pupils get a smattering of Homer and Cicero. That is literally all the equipment for life that the cleverest and most industrious boys can ever take away from them. The sillier or idler don't take away even that. As to the "mental training" argument, ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... this the third! theme of mine ode, Adorned by sculptur'd art; Make it, O Learning, thy abode, Thy gems through it impart. There may the bards of tragic name Forever flourish, Graecia's fame— With Homer's deathless lay! Here Maro with heroic glow, And Naso's elegiac flow ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... is no transcript of the divine method, and is sternly rejected by all who suspect a perfection hidden in the day. A few works are great which celebrate the charm of actual effort, and the furtherance of Nature for the brave. Homer, Shakspeare, Goethe, need never exaggerate or leave the earth behind: in their experience it carries well the sky. Every vital thought is some pleasure in running, waking, loving, contending, helping,—is valor dealing gayly with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... "Last year we lost a game that way just as we thought we had it tucked away in our bat bag. The other fellows were one run ahead, and when we came to bat in our half of the sixth we got three men on bases in less than no time. Our heaviest batters were just coming up, and one of them knocked a homer, clearing the bases and putting us three runs in the lead. The fellows were dancing round and hugging each other, when just then the rain came down like fury and the game had to be called. Of course, our runs didn't count and the score stood as it was at the end ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... impression of Cowper's indifference to literature. His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters. But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature as Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer. Though Cowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer into English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical reservations. "I should not have chosen to have been the original author of such ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... into the sea. A large mill, which much resembles an ancient castle, and in all probability had served both purposes in times gone by, stood near. Upon the sandy beach close by, and hauled entirely out of the water, lay several vessels in the style of Homer's ships; and I have no doubt bore a strong resemblance to ships of ancient time, for they were picturesquely formed, and painted fantastically with figures of fishes and eyes. The wild-looking mariners ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... "According to Homer, Nestor, the old warrior and the wise counselor of the Greeks, had ruled over three generations of men, and was wise as the ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the gallant souls of heroes sent to Hades!" says Mr. Addison, with a smile. "Would you celebrate them all? If I may venture to question anything in such an admirable work, the catalogue of the ships in Homer hath always appeared to me as somewhat wearisome; what had the poem been, supposing the writer had chronicled the names of captains, lieutenants, rank and file? One of the greatest of a great man's qualities is success; 'tis the result of all the others; ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... in his comfortable sitting-room in the Hotel Wellington—Homer and Juvenal (in the original) ranked on the piano-top beside De Vere Stackpole novels and other contemporary literature called to mind that though Brahms and Beethoven violin concertos are among his favorites, he does not disdain to ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the mind like English; with words like pictures, with words like the gossamer films of the summer; at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and the intensity of AEschylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor fathomed to the bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardours even under ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... own we'd give a leg if we could borrow, steal, or beg the skill old Homer used to show. (He wrote the Iliad, you know.) Old Homer swung a wicked pen, but we are ordinary men, and cannot even start to dream of doing justice to our theme. The subject of that great repast is too magnificent and vast. We can't describe ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... massive pantomime of a life, offers itself to the gaze of men's souls and the needs of their bodies,—to know an inventor at all is to know that at a moment like this a chord is touched in him strange and deep, soft as from out of all eternity. The melody that Homer knew, and that Dante knew, is his also, with the grime upon his hands, standing and watching it there. It is the same song that from pride to pride and joy to joy has been singing through the hearts of The Men Who Make, from the beginning of ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... flowers; That young and tender crescent-moon, thy slave, 135 Sleeping above her robe as buoyed by clouds, Refines upon the women of my youth. What, and the soul alone deteriorates? I have not chanted verse like Homer, no— Nor swept string like Terpander, no—nor carved 140 And painted men like Phidias and his friend: I am not great as they are, point by point. But I have entered into sympathy With these four, running these into one soul, Who, separate, ignored each other's art. 145 Say, is it nothing that ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... That fabled armor of Homer's Iliad is not to be compared with this little insect's wing-shields. They are nothing ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... Heliobas quietly, "believe me, nothing! The British Government would no doubt accept it as a gift, just as it would with equal alacrity accept the veritable signature of Homer, which we also possess in another retreat of ours on the Isle of Lemnos. But our treasures are neither for giving nor selling, and with respect to this original 'Esdras,' it will certainly never pass out of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... more, but a one-legged soldier, a hollow-eyed statesman, a scholar spectacled and slippered! When Micyllus"—here the hand slides into the waistcoat again—"when Micyllus," said my father, "asked the cock that had once been Pythagoras(2) if the affair of Troy was really as Homer told it, the cock replied scornfully, 'How could Homer know anything about it? At that time he was a camel in Bactria.' Pisistratus, according to the doctrine of metempsychosis you might have been a Bactrian camel when that which ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... imply that he cared only for himself and the affairs of his own life; but that he anticipated the inability of future ministers to avert revolution, and foreboded the worst. Two persons may use the same words, and yet their sayings be as different as the first line of Homer from the first of Virgil. The omission of the French verb disguises the fact, that the one was said in the optative, and the other ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... and faces now mouldering in the dust! For as human hearts have felt, and all human lips have declared—melancholy making poets of us all, ay, even prophets—till the pensive air of Autumn has been filled with the music of elegiac and foreboding hymns—as is the Race of Leaves—now old Homer speaks—so is the Race of Men! Nor till time shall have an end, insensate will be any creature endowed "with discourse of reason" to those mysterious misgivings, alternating with triumphant aspirations more mysterious still, when the Religion of Nature leans in awe ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... room for doubt that the surpassing interest which fiction, whether in poetry or prose, possesses for most minds arises mainly from the biographic element which it contains. Homer's "Iliad "owes its marvelous popularity to the genius which its author displayed in the portrayal of heroic character. Yet he does not so much describe his personages in detail as make them develop themselves by their actions. "There are in Homer," said Dr. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... yield the first and most plentiful relief to bees, even before our abricots blossom. The hopping-sallows open, and yield their palms before other sallows, and when they are blown (which is about the exit of May, or sometimes June) the palms (or olesikarpoi frugiperdae, as Homer terms them for their extream levity) are four inches long, and full of a fine lanuginous cotton. Of this sort, there is a salix near Dorking in Surrey, in which the julus bears a thick cottonous ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... calling attention to the Negro's achievement in this particular, it may be well to note the fact that the Negro's white neighbor, although he lives in a clime similar to that which produced in Greece, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and poets like Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles, and in Italy poets like Virgil and Horace, has not produced a philosopher or a first-class poet, with all the leisure he enjoyed while the Negro has been engaged in enforced labor for him. In the highest field of thought as in philosophy and the works of ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... See the speech of Glaucus in the Iliad, (Z. 146.) This natural but melancholy image is peculiar to Homer.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... all the qualities that distinguish it to-day,—its eloquence, its symbols that open up unending vistas through mysteries, its eeriness as of the bewildering light of late sunset over gray-green Irish bog and lake and mountain, its lonely figures as great in their simplicity as those of Homer, its plain statement of high passion that breaks free of all that is occult and surprises with its clarity where so much is dim with dream. First one and then another of these qualities has most interested him. He ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... expedition into Upper Egypt, is singularly characteristic. "On turning the point of a chain of mountains which forms a kind of promontory, we saw all at once ancient Thebes in its full extent—that Thebes whose magnitude has been pictured to us by a single word in Homer, hundred-gated, a poetical and unmeaning expression which has been so confidently repeated ever since. This city, described in a few pages dictated to Herodotus by Egyptian priests, which succeeding authors have copied—renowned for numerous kings, who, through ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... twentieth of July, 1879. Count up—dat makes me 79 (born 1859), don't it? My daddy's name was Sam, same as mine, and mammy's was Mollie. Dey was slaves on de plantation of Capt. Scott—yes suh, Capt. John R. Homer Scott—at Dover. My name is Sam, same as my father's, of course. Everybody in de old days knowed Sam Scott. My father died in slavery times, but mother ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... is a dignity about these Latin races, even in their trivial everyday movements. They suggest to me, as those lines of Homer suggested to Mr. Pater's Marius, thoughts which almost seem to be memories of a time when all ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... harbour-bar Out where our songs fly free Across time's bounded sea, A boundless flight beyond the dim sun's car, Till all the spheres of night Chime concord round their flight Too loud for blasts of warring change to mar, From stars that sang for Homer's birth To these that gave our Landor welcome ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... halted this great reform. I earnestly hope that the people of Alabama will take the lead of southern States east of the Mississippi and follow the wise leadership of Texas and Missouri and other progressive commonwealths. There is no doubt of its ratification. Let Alabama lead and not follow." Homer S. Cummings, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and other prominent Democrats added their earnest appeals to the Senate for ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... of a sunken prime! You to reviewers are as ball to bat. They shadow you with Homer, knock you flat With Shakespeare: bludgeons brainingly sublime On you the excommunicates of Rhyme, Because you sing not in the living Fat. The wiry whizz of an intrusive gnat Is verse that shuns their self-producing time. Sound them their clocks, with loud alarum trump, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Dick Wythe, who never needed any tonic but a fight," returned the Governor, thoughtfully. "You remember Dick, don't you, Major?—a hard drinker, poor fellow, but handsome enough to have stepped out of Homer. I've been sitting by him at the post-office on a spring day, and seen him get up and slap a passer-by on the face as coolly as he'd take his toddy. Of course the man would slap back again, and when it was over Dick would ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... and rushing like wolves of war to the closer and more deadly hand-to-hand combat of sword and axe, of the shock of the contending forces, the hopes and fears of victory and defeat, the deeds of desperate valor, the mighty achievements of noted chiefs, on that hard-fought field no Homer has sung, and they must remain untold. All we know is that the Danes fought with desperate valor, the English with a courage inspired by revenge, fear of slavery, thirst for liberty, and the undaunted resolution of men whose every blow ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... mosaic represents the body in its extreme maceration and humiliation. The rhetorician, Dio Chrysostom, in a somewhat whimsical passage, which was suggested by a remark of Plato, found a special moral significance in the fact that Homer, though he places his heroes on the the banks of what he calls 'the fishy Hellespont,' never makes them eat fish, but always flesh and the flesh of oxen, for this, as he says, is 'strength-producing food' and is therefore suited for the formation of heroes and the proper diet for men ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... allowed to give evidence in the law courts, but butchers may not serve on juries in criminal cases, though surgeons are allowed to do so.] Great criminals prepare themselves for murder by drinking blood. Homer makes his flesh-eating Cyclops a terrible man, while his Lotus-eaters are so delightful that those who went to trade with them forgot even their own country to ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... the pale of professional criticism. It is not in their power to speak or write more contemptuously of my Horatian Odes than the Critics of Dryden's and Pope's time, in the literary journals of that Period, wrote of their Translations from Homer, Virgil, Horace, Boccace, and Chaucer. Instances of that public abuse are triumphantly inserted by Warburton in his Edition of Pope's works. See Appendix to the Dunciad. It is re-published there, to justify ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... accompanies him. Of course, true daughter of Eve that you are, you will wish to know "right off" what Chock's other name is. Young woman, I am ashamed of you! Who ever asks for the other name of Alexander, of Hannibal, of Homer? Suffice it that he is Chock by himself,—Chock, and assistant violinist ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... Arnold?" It was at Rome too that we began the Lyra Apostolica which appeared monthly in the British Magazine. The motto shows the feeling of both Froude and myself at the time: we borrowed from M. Bunsen a Homer, and Froude chose the words in which Achilles, on returning to the battle, says, "You shall know the difference, now that I ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... them dreadful to their enemies in battle, and ferocious-looking even in time of peace. Their civilisation was of a much higher type than that of the Iberians; their weapons, their war-chariots, their mode of life and their treatment of women, are all so closely similar to that of the Greeks of Homer that a theory has been advanced and ably defended, that the Homeric Greeks were really invading Celts—Gaelic or Gaulish tribes from the north of Europe. If it indeed be so, we owe to the Celts a debt of imperishable culture and civilisation. To them belongs more especially, in our ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... preserved," said the licentiate, "and kept as a jewel; and let such another casket be made for it as that which Alexander found among the spoils of Darius appropriated to preserve the works of the poet Homer....Therefore, master Nicholas, saving your better judgment let this and Amadis de Gaul be exempted from the flames, and let all the rest perish without any farther inquiry." "Not so neighbour," replied the barber, "for behold here the renowned Don ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... touching and beautiful lines. The Ballad of the White Horse is an epic of the struggle between Christian and Pagan. One of the essentials of an epic is that its men should be decent men, if they cannot be heroes. The Iliad would have been impossible if it had occurred to Homer to introduce the Government contractors to the belligerent powers. All the point would have gone out of Orlando Furioso if it had been the case that the madness of Orlando was the delirium tremens of an habitual drunkard. Chesterton recognizing ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... country-side received an invitation—all being needed to "heave up," at the boss carpenter's pompous word of command, the ponderous timbers seemingly meant to last forever. A feast followed, with contests of strength and agility worthy of description on Homer's page. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... will understand the feeling. Later on I lied through habit; later still because, after all, the classics were all that I had and so I valued them. I have seen thus a deceived dog value a pup with a broken leg, and a pauper child nurse a dead doll with the sawdust out of it. So I nursed my dead Homer and my broken Demosthenes though I knew in my heart that there was more sawdust in the stomach of one modern author than in the whole lot of them. Observe, I am not saying which it is that has ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... why children of the simplest minds and the purest hearts are often so acute to distinguish, in the tales you tell them, or the songs you sing, the difference between the true art and the false, passion and jargon, Homer and Racine,—echoing back, from hearts that have not yet felt what they repeat, the melodious accents of the natural pathos. Apart from her studies, Viola was a simple, affectionate, but somewhat wayward child,—wayward, not in temper, for that was sweet and docile; but ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... to be found in Homer, Virgil, and other Greek and Latin authors; they were doubtless originally derived from the Hebrews, or rather the Egyptians, from whom the Greeks took their religion, which they arranged to their own ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... its sympathy with the war spirit. A person Christianly educated can hardly read some of his descriptions in the Lady of the Lake and Marmion without an emotion of disgust, like what is excited by the same things in Homer; and as the world comes more and more under the influence of Christ, it will recede more and more from this ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... paces, that Xerxes imposed a stupendous bridge of boats, for the purpose of transporting into Europe a hundred and seventy myriads of barbarians. A sea contracted within such narrow limits may seem but ill to deserve the singular epithet of broad, which Homer, as well as Orpheus, has frequently bestowed on the Hellespont. * But our ideas of greatness are of a relative nature: the traveller, and especially the poet, who sailed along the Hellespont, who pursued the windings of the stream, and contemplated the rural scenery, which appeared on ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Sweet Ulysses, say Old Homer was mistaken; The Goddess must have had her way, And turned thee ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... lying as the basis of human action and responsibility, was recognized by Homer, who ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... well-established character, and one well known and of the first repute for his conduct in the most important and weighty matters of state; so that I shall seem to have gained not only the fame which Alexander on his visit to Sigeum said had been bestowed on Achilles by Homer, but also the weighty testimony of a great and illustrious man. For I like that saying of Hector in Naevius, who not only rejoices that he is "praised," but adds, "and by one who has himself been praised." But if I fail to obtain my request ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... refused to come to the scratch on any terms. Homer is silent as to how long the walls of Ilium took to dry; they must have been wet if they were built by Neptune. But one may be excused for doubting if they took as long as wet new plaster does, in premises parties are waiting to come into, and getting impatient, in London. Ascribe this ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... on Homer's poetry (s. 24.), says, sneezing was considered by that poet as a good sign ([Greek: sumbolon agathon]); and from the Anthology (lib. ii.) the words [Greek: oude legei, Zeu soson, ean ptarei], show that it was proper to exclaim "God bless you!" ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... "Auld Homer sang for's daily bread; Surprising Shakspeare fin'd the wool; Great Virgil creels and baskets made; And famous ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... they moved away. A strident voice reached her from the end of the room—L. Q. C. Lamar, here to-night despite physicians. "The fight had to come. We are men, not women. The quarrel had lasted long enough. We hate each other, so the struggle had to come. Even Homer's heroes, after they had stormed and scolded long enough, fought like brave men, long ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Albert Penny's inhibitions, incased within the shell of himself, were as catalogic as Homer's list of ships. First, like Tithonus, he had no youth. Persiflage, which he secretly envied in others, on his own lips went off like damp fireworks. He loved order and his mind easily took in statistics. He had invented a wire kind of dish for utilizing ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... ceiling with dark oak, and had a little fireplace in one of the corners. The window-panes were small, and set in lead. The curiosity of this room is, that it was once the residence of Pope, and that he here wrote a considerable part of the translation of Homer, and likewise, no doubt, the admirable letters to which I have referred above. The room once contained a record by himself, scratched with a diamond on one of the window-panes, (since removed for safe-keeping to Nuneham Courtney, where it was shown me,) purporting that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... simplicity. When a man for a series of years has only had his wits to live by, I say not that he is necessarily a rogue,—he may be a good fellow; but you can scarcely expect his code of honour to be precisely the same as Sir Philip Sidney's. Homer expresses through the lips of Achilles that sublime love of truth which even in those remote times was the becoming characteristic of a gentleman and a soldier. But then, Achilles is well off during his whole life, which, though distinguished, is short. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... base world. Pale HELEN steps out upon the battlements and turns to FLAUBERT her appealing glance, and CELLINI paces with Madame DE SEVIGNE through the eternal shadows of unrevealed realism. And BROWNING, and HOMER, and MEREDITH, and OSCAR WILDE are with them, the fleet-footed giants of perennial youth, like unto the white-limbed Hermes, whom Polyxena once saw, and straight she hied her away to the vine-clad banks ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... beginning of the sickness men remembered what Homer says about the lower and higher ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... not to be beaten. And in their own way some of the later records are as telling. One can take the book as a text-book of the supernatural, or as a story-book of that middle world which has given us the ghosts that Homer and Shakespeare conjured up. ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... Mrs. Homer shook her head. "I am afraid not, but you can ask him. Julia will be greatly disappointed, but you know Justus is nothing if not conscientious and if he has made up his mind he ought not to go, ...
— A Dear Little Girl at School • Amy E. Blanchard
... more gorgeous and vivid tints to poetry; nor was it long before a poet appeared who knew how to employ them. Early in the fourteenth century came forth the Divine Comedy, beyond comparison the greatest work of imagination which had appeared since the poems of Homer. The following generation produced indeed no second Dante: but it was eminently distinguished by general intellectual activity. The study of the Latin writers had never been wholly neglected in Italy. But Petrarch introduced a more profound, liberal, and elegant scholarship, and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... main hero sung of by the bard in the present Book; such is the artistic adaptation of the Homeric work, clearly done with a conscious design. Ulysses has already passed through several stages—Calypso, Nausicaa, Arete; now he has reached the poet, Demodocus certainly, and perchance Homer himself, who is to sing not only of the Trojan War, but also of its consequences—this rise of man's spiritual hierarchy as here unfolded, from Nature, into Institutions, and thence into Art. After hearing Demodocus, Ulysses picks up the thread and becomes his own poet, narrating his adventures ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... merit, who was to act as tutor to my son, Woronzow Greig, then attending the High School, of which Mr. Pillans was master. Mr. Finlayson was a remarkably good Greek scholar, and my husband said, "Why not take advantage of such an opportunity of improvement?" So I read Homer for an hour every morning before breakfast. Mr. Finlayson joined the army as surgeon, and distinguished himself by his courage and humanity during the battle of Waterloo; but he was lost in the march of the army to Paris, and his brother George, ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... history Argos, Rhodes, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, and several other cities claiming Homer, I conclude that ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... Olympiad. Timaeus, however, supposes that, as there were two Lycurguses in Sparta at different times, the actions of both are ascribed to one, on account of his particular renown; and that the more ancient of them lived not long after Homer: nay, some say he had seen him. Xenophon too confirms the opinion of his antiquity, when he makes him contemporary with the Heraclidae. It is true, the latest of the Lacedaemonian kings were of the lineage of the Heraclidae; but Xenophon there seems to speak of the ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... are several towns that have laid claim to being his birthplace. M. Jean Reynaud, the distinguished French philosophical writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, once said that Basil Valentine, like Ossian and Homer, had many towns claim him years after his death. He also suggested that, like those old poets, it was possible that the writings sometimes attributed to Basil Valentine were really the work not of one man, but of several individuals. There are, however, many ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... most eloquent effort delivered with much gesticulation. The Yemassee braves set in a circle and grunted approval. They liked the sound and fury of it. Jack hurled scraps of Homer and Virgil at them when at a loss for resounding periods. The chief nodded his understanding of such words as pirates and gold and actually smiled when Jack's pantomime depicted the death of Blackbeard on the deck of his ship. ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... might do in their service should be paid as though he were not in receipt of a fixed income. These are not ordinary occurrences, or such as happen every day, but strange and out of common usage; nor are they wont to befall any but men of singular and transcendent ability, as was Homer, for whom many cities strove in rivalry, each desirous of acquiring him and making him ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... had come down to them from prehistoric times. They found it more and more difficult to believe in the Olympian deities, who were fashioned like themselves and had all the faults of mortal men. [10] An adulterous Zeus, a bloodthirsty Ares, and a scolding Hera, as Homer represents them, were hardly divinities that a cultured Greek could love and worship. For educated Romans, also, the rites and ceremonies of the ancient religion came gradually to lose their meaning. The worship of the Roman gods had never appealed to the emotions. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... knew his superiority. More than likely he had been measuring himself with the writers he had studied, and found himself not inferior. The great misfortune of his life, as he confessed himself, was never to have an aim. He had felt early some stirrings of ambition, but they were like gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave. Now, however, we have come to a period of his life when he certainly did have an aim, but necessity compelled him to renounce it as soon as it was recognised. It was not a question of ploughing or poetry. There ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... food and much of Homer and the accordion, a week passed over the heads of the outcasts. The sun again forsook them, and again from leaden skies the snowflakes were sifted over the land. Day by day closer around them drew the snowy circle, until at last ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... only much shorter, his opinions on one or two subjects briefly given, some quotations and criticisms. I was much struck with his criticisms on Virgil, whom he seems to have held in great contempt, and to have regarded as inferior to Ovid. He says, 'Take away his imitation of Homer, and what do you leave him?' Of Homer his admiration was unbounded, although he says that he never read the whole of the 'Odyssey' in the original, but that everything which is most admirable in poetry is to be found in Homer. I care the less about remembering these things because they will probably ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... it requires some effort and resolution to carry us on to the end of his long performance. This effect, of which every one is conscious, is usually ascribed to the change of manners: but manners have more changed since Homer's age; and yet that poet remains still the favorite of every reader of taste and judgment. Homer copied true natural manners, which, however rough or uncultivated, will always form an agreeable and interesting picture; but the pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... the intensest heat of fire or sun. Mrs. Shelley relates that a great part of the "Cenci" was written on their house-roof near Leghorn, where Shelley lay exposed to the unmitigated ardour of Italian summer heat; and Hogg describes him reading Homer by a blazing fire-light, or roasting his skull upon the hearth-rug by ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... of heaven shine not till it is dark. Seven cities strove for Homer's bones, 'tis said, "Through which the living Homer begged for bread." When in their coffins they lay dumb and stark Shakespeare began to live, Dante to sing, And Poe's sweet lute began its werbelling. Rear monuments of fame or flattery— Think ye their sleeping souls are ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... arm-chair, with his head resting on his hand, and his brow painfully wrinkled. He looked quite old—at least seventy. Now he was up, walking about the room with springy stride, his mind actively engaged in framing theories on the use of pork by HOMER's contemporaries. If I could only keep him engaged, he would forget the blow that had descended upon him, and would regain his usual equanimity. A question as to whether he thought Achilles liked sage with his pork, cunningly led him on to a long disquisition, till, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... MATERIALS, and which consequently transforms them into capital and wealth. Capital is the result of labor,— that is, realized intelligence and life,—as animals and plants are realizations of the soul of the universe, and as the chefs d'oeuvre of Homer, Raphael, and Rossini are expressions of their ideas and sentiments. Value is the proportion in which all the realizations of the human soul must balance each other in order to produce a harmonious whole, which, being wealth, gives ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... 'Could I unfold the influence of names, I were a second greater Trismegistus!' Names occupy a place in literature peculiarly their own. From Homer downwards, all great writers have recognized their magical value. The most superficial readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey must have noticed how liberally every page is sprinkled with capital letters. The name of a god or of a hero blazes like an oriflamme in almost every line. And Macaulay, ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... you shall read Homer. He is the greatest, he is the Master. There is Pope for a beginning. I will teach ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... beat a retreat, lest we should have our eyes put out by their immense horns; Gringalet followed our example. Lucien sat down so as to laugh at his ease, for l'Encuerado, instead of running away, drew his bill-hook, assuming a threatening attitude to his enemies, and, like one of Homer's heroes, defied them to come near him. At last the whole band of beetles united and suspended themselves to the branch of a ceiba, a tree for which the Hercules ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... and verse, both for matter and style, should not have found a printer till the fifteenth century was long past, and then in a style which, for the Sophocles, can only be called neat. The Thucydides is handsome, but far inferior to the glory of the princeps Homer. And to own them—for a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... Sobey nor the mare—nor, for that matter, the jackass—had ever read the eighteenth book of Homer's Iliad; and this must be their excuse for letting pass the encounter with less eloquence than I, its narrator, might have made a fortune by reporting. For once Gunner Sobey's readiness failed him, under emotion too deep ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... its lucid procedure, to forget that there is one thing which it will never explain, and that thing is poetry. Books beget books; but the mystery of conception still evades us. We display, as if in a museum, all the bits of thought and fragments of expression that Milton may have borrowed from Homer and Virgil, from Ariosto and Shakespeare. Here is a far-fetched conceit, and there is an elaborately jointed comparison. But these choice fragments and samples were to be had by any one for the taking; what ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... away. Stoop down when you are on the ridge of each table. A trout may be basking at the lower end of the pool, who will see you, rush up, and tell all his neighbours. Take off that absurd black chimney-pot, which you are wearing, I suppose, for the same reason as Homer's heroes wore their koruthous and phalerous, to make yourself look taller and more terrible to your foes. Crawl up on three legs; and when you are in position, kneel ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... progress of these Americans in taste, their amazing leaps, like grasshoppers up to the sun—from ... what is the 'from,' what depth, do you remember, say, ten or twelve years back?—to—Carlyle, and Tennyson, and you! So children leave off Jack of Cornwall and go on just to Homer. ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... of the year. The dies caniculares, or dog-days, were reckoned to begin twenty days before, and to continue for twenty days after, the heliacal rising of Sirius, the dog-star. During those days a peculiar influence was believed to exist which created diseases in men and madness among dogs. Homer alludes to ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... avoided falling into precipices, off the quays, or down staircases is a great mystery. The sides of his overcoat bulged out with pocket editions of various poets. When not engaged in reading Virgil, Homer, or Mistral, in parks, restaurants, streets, and suchlike public places, he indited sonnets (in French) to the eyes, ears, chin, hair, and other visible perfections of a nymph called Therese, the daughter, honesty compels me to state, of a certain ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... part of the seventeenth century, and during nearly the whole of the eighteenth, the literature of Rome exercised an imperial sway over European taste. Pope thought fit to assume an apologetic tone when he clothed Homer in an English dress, and reminded the world that, as compared with Virgil, the Greek poet had at least the merit of coming first. His own mind was of an emphatically Latin order. The great poets of his day mostly based their art on the canons recognised by Horace. And ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... yielding Magna Charta to the barons. While the Caesars were building Rome the Pymeut forefathers were building just such ighloos as this. While Pheidias wrought his marbles, the men up here carved walrus-ivory, and, in lieu of Homer, recited "The Crow's Last Flight" and "The Legend of the ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... classical authority for it, though," said Mr. Armstrong. "Homer, himself, condescends to introduce a God, when he cannot extricate himself from ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... cool sort of tone by which people show they assent to admiration without participating in it, and added something of there being no language but Greek; at which Harry Benson laughed and asked him if he was still reviewing his Homer. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... autobiography, has a bully chapter on Charlie Russell. Charles M. Russell, the Cowboy Artist: A Bibliography, by Karl Yost, Pasadena, California, 1948, is better composed than its companion biography, Charles M. Russell the Cowboy Artist, by Ramon F. Adams and Homer E. Britzman. (Both OP.) One of the most concrete pieces of writing on Russell is a chapter in In the Land of Chinook, by Al. J. Noyes, Helena, Montana, 1917. "Memories of Charlie Russell," in Memories of ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... nearly by himself. I hope you beat him, anyhow. He's got an awful swelled head. They say the only reason he wants to join the Scouts is so that he can get a chance to show he's a better pitcher than you are. That's Homer Lawrence ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland
... Homer's Goddess Ate hath not involved into this discontented [1745]rank, or plagued with some misery or other. Hyginus, fab. 220, to this purpose hath a pleasant tale. Dame Cura by chance went over a brook, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... poetry to-day, it may not impossibly be due to the fact that we have ceased to prize the old, old tales which have been the delight of the child and the child-man since the foundations of the world. If you want your child to love Homer, do not withhold ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... 'to be sure I delight in Homer and the Georgics, and plenty more. What splendid things there are in these old fellows! But, I never liked the drudgery part of the affair; and now if I am to be set to work to be accurate, and to get up ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of those lands Whence painting, sculpture and the drama sprung; See starved Trinacria's outstretched, empty hands, And all the classic shores by Homer sung! ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... spoke of Sophia or wisdom; when they heard the first preacher who told them of their innermost selves, they called him the Prophetes or prophet, the man that speaketh forth as from an illimitable deep; and when they listened to the soul of music coming from the lips of a Homer or a Sappho, they called it by the most expressive name of all, "making" or "creation". The poet was a creator. And so he is if we come to think of it. Out of the materials supplied to him by the thinking of other intelligences, he weaves his song of joy and beauty which holds ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Firdausi, the Homer of Persia (eleventh century), has the following remarks in his scathing satire on the sultan Mahmud, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Pythagoras too, whose teaching is not new to you, worships one god only, whom he calls Apollo; because, like the Greek sun-god, he is the source of light and of those harmonies which Pythagoras holds to be higher than all else. And lastly, Xenophanes of Colophon laughs at the many and divers gods of Homer and sets one single deity on high—the ceaselessly creative might of nature, whose essence consists ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sufficiently galling form of asceticism? His friends habitually looked askance upon all those pleasures of the intellect and the imagination which are not directly subservient to the religious emotions. They had grave doubts of the expediency of his studies of the pagan Homer. They looked with suspicion upon the slightest indulgence in social amusements. And Cowper fully shared their sentiments. A taste for music, for example, generally suggests to him a parson fiddling when he ought ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... save his own axe and therefore he counselled him to guard it well, since if it was lifted against him in another's hands it would bring him down to death, which nothing else could do. Like to the heel of Achilles whereof the great Homer sings—have ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... on TESTIMONY,—and that the 'testimony' was drawn up afterward and is a spurious invention—but we have no more proof that it IS spurious than we have of [Footnote: See Chapter XIII. "In Al-Kyris"—the allusion to "Oruzel."] Homer's Iliad being a compilation of several writers and not the work of a Homer at all. Nothing—not even the events of the past week—can be safely rested on absolute, undiffering testimony, inasmuch as no two narrators tell the same story alike. But all the same we HAVE the Iliad,—it ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of thought and passion, all modern languages are dull, ill-contrived, and barbarous." He thought that even the most accomplished of modern writers might still be glad to "borrow descriptive power from Tacitus; dignified perspicuity from Livy; simplicity from Caesar; and from Homer some portion of that light and heat which, dispersed into ten thousand channels, has filled the world with bright images and illustrious thoughts. Let the cultivator of modern literature addict himself to the purest models of taste which France, Italy, and England could supply—he ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... memor: certis medium et tolerabile rebus The Poet thus, from faults scarce ever free, Becomes a very Chaerilus to me; Who twice or thrice, by some adventure rare, Stumbling on beauties, makes me smile and stare; Me, who am griev'd and vex'd to the extreme, If Homer seem to nod, or chance to dream: Tho' in a work of length o'erlabour'd sleep At intervals may, not ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... be,—thought I,—to whom my tremendous hero turns tail! The carrier saw the muzzle hanging, cut and useless, from his neck, and I eagerly told him the story, which Bob and I always thought, and still think, Homer, or King David, or Sir Walter, alone were worthy to rehearse. The severe little man was mitigated, and condescended to say, "Rab, ma man, puir Rabbie!"—whereupon the stump of a tail rose up, the ears were cocked, the eyes filled, ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... most successful attempt to elevate The Dunciad comes in section two of his poem. Unlike Dryden, in whose Discourse the account of the "progress" of satire is confined almost exclusively to a few Roman writers, Harte begins his account of its progress with Homer and brings it down to Pope. Deriving the ancestry of The Dunciad from Homer, the greatest epic poet, obviously enhances Pope's satire. Perhaps less obviously, by extending Dryden's account to the present, Harte makes The Dunciad not only a chronological terminus ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... This is the first mention of surgeons in the Greek army, as Mr. Stanford observes, since the time of Homer. But whether the persons here mentioned were professed surgeons, or merely some of the soldiers, who, in long service, had gained experience in the treatment of wounds, is uncertain. The latter supposition is more in consonance with ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... the world shown him at lunch-time, a world capable of existing—there was no doubt about that—but so unnecessary, such a thing to believe in— Shaw and Wells and the serious sixpenny weeklies! What were they after, scrubbing and demolishing, these elderly people? Had they never read Homer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans? He saw it clearly outlined against the feelings he drew from youth and natural inclination. The poor devils had rigged up this meagre object. Yet something of pity was in him. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... at Athens the power which his father Pisistratus had usurped, was one of those princes who may be said to have polished the fetters of their subjects. He was the first, according to Plato, who edited the poems of Homer, and commanded them to be sung by the rhapsodists at the celebration of the Panathenaea. From his court, which was a sort of galaxy of genius, Anacreon could not long be absent. Hipparchus sent a barge for him; the poet readily embraced the invitation, and ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... "easily imitated style"; for, of the hundreds who have tried, how many, besides Franklin, have really succeeded in imitating it? We do not believe that Latin and Greek are an "obstructing nuisance," or that the student of Homer and Thucydides and Demosthenes and Plato and Aristotle and Caesar and Cicero and Tacitus is merely studying "the prattle of infant man," or "adding the ignorance of the ancients to the ignorance he was born with." We believe, on the contrary, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... is always better composed than the real one Advantage that a calm temper gives one over men Art is the chosen truth Artificialities of style of that period Artistic Truth, more lofty than the True As Homer says, "smiling under tears" Difference which I find between Truth in art and the True in fac Happy is he who does not outlive his youth He did not blush to be a man, and he spoke to men with force History too was a work of art In every age we laugh at the costume of our fathers ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... virtue or vice. They hardly ever have been prosperous if they have not done this, and, considering how many miscarry altogether, it is no small feather in a man's cap if he has been no worse than his neighbours. Homer tells us about some one who made it his business [Greek text]—always to excel and to stand higher than other people. What an uncompanionable disagreeable person he must have been! Homer's heroes generally came ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... the popular thought of his time: this feeling that there had been a lost Golden Age in the past was deeply rooted in Greek mythology. We get it long before Plato, in Hesiod, and there are similar touches in Homer, and once men believe that they have sunk from glory, there is always the dread that if ever they recover it they will lose it again. And with Plato this dread is reinforced by his sense of something incurable in the world, the thwarting influence of ...
— Progress and History • Various
... wildish speculation, in fact, can be got by considering what the world's literature would be, had its authors restricted themselves, as do we Americans so sedulously—and unavoidably—to writing of contemporaneous happenings. In fiction-making no author of the first class since Homer's infancy has ever in his happier efforts concerned himself at all with the great "problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rank you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... they had tended to foster; he describes their events, their characters, their relations, as if they were to continue for centuries. His remarks are such as the simplest form of human affairs gives birth to; he laments the instability of earthly fortune, as Homer notes our common mortality, or in the tone of that beautiful dialogue between Solon and Croesus, when the philosopher assured the king, that to be rich was not necessarily to be happy. But, resembling Herodotus in his simple morality, he is utterly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Provencal bards gave place to the immortal productions of the great creators of the European languages. Dante led the way in Italy, and gave to the world the "Divine Comedy"—a masterpiece of human genius, which raised him to the rank of Homer and Virgil. Petrarch followed in his steps, and, if not as profound or original as Dante, yet is unequalled as an "enthusiastic songster of ideal love." He also gave a great impulse to civilization by his labors in collecting and collating manuscripts. Boccaccio also lent his ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... and Odyssey of Homer into English Blank Verse, 4 vols. 8vo., half bound in morocco, uncut, top edges gilt, illustrated with a choice set of engravings by Fuseli, Stothard, Burley, and others, proofs before letters, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 44, Saturday, August 31, 1850 • Various
... instance. Indeed love in all its forms was familiar to the ancients. Where can we find a more beautiful expression of ardent passion than glows in Sappho's songs? or of patient faithful constancy than in Homer's Penelope? Could there be a more beautiful picture of the union of two loving hearts, even beyond the grave, than Xenophon has preserved for us in his account of Panthea and Abradatas? or the story of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers |
