"Homer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of history, and I can remember his often turning back to Hume, Macaulay, Hallam, and other historical works. He read various books on the French Revolution with great interest. He had several classics always near him, such as Homer and Virgil; and he always carried about with him a small edition of Horace. Of Shakespeare he could repeat much, and knew the plays well, entering into and discussing the characters. He admired Milton very greatly and was fond of reading "Paradise ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... And wept the North that could not find relief. Then madness joined its harshest tone to strife: A minor note swelled in the song of life Till, stirring with the love that filled his breast, But still, unflinching at the Right's behest Grave Lincoln came, strong-handed, from afar,— The mighty Homer of the lyre of war! 'Twas he who bade the raging tempest cease, Wrenched from his strings the harmony of peace, Muted the strings that made the discord,—Wrong, And gave his spirit up in thund'rous song. Oh, mighty Master of ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... ransacked for proof of this. Poseidon is the lord of wind and wave. Now, there are waves of corn, under the wind, as well as waves of the sea. When the Suabian rustic sees the wave running over the corn, he says, Da lauft das Pferd, and Greeks before Homer would say, in face of the billowing corn, [Greek], There run horses! And Homer himself {51c} says that the horses of Erichthonius, children of Boreas, ran over cornfield and sea. We ourselves speak of sea-waves as 'white horses.' So, to be brief, Mannhardt ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... betray my secrets, you cannot expect me to keep yours. I assure you, Captain Waverley, that Fergus is too proud to exchange his broardsword for a marechal's baton, that he esteems Mac-Murrough a far greater poet than Homer, and would not give up his goat-skin purse for all the louis-d'or ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... barrier between that gentle nature and mine. Besides, I am ashamed to say, that I cannot imagine love in the midst of poverty. Perhaps this is a vitiation due to that malady of mankind called civilization; but a woman in squalid poverty would exert no fascination over me, were she attractive as Homer's Galatea, the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... attributing to a later age than the bulk of the two Homeric epics, in this poetry il se fait grand jour.[853] This is not the first time that I have compared the religion of the Roman patricians to that of Homer;[854] and there is a growing conviction among experts that we have in each case the ideas of a comparatively civilised immigrant population, whose religion, though it has developed in very different ways, has the common characteristic of cleanness and brightness. ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... it is stark naught. When the men did anything, it was after they had left the academy, and began thinking for themselves. There is only one picture among the many hundreds that has, to my idea, much merit (a charming composition of Homer singing, signed Jourdy); and the only good that the Academy has done by its pupils was to send them to Rome, where they might learn better things. At home, the intolerable, stupid classicalities, taught ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Isaeus; of the three hundred and ninety-one speeches of Lysias; of the hundred and eighty treatises of Theophrastus; of the eighth book of the conic sections of Apollonius; of Pindar's hymns and dithyrambics; and of the five and forty tragedies of Homer Junior. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... same immortality under a condition similar to that of Noureddin in an Eastern tale. Noureddin, you remember, was to enjoy the gift of immortality, but with this qualification,—that he was subjected to long naps of forty, fifty, or a hundred years at a time. Even so Homer and Virgil slumbered through whole centuries. Shakspeare himself enjoyed undisturbed sleep from the age of Charles I., until Garrick waked him. Dryden's fame has nodded; that of Pope begins to be drowsy; Chaucer is as sound ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... ninth was a thrilling piece of business, wasn't it, Toby? Why, only for our right fielder, Big Bob Jeffries, hitting that screamer straight into the hands of the man playing deep centre instead of lifting it over his head for a homer, we'd have won out. There were two on bases, you remember, with the score three ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... story of that 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 ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... have thrown back to some earlier progenitor. Even their intellects and moral outlook were quite different. She had, it is true, something of his scholarly power; thus, notwithstanding her wild upbringing, as has been said, she could read the Greek Testament almost as well as he could, or even Homer, which she liked because the old, bloodthirsty heroes reminded her of the Zulus. He had taught her this and other knowledge, and she was an apt pupil. But there the resemblance stopped. Whereas his intelligence was narrow and enslaved by the priestly tradition, hers was wide and human. She searched ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... successful. "He did not appreciate the niceties of scholarship, and could not write verses or do Greek or Latin prose at all well;" and he was accordingly placed in the Third Class. But as soon as the tyranny of Virgil and Homer and Sophocles was overpast, he betook himself to more congenial studies. Of the two tutors who then made Balliol famous, he owed nothing to Jowett and everything to T. H. Green. That truly great man "simply fell in love" with his brilliant pupil, and gave him ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... relations to worry him. The man who possesses a permanent address, and whose name is to be found in the Directory, is necessarily limited and localised. Only the tramp has absolute liberty of living. Was not Homer himself a vagrant, and did not Thespis go about in a caravan? It is then with feelings of intense expectation that we open the little volume that lies before us. It is entitled Low Down, by Two Tramps, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Jonson, we do have the type of the young man bent on getting scholarship as the best thing possible to him. The bricklayer's apprentice, unwillingly following the craft of his stepfather, sticking obstinately all the while to his Horace and his Homer, resolute to keep and to add to the humanities he had learned in the grammar school, stands out clearly alongside of the other, far less enthusiastic for knowledge and letters, but also far more plastically ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... virtue and piety. The language seems to fall short of his ideas; he pours along, familiarizing the terms of philosophy, with bold inversions, and sonorous periods; but we may apply to him, what Pope has said of Homer: "It is the sentiment that swells and fills out the diction, which rises with it, and forms itself about it: like glass in the furnace, which grows to a greater magnitude, as the breath within is more powerful, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... modern ideas of education, which they read of sometimes in The Times or The Guardian, and hoped fervently that King's School would remain true to its old traditions. The dead languages were taught with such thoroughness that an old boy seldom thought of Homer or Virgil in after life without a qualm of boredom; and though in the common room at dinner one or two bolder spirits suggested that mathematics were of increasing importance, the general feeling was that they were a less noble study than the classics. Neither German nor chemistry ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... have made use not only of Homer's 'Odyssey,' but also of that excellent reader which is used in the public schools of Germany, Willman's 'Lesebuch aus Homer.' We have divided the little volume into three parts, the first of which ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... 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 ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... higher aesthetic as well as spiritual models of principles, and revealed man's body to be the temple of the Holy Ghost. To look for our modern philanthropy in that "Greek Gazette," the Iliad of Homer—to expect that reverence for the Supreme Being which the Bible has taught us in the Metamorphoses of Ovid—or to seek that refinement of manners and language which has only of late prevailed amongst us, in the plays of Aristophanes ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... the gods. The typical method of this criticism is that the higher conceptions of the gods are used against the lower. From the earliest times the Greek religious sense favoured absoluteness of definition where the gods are concerned; even in Homer they are not only eternal and happy, but also all-powerful and all-knowing. Corresponding expressions of a moral character are hardly to be found in Homer; but as early as Hesiod and Solon we find, at any ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... week an untoward circumstance happened, which, while it increased his popularity, diminished a good deal (as he thought) his chance of success. The fourth-form were learning a Homer lesson, and Barker, totally unable to do it by his own resources, was trying to borrow a crib. Eric, much to their mutual disgust, still sat next to him in school, and would have helped him if he had chosen to ask; but he never did choose, nor did Eric care to volunteer. The consequence was, that ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... poetry had gone through the whole circle of human interests before they turned to the representation of nature, and even then the latter filled always a limited and subordinate place. And yet, from the time of Homer downward, the powerful impression made by nature upon man is shown by countless verses and chance expressions. The Germanic races which founded their states on the ruins of the Roman Empire were thoroughly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Homer clanged it, Omar twanged it, Greece and Persia knew!— Nimrod's reivers, Hiram's weavers, Hindu, Kurd, and Jew— Crowning Tyre, Troy afire, they have dreamed the dream; Tiber-side and Nilus-tide brightened with ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... oldest, as it is one of the noblest in the Spanish language. Written probably not later than the year 1200, it is of about three thousand lines in length, and of such merit that its unknown author has been designated the "Homer of Spain." As it was written soon after the death of the Cid, it could not have deviated far from historic truth. Chief among the prose works is the "Chronicle of the Cid,"—Chronica del famoso Cavallero Cid Ruy Diez,—which, with ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... 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 ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... 'Homer's Epithets were much admired by Antiquity: See what great Justness and Variety there is in these Epithets of the Trees in the Forest where the Red-cross Knight lost Truth, B. I. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... in this country? No, my Lords, he exactly followed the advice which Longinus gives to a great writer:—"Whenever you have a mind to elevate your mind, to raise it to its highest pitch, and even to exceed yourself, upon any subject, think how Homer would have described it, how Plato would have imagined it, and how Demosthenes would have expressed it; and when you have so done, you will then, no doubt, have a standard which will raise you up to the dignity of anything that human genius can aspire to." Mr. Hastings was ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... you who led me to understand the marvelous framework of ideas on which the great Italian poet built his poem, the only work which the moderns can place by that of Homer. Till I heard you, the Divine Comedy was to me a vast enigma to which none had found the clue—the commentators least of all. Thus, to understand Dante is to be as great as he; but every form of ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... maiden's cheeks and to the maiden's fan; youth sings to the flower, to the bee, to the bird, and even to the mouse. And what is true of the individual is equally true of the race. The earliest voices in the literature of any nation are those of song. In Greece Homer, like his favorite cicada, chirps right gladly, and in England Chaucer and Shakespeare are first of all bards. In France and Germany it is even difficult to find the separate prominent singers, for there the whole nation, whatever hath articulate voice in it, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... wandering old Homer, the blind son of Scio's isle, was the inspiration of Samian wine; and good old Noah, too, would have sung some good and merry song, from the inspiration of the juice of the vine he planted, but having to wait so ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... which a poem can be conceived—in which the matter of it can be digested: this is the only womb whose activity could usher to an admiring world, the sublime stanzas which develope the story of the unfortunate Priam, and immortalize their author. A head organized like that of Homer, furnished with the same vigour, glowing with the same vivid imagination, enriched with the same erudition, placed under the same circumstances, would necessarily, and not by chance, produce the poem of the Iliad; at least, unless it be denied that ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... take a stroll in the quiet groves of Slumber I noticed a commotion near one of the entrances to my enchanted palace. It was evident from the whispering and buzzing that went round that more celebrities had arrived. The first personage I saw was Homer, blind no more, leading by a golden chain the white-beaked ships of the Achaians bobbing their heads and squawking like so many white swans. Plato and Mother Goose with the numerous children of the shoe came next. Simple Simon, Jill, and Jack who had had his head mended, and ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... pretending to honour and obey a primate or bishop, to whom the nickname of Golias was given at the period in which they flourished most. Viewed in his literary capacity, this chief was further designated as the Archpoet. Of his personality we know as little as we do of that of Homer. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... When you cannot preserve your own position." This adventure in itself, without going further, Might serve as a lesson, to most of mankind, For of us mortals, a certain part inclines, To the belief, that, with the help of mind, The book of Destiny may easily be read, But this book, by Homer and his disciples sung, What is it called but Chance, by ancients, And by us Christians named Providence instead. Now in Chance there can no science be, Or why should it be called by them Chance— And things uncertain, who knows in advance? ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... 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 ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... poem, "Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs." In that poem he retold a story of which an Icelandic version, the "Volsunga Saga," written in the twelfth century, is one of the world's masterpieces. It is the great epic of Northern Europe, just as the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" of Homer are the chief epics of ancient Greece, and the "AEneid" of Virgil the chief epic of the Roman Empire. Morris's love for these great stories of ancient times led him to rewrite the tale of the Volsungs ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... shall se the good Homer have ben aslepe to be wyllyng by good maner ou ilz verront le bon Homere auoir dormy le ...
— An Introductorie for to Lerne to Read, To Pronounce, and to Speke French Trewly • Anonymous
... spent either out of doors, or in her father's lap. He would not allow her to attend the district school; all she knew she learned from him. Reuben Miller had never looked into an English grammar or a history, but he knew Shakespeare by heart, and much of Homer; a few odd volumes of Walter Scott's novels, some old voyages, a big family Bible, and a copy of Byron, were the only other books in his house. As Draxy grew older, Reuben now and then borrowed from the minister books which he thought would do her good; but the child and he both loved Homer and ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... not signify that these books are valueless. When it was discovered that the Homeric writings were not all the work of Homer, the value of the Homeric writings was not affected. As pictures of the life of that remote antiquity they had not lost their significance. The value of these Mosaic books is of a very different sort from that of the Homeric writings, but the discoveries ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... had my great adventure," he said, "I have helped to fight the wild men, and in the days to come I can speak boastfully of it, even as the great Greeks in Homer spoke boastfully of their achievements, but once is enough. I am a man of peace and years, and I would fain wage the battles of learning rather ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the deep" when sailing from the pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) to Corfu. Yet such a course taken now would land the traveller in Africa. Odysseus is said in his voyage in springtime to have seen the Pleiades and Arcturus setting late, which seemed to early commentators a proof of Homer's inaccuracy. Likewise Homer, both in the Odyssey [2] (v. 272-5) and in the Iliad (xviii. 489), asserts that the Great Bear never set in those latitudes. Now it has been found that the precession of the equinoxes explains all these puzzles; shows that in springtime ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... than he conspired to forge the Pentateuch. That Hogg did not forge Auld Maitland I think I have made as nearly certain as anything in this region can be. I think that the results are a lesson to professors of the Higher Criticism of Homer. ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... the birds; but outside of crows, robins, jay-birds and things like that we didn't know 'em—neither Mitch nor I. We didn't care, for what's the use of knowing names of things? You can't pronounce 'em anyway, and I've noticed people get queer studying such things, like Homer Jones who gathered weeds and flowers and ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... in Homer an epithet of Ares; at another date (cf. Aristoph. "Peace," 456) looked upon as a ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... spectator with the truth and reality of its revelations, as these rude toys, that must have been handled by prattling Egyptian children, when all was dark throughout Europe, save on the shore of the southern sea, where glimmered fitful lights of awakening civilisation, and Homer was enshrining the poor knowledge of his period in the splendid fancies of his poet soul. Not vastly different from the rude dolls of the present century must these of Egypt have been when fresh from the workman's hand. They are in a very disabled state now, however; one being a rude representation ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... field nearly opposite there is perhaps the best view over the town of Birmingham that can be taken. A short distance beyond, on the right, is a row of houses, to which is given the name of Highgate. A little farther, on the left, is a tan-yard, upon an extensive scale, the property of Mr. Avery Homer. ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye
... once, and you can read no more, For all books else appear so mean, so poor; Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, And Homer will be all the ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... at St. Michael's Church in 1771, and succeeded to her father's business as a tobacconist and grocer. Paine was more successful as a debater than a business man. As a member of the White Hart evening club he was more often than any other the winner of the Headstrong Book—an old Greek Homer despatched the next morning to the most obstinate haranguer of the preceding night. It was at Lewes that Tom Paine's thoughts were first turned to the question of government. He used thus to tell the story. One evening after playing bowls, all the party retired to drink punch; when, in the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... of syntax, Dr. Adam remarks, "Adverbs sometimes likewise qualify substantives;" and gives Latin examples of the following import: "Homer plainly an orator:"—"Truly Metellus;"—"To-morrow morning." But this doctrine is not well proved by such imperfect phrases, nor can it ever be very consistently admitted, because it destroys the characteristic difference ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... shots came from Crete, that long, beautiful island south of Greece, called in the time of Homer the "Isle of One Hundred Cities." It has a most heroic history, remaining free long after Greece herself had become subject to Rome. Only in the year 68 B.C., after a long and determined effort upon the part of Rome, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 18, March 11, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... subject—from which it was taken, let them; they have not yet. If they point out (as they can) French and English books from which parts of it were taken, similar things may be done with Dante and Chaucer, with Shakespeare and Milton, and very probably could have been done with Homer. It is what the artist does with his materials, not where he gets them, that is the question. And Malory has done, with his materials, a very great thing indeed. He is working no doubt to a certain extent blindly; working much better than he knows, and sometimes as he would ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... cambric. Indeed had I the power to make you better, my little book, I would have exercised that power to the utmost. A good conscience is a continual feast, and I summon high Heaven to be my witness that had I been Homer you had awed the world, another Iliad. I lament your inability to do this, as heartily as any person living; yet Heaven willed it; and it is in consequence to Heaven these aforementioned cavillers should ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... as the most renowned school for wisdom and politics, and the source from whence most arts and sciences were derived. This kingdom bestowed its noblest labours and finest arts on the improvement of mankind; and Greece was so sensible of this, that its most illustrious men, as Homer, Pythagoras, Plato; even its great legislators, Lycurgus and Solon, with many more whom it is needless to mention, travelled into Egypt, to complete their studies, and draw from that fountain whatever was most rare and valuable in every kind of learning. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... 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 has written in explanation of patriotic verse, of folk-verse, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... substance which is more combustible than the wood. This sulphur—which most people call brimstone—has been known from very early times. In the middle ages it was regarded as the "principle of fire." It is referred to by Moses and Homer and Pliny. A very distinguished chemist, Geber, describes it as one of "the principles of nature." Having fired my tinder, as you see, and blown upon it, I place my sulphur match in contact with the red-hot tinder. And now I want you to notice that the sulphur ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... collection of old verses, which by patching together, sometimes aided by other boys, I could work into any subject. Much attention was paid to learning by heart the lessons of the previous day; this I could effect with great facility, learning forty or fifty lines of Virgil or Homer, whilst I was in morning chapel; but this exercise was utterly useless, for every verse was forgotten in forty-eight hours. I was not idle, and with the exception of versification, generally worked ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... masters of song. First, Orpheus taught you religious rites, and from bloody murder to stay your hands: Musaeus healing and oracle lore; and Hesiod all the culture of lands, The time to gather, the time to plough. And gat not Homer his glory divine By singing of valour, and honour, and right, and the sheen of the battle-extended line, The ranging of troops and the ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... being are translated 'Maker,' 'Preserver,' 'Benefactor,' 'Great Friend.' Though compact of all good qualities, the being has allowed the world to 'come under the control of evil spirits,' who, alone, receive religious worship. Though he leaves things uncontrolled, yet the chief being (as in Homer) ratifies the Oath, at a treaty, and is invoked to punish criminals when ordeal water is to be drunk. So far, then, he has an ethical influence. 'Grossly wicked people' are buried outside of the regular place. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... had at hand all the materials for a great national epic, a wealth of saga-material replete with interesting episodes, picturesque and dramatic incidents and strongly defined personages, yet she never found her Homer, a gifted poet to embrace her entire literary wealth, to piece the disjointed fragments together, smooth the asperities and hand down to posterity the finished epic of the Celtic world, superior, perhaps, to the Iliad or the Odyssey. What has come down to us is "a sort of patchwork epic," as ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... all of us it stands on a razor's edge: either pitiful ruin for the Achaians or life." Homer, ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... Jericho" might, save for the prudent forethought of Mrs. Wilbur in secreting the same just as I had arrived beneath the walls and was beginning a catalogue of the various horns and their blowers, too ambitiously emulous in longanimity of Homer's list of ships, might, I say, have rendered frustrate any hope I could entertain vacare Musis for the small remainder of my days,) but only further to secure myself against any imputation of unseemly forthputting. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... a laugh. "But I wasn't always a tobacco- grower, and there were poets before Homer, who is about the only one I've ever read. It's true I've tried to lose the little education I ever had—that I've done my best to come down to the level of my own cattle; but I'm not an ox, after all, except in strength, and one has plenty ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... sentiment as to be lost and absorbed in the abstract feeling, and becomes too elevated or too refined to glow with fervor in the commendation or the love of individual benefactors. All this is unnatural. It is as if one should be so enthusiastic a lover of poetry, as to care nothing for Homer or Milton; so passionately attached to eloquence as to be indifferent to Tully and Chatham; or such a devotee to the arts, in such an ecstasy with the elements of beauty, proportion, and expression, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the epic of the eighteenth century, and betrays the artificial genius of its age. The poet rises to his flight like a heavy heron—not a hawk or eagle. Passages in it are good, but the effect of the whole is dulness. It reminds you of Cowper's 'Homer,' in which all is accurate, but all is cold, and where even the sound of battle lulls to slumber—or of Edwin Atherstone's 'Fall of Nineveh,' where you are fatigued with uniform pomp, and the story struggles and staggers under a load of words. Thomson exclaimed ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... or Naturalistic View of the Bible.—The Bible is not inspired at all, or at least in no way differing from any other book. Its authors were inspired, perhaps, just as Homer, or Thucydides, or Cicero were inspired, but not differently. It has no authority, therefore, over any other book, and is just as liable to be in error as any other. If you should bind in one volume the histories of Herodotus, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... a chasm which eternity cannot fill. Others succeed to his fame—but never to the exact place which he held in the world's eye;—they may be greater than the one we have lost—but they are not he. Shakspeare built not his throne on the same site as Homer—nor Scott on that whence Shakspeare looked down upon the universe. The gap which Scott leaves in the world is the token of the space he filled in the homage of his times. A hundred ages hence our posterity will still see that wide interval untenanted—a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... 'Commentaries,' in writing, besides a number of Tully's orations. ... In Greek his progress has not been equal, yet he has studied morsels in Aristotle's 'Poetics,' in Plutarch's 'Lives,' and Lucian's 'Dialogues,' 'The Choice of Hercules,' in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books of Homer's 'Iliad.'" ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... Elsewhere (that is in Homer) the word always means "helper," and Stein translates it so here, "thou shalt be protector and patron of Tegea" (in the place of Orestes). Mr. Woods explains it by the parallel of such phrases as {Danaoisi makhes ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... unless he has given to them much labor. The botanist must have learned to trace the herbs and flowers before he can presume to tell us how God has formed them. But the death of Hector is a fit subject for a boy's verses, though Homer also sang of it. I feel that there is scope for a book on the United States form of government as it was founded, and as it has since framed itself, which might do honor to the life-long studies of some one of those great constitutional pundits whom we have among us; but, nevertheless, the plain ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... is genius. Not the call Of Homer's or of Dante's heart sublime,— Not Michael's hand furrowing the zones of time,— Is more with compassed mysteries musical; Nay, not in Spring's or Summer's sweet footfall More gathered gifts exuberant Life bequeathes* Than ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... retribution; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judgment on the successive spirits brought before them; the flames of Tartarus, the rock of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnawing Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil, the descent into the infernal regions was a brief episode; with Dante it was the whole poem. Immense was the effort of imagination requisite to give variety to such a subject, to prevent the mind from experiencing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... away by the deluge of revolution. Confucius showed his wisdom by the high value he set upon the poetry of his native land, and his name must be set side by side with that of the astute tyrant of Athens who collected the poems of Homer and preserved them as a precious heritage to the Greek world. Confucius has given us his opinion with regard to the poems of the Shi-King. No man, he says, is worth speaking to who has not mastered the poems of an anthology, the perusal of which elevates the mind and purifies it from all corrupt ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... ages, comes to mean kingdom, government, power, to rule. Purple is formed by the union of blue and red, truth and valor. Happy the people who are truly governed by truth and valor! The Tyrian purple was famous in Homer's days, and our dreams of Tyre and its splendor are all colored by this most gorgeous of dyes, the manufacture of which from a species of shell fish gave this ancient city a celebrity which all its other arts combined could not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... rather than deter. The student says, "I will; therefore I can." He also says, "I can; therefore I will." He knows that the forces fighting for him are more than those that fight against him, strong as these are. Man in his noblest relationships, the songs of the poet (the best interpreter, from Homer and Virgil to the "Winepress" of Alfred Noyes), the torture, the pains, the sufferings, the woes, the vision of the prophet of a loving and perfect humanity, the reason of logic—all these and more are ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... instead, an almost fierce determination making his face stern. This was his resource for carrying off the extreme inward tremor which he really felt. His hostess brought out Plaxmau's designs for Dante, just received from Professor Felton of Harvard, [Footnote: The book may have been Felton's Homer with Flaxman's drawings, issued in 1833.] and the party made an evening's entertainment out ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... besides the produce of his own industry, a certain quantity of some commodity such as other people will be likely to take in exchange for the produce of their particular industries. Cattle, for example, have been widely used for this purpose in primitive societies, and Homer speaks of a suit of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... top of this let me assure you that in writing, or learning to write, solid daily practice is the prescription and 'waiting upon inspiration' a lure. These crests only rise on the back of constant labour. Nine days, according to Homer, Leto travailed with Apollo: but he was Apollo, lord of Song. I know this to be true of ordinary talent: but, supposing you all to be geniuses, I am almost as sure that it holds ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... plainly; and your peasant-girl was seized upon by some errant knight of palette and brush, and painted for her beauty. These women are what you men call fine creatures. Their limbs are rounded and shapely, their figures full and lithe; they are what I've heard you say Homer calls Briseis. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... with Lydgate's "Troy-Book," with Henryson's "Testament of Cressid" (and in a sense even with Shakespere's drama on the theme of Chaucer's poem), may be said to belong to the second cycle of modern versions of the tale of Troy divine. Already their earlier predecessors had gone far astray from Homer, of whom they only know by hearsay, relying for their facts on late Latin epitomes, which freely mutilated and perverted the Homeric narrative in favour of the Trojans—the supposed ancestors of half the nations of Europe. Accordingly, Chaucer, in a well-known passage in his "House of Fame," ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... through the various windings of this marvellous open-eyed dream; the monotonous harmony of the tarabouck and the rebek faintly reached my ear, and served as rhythm to this wonderful poem, which will, henceforth, make Homer, Virgil, Ariosto and Tasso as wearisome to read as a table of logarithms. All my senses had changed places; I saw music and heard colors; I had new perceptions, as the denizens of a planet superior to ours must have; at will, my body ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... translations which were constantly appearing through all its progressive stages of improvement, must naturally have given the language a classical turn. It is scarcely possible that a work so extensive, and so universally read, as Pope's admirable translation of Homer, should not leave some gloss of grecism upon the idiom into which so many of its greatest beauties had been transfused. At the same time the early and proud independence of the middle orders of people in England, ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... life into three periods. During his first thirty years, he produced various kinds of verse, like the Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock. The middle period of his life was marked by his translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. In his third period, he wrote moral and didactic poems, like the Essay on Man, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... we think of Homer, had he sung his impressions of the ancient Egyptians? or of Thackeray, had he novelized the life of the Babylonians? It is an ancient blindness, with an ancient wall to bruise one's head. It is only those who seek ointment of the consecrated clay that gives back sight, who see the shining way at ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... 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 ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... now in extreme age,[5] the same glory and delight in war as in the days of his early manhood when he wrote Valmy and Jemappes. Since the heroic age there are no such battle-pictures as these. The spirit of war that leaps and laughs within these pages is the spirit of Homer and Firdusi, of Beowulf and the Song of Roland, and when it sank, it was like the going down of a sun. The breath that blows through the Iliad stirs the pages of Cromwell and of Frederick; ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... declined. Vitruvius mentions that the ancients had some very important wall-paintings consisting of simple landscapes, and that others had landscape backgrounds with figures illustrating scenes from the poems of Homer. But we have no reason to believe that Greek landscape-painting was ever more than scenic or decorative work, and thus fell far short of what is now the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... heroic poetry among the Greeks. The Hellenic philosophers, historians, and geographers of later times always quoted Homer and Hesiod as authorities for the facts they related in their scientific works. The whole first book of the geography of Strabo, one of the most statistical and positive works of antiquity, has for ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... following extract about Homer's death from "Pleasant and Delightfull Dialogues in Spanish and English: Profitable to the Learner, and not vnpleasant to any other Reader. By John Minsheu, Professor of Languages in London. ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... head of a bear exquisitely sculptured out of a block of marble. It is in an unfinished state. When did bears inhabit the peninsula? Strange to say, the Maya does not furnish the name for the bear. Yet one-third of this tongue is pure Greek. Who brought the dialect of Homer to America? Or who took to Greece that of the Mayas? Greek is the offspring of Sanscrit. Is Maya? or are they coeval? A clue for ethnologists to follow the migrations of the human family on this old continent. Did the bearded men whose portraits are carved on the massive pillars of the fortress at ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... dog Argus was told two thousand years ago by the great Greek poet, Homer. Argus may not have been a real dog, but the poet must have known some dog like him or he could not have told ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... "apartness makes greatness," when justly applied to a poet, marks, not his superiority of rank, but his inferiority. It relegates him at once to a lower place. The greatest poets are loved by all, and understood by all who think and feel naturally. Homer was loved by Pericles and by the sausage-seller. Vergil was read with joy by Maecenas and Augustus, and by the vine-dressers of Mantua. Dante drew after him the greatest minds in Italy, and yet is sung to-day by the shepherds and peasants of the hill-villages of Tuscany. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... he was almost Francis himself as he sat there on Francis' sometime throne; and these Sir Jollys were his subjects all—Marot, Caillette, Brusquet, Villot, and the lesser lights, jesters of barons, cardinals and even bishops! Rabelais, too, that poor, dissolute devil of a writer, learned as Homer, brutish as Homer's swine—all subjects of his, the king of jesters, save one; one whom he eyed with certain fear and wonder; fear, because she was a woman—and Triboulet esteemed all the sex but "highly perfected ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Turin, and on a broad, homely scale. By which you are not to understand, either that the male portion of the inhabitants feast on whole oxen, like Homer's heroes, or that, the fair sex are draped in tunics of homespun wool, like the Roman matrons of old. They are not so primitive as that. You may have at any restaurant a smaller morsel than an ox or even an ox's shoulder; and as to ladies' finery, there is no article de Paris, no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... canvas chair, and thence dispense justice, advice, or medical treatment. If none of these things seemed demanded, I smoked my pipe. To me one afternoon came a big-framed, old, dignified man, with the heavy beard, the noble features, the high forehead, and the blank statue eyes of the blind Homer. He was led by a very small, very bright-eyed naked boy. At some twenty feet distance he squatted down cross-legged before me. For quite five minutes he sat there silent, while I sat in my camp chair, smoked and waited. At last he spoke in a rolling ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... stems and branches—on which they perch so quaintly—fell in a red-mauve shower upon the slabs of the marble pavement, upon the mimic waves of the fountain basin, and upon the clustering curls, and truncated shoulders, of the bust of Homer standing in the shade of the grove of cypress and ilex which sheltered the square, high-lying hill-garden, at this hour of the morning, from the fierceness of the sun. They floated as far even as the semicircular steps of the pavilion ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... they found theological machinery powerful enough to govern society; and though, on the subject of the Gods, they prudently conformed, or were silent, yet we are not at this day warranted in supposing that they obsequiously reverenced the absurd theology of the romance of Homer. Of the archbishops who have passed this gate, St. Thomas a Becket was perhaps the greatest bigot; but the exaltation of the ecclesiastical over the temporal power was the fashion of his day; and obedience and allegiance could scarcely be expected of ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... say that it is still an open question whether it has a right to exist, and no one has yet settled it.... Neither you nor I, nor all the critics in the world, have any trustworthy data that would give them the right to reject such literature. I do not know which are right: Homer, Shakespeare, Lopez da Vega, and, speaking generally, the ancients who were not afraid to rummage in the "muck heap," but were morally far more stable than we are, or the modern writers, priggish on paper but coldly cynical in their souls and in life. I do not ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... in the world, had loved and suffered, so long before us that they seem a part of that antenatal mystery out of which we sprang. When they speak of their old love-stories, it is as though we were reading Homer. It sounds so long ago. We are surprised at the vividness with which they recall happenings and personalities, past and gone before, as they tell us, we were born. Before we were born! Yes! They belong to that mysterious epoch of time—"before we were born"; and unless we ...
— Different Girls • Various
... 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 ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Tuscan dialect to be considered the Italian language as he would have been in any other way. The wonderful facility, no less than the unreality, of the man appears in many things, but in none more remarkably than his translation of Homer, which is the translation universally accepted and approved in Italy. He knew little more than the Greek alphabet, and produced his translation from the preceding versions in Latin and Italian, submitting the work to the correction of eminent scholars before he printed it. His poems ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... in the world," he roared. "You don't have to keep your pockets full of dollars to live in the times of Homer and Horace. I've told them to let you have what you need at the bookstore. For the rest, the college library should be your haunt and the debating society your recreation." If ever any one was getting ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... remains so. It never seems tired, even when, as it often does, it pleases him to read aloud for his own pleasure or that of a circle of friends. It frequently occurs that he will pick up a book, one of his ancient favourites, Horace or Homer perhaps, Mr. Stewart Houston Chamberlain's "Foundations of the Nineteenth Century"—a work he greatly admires—or a modern publication he has read of in the papers, and read aloud from it for an hour or an hour and a half at a time. Nor is his reading ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... perished.—Ver. 365. What is here told of Nestor, one of the Commentators on Homer attributes to Thersites, who, according to him, being the son of Agrius, the uncle of Meleager, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Corpus Boreale, some Irish reprints, Stevenson's poems, Virgil and the Pilgrim's Progress, and a French Gazetteer of Mountains wedged above them. And then an odd Badminton volume, French Memoires, a Dante, a Homer, and a badly printed German text of Schopenhauer! Three different copies of Rabelais, a De Thou, a Horace, and-bless my soul!—about twenty books of fairy tales! Lewie, you must have a mind ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... say the same of me," replied Ligarius. "I am just as able to decipher an obelisk as to read a line of Homer." ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he says, "I know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly by way of precept, or sermoned at large, as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises." He thought that Homer and Virgil and Ariosto had thus written poetry, to teach the world moral virtue and political wisdom. He attempted to propitiate Lord Burghley, who hated him and his verses, by setting before him in a dedication sonnet, the true ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... guests kept on dancing, Now leaping and prancing; The band still continued to play; And "Puss-in-the-corner," And "Little Jack Homer," Were games very much in their way; With singing and screeching, And laughter far-reaching, They had a good time, I dare say. Miew, miew, miew, miew, Miew, ...
— The 3 Little Kittens • Anonymous
... Turks own. In ancient times Croesus lived here after he had made his pile, and at the present day great numbers of wealthy men make it their home, and there is a good deal of luxury seen in the suburbs. It has the trade from Asia Minor. Homer was born here, and wrote and sang his immortal poetry along its rocky shores. It was conquered by Alexander the Great, and after he had destroyed it he ordered it rebuilt a few miles farther off so as not to forget it, and it became very prosperous. The Knights of ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... the catch of raw silk, the chill smoothness of burnished brass, the thick softness of mists, the "amorous wet" of green depths of sea. The senses of taste and smell may be excited imaginatively and contribute to our pleasure. Winslow Homer's breakers bring back to us the salt fragrance of the ocean, and in the presence of these white mad surges we feel the stinging spray in our faces and we taste the cosmic exhilaration of the sea-wind. But the final meaning of a picture resides in the total ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes |
