"Idyll" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sweet country, fresh and verdant Gruyere Did thy children imagine how happy they were? Did thy shepherds know they lived an idyll? Had they read Theocrite, had they heard of Virgil? No, no! as in gardens the lilac and rose Grow in innocent beauty, their days ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... breeding to try to laugh away incipient quarrels, and which greeted with airy banter the indiscreet act of an enamoured young gallant,—the kind of act which vulgarity meets with angry lampoons or rude violence. The poem is an idyll quite as much as a satire. The follies of fashionable life are treated with nothing severer than light raillery; and its actually distasteful features,—its lapses into stupidity, its vacuous restlessness, its ennui,—are cunningly suppressed. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... never weary of admiring or caressing or spoiling her. She can coax and wheedle her father and Arama, mihonere and kuremata alike, to do almost anything she desires, and through them she may be said to reign over the Ngatewhatua. She is the delight and darling of all the settlers round. She is the idyll of our shanty, and our regard for her approaches to idolatry. O Rakope, Rakope! I hope you will some day marry a Pakeha rangatira, and endow him with your ten thousand acres; for if you mate with even an ariki from among your own people, your lot will ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... Spectator tells us: 'This was followed by a vain laugh of his own, and a deep silence of all the rest of the company. I had nothing left for it but to fall fast asleep, which I did with all speed.' [Footnote: Spectator 132.] His, too, is the charming little idyll of the huntsman and his Betty, who fears that her love will drown himself in a stream he can jump across, [Footnote: Spectator 118.] and the whole fragrant story of Sir Roger's thirty years' attachment to the ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... when he touched that French officer's glass with his own that day at dinner, he secretly forgave him—forgave him in the name of the Divine Forgiver." With a moral no less noble and affecting, no less grand and elevating than this, the lovely idyll closed. The final glimpse of the scene at the old Aix chateau was like the view of a sequestered orchard through the ivied porchway of a village church. The concluding words of the prelection were like the sound of the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... an improvised work of art. By the instinctive collaboration of everybody concerned, intellect and taste hold festival, and the associations of reality are exchanged for the associations of imagination. So understood, society is a form of poetry; the cultivated classes deliberately recompose the idyll of the past and the buried world of Astrea. Paradox or no, I believe that these fugitive attempts to reconstruct a dream whose only end is beauty represent confused reminiscences of an age of gold haunting the human heart, or rather aspirations toward a harmony of things which ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nigher to the explaining the manner of introducing Revenge into Pastoral, is what we find in the sixth Idyll of Theocritus. Polyphemus's Mistress had been unkind; and how do's he propose to take Revenge: Why, he will not take notice of her as she walk's before his Cave to be seen, and pelt's his flock. After which follow's the most simple, and I had almost said, finest Thought in any ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... from Mrs. Brown's celebrated Manuscript. The kind of spell indicated was practised by Hera upon Alcmena, before the birth of Heracles. Analogous is the spell by binding witch-knots, practised by Simaetha on her lover, in the second Idyll of Theocritus. Montaigne has some curious remarks on these enchantments, explaining their power by what is now called "suggestion." There is a Danish parallel to "Willie's ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... savage, which Michaud's new occupation had developed among his faculties, joined to an acquaintance with the passions and interests of Blangy, enabled him partially to understand a third idyll in the Greek style, which poor villagers like Tonsard, and middle-aged rich men like Rigou, translate freely—to use the classic word—in the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... preserving forever our most precious relic of Germanic Folksepic. A powerful story it is of sin and suffering: corresponding to the world itself and just as the primitive mind of a people loves to represent it. The story begins as a lovely idyll but ends ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... No! The chief part of their love-making (for such it was, though the term would have roused Eva's contemptuous anger) occurred in the streets; in this they did but follow the traditions of their class. Thus, the idyll, so matter-of-fact upon the surface, but within which glowed secret and adorable fires, progressed towards its culmination. Eva, the artless fool—oh, how simple are the wisest at times!—thought that the affair was hid from ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... such themes. The last picture he describes as a proof that compositions of that kind are capable of doing honour to the gifts and the sentiments of the artist.[31] The Girl bewailing her dead bird throws him into raptures. "O, the pretty elegy!" he begins, "the charming poem! the lovely idyll!" and so forth, until at length he breaks into a burst of lyric condolence addressed to the weeping child, that would fill four or five ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... seem to break loose from the graceful harmony which the Tennysonians affect, and to plunge headlong into the obscure, the uncouth, the ghastly, and the lurid. No one denies originality and power in many of these pieces: but they are flat blasphemy against the pellucid melody of the Tennysonian idyll. Our poetry seems to be under two contrary spells: it is enthralled at one time by the ravishing symmetry of Mozart; at another time it yearns for the crashing discords that thunder along the march of the Valkyrie through ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... is this? some one been stirring Against me? he, your rustic amourist, The polish'd Damon of your pastoral here, This Dobson of your idyll? ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... find that it falls into three periods, pretty sharply divided. The earliest is the idyllic period, pure and simple, and includes Synnoeve, Arne, and A Happy Boy. Then with The Fisher Maiden we enter on a stage of transition. It is still the idyll; but it grows self-conscious, elaborate, confused by the realism that was coming into fashion all over Europe; and the trouble and confusion grow until we reach Magnhild. With Flags are Flying and In God's Way we reach a third stage—the stage of realism, some readers ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the book is the Provencal town of Plassans, and the tragic events attending the rising of the populace against the Coup d'Etat are told with accuracy and knowledge. There is a charming love idyll between Silvere Mouret, a son of Ursule Macquart, and a young girl named Miette, both of whom fall as victims in the rising which ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... life is not an idyll, not by a good deal. We live by killing, destroying everything there is around us; we get to be something by ridding ourselves of our enemies. We are ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... our faculties aspire after movement and exercise. A morbid mind will find its cure in them, a sound soul will not find its food in them. They cannot vivify, they can only soften. This defect, grounded in the essence of the pastoral idyll, has not been remedied by the whole art of poets. I know that this kind of poem is not without admirers, and that there are readers enough who prefer an Amyntus and a Daphnis to the most splendid masterpieces ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... exhibits such many-sidedness and such objectivism that they carry him beyond the limits of time and nationality;" "Shakespeare is the greatest genius that has hitherto existed;" "For the creation of tragedy, comedy, history, idyll, idyllistic comedy, esthetic idyll, for the profoundest presentation, or for any casually thrown off, passing piece of verse, he is the only man. He not only wields an unlimited power over our mirth and our tears, over all the workings of passion, humor, thought, and observation, but ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... idyll, written in 1864, made a great hit. It was followed by several plays—Queen Mary, Harold, Becket and others—all finely written, but none appealing to the great public. Up to his last years Tennyson remained the real laureate of his people, his words ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... resulted happily. The devotion of the new helpmate to the Wagnerian cause has survived the master's death by many years, and is still witnessed by the musical world. The domestic bliss of their married life is well shown in the beautiful Siegfried Idyll, which Wagner composed as a surprise for his ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... as The Everlasting Mercy and The Widow of Bye Street showed, that dirt and dross, if wrought into tragedy, can win a higher beauty than the harmonies of idyll. Even the hideous elder women in Mr. Bottomley's Lear's Wife, or his Regan—an ill-conditioned girl, sidling among the 'sweaty, half-clad cook-maids' after pig-killing, 'smeary and hot as they', participate in this ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... so fine a compound of sentiment and common sense. She frankly loved it all and though, at the moment, occupied with the work of at least a dozen women, and with a family that needed her most earnest care, she hastened to assist the Idyll. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... and luring, she held him off, and her heart beat exultantly as she saw that she had given him the thought of marriage for that of conquest, the dream of a perfect idyll for that of an enforced submission.... It was a desperate play, but she played it valiantly, and her fearfulness and the spell of her beauty sweetened the role of beseeching suitor for him, and gave a glamour to this pretty garden dalliance.... The memory of time came ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... perhaps a sister of his own. The comfortable bed, the dainty furniture, are carefully drawn. The clear morning light streams into the room. The saint lies peacefully asleep, her hand under her head, her long eyelashes resting upon her cheek: the whole is an idyll, full of insight into girlish life. The tiny slippers made, no doubt, one of the details that caught his eye. The crown lying on the ledge of the bed is an arbitrary introduction, as naif as the angel. In the funeral scene the luminous light is diffused over all, the young saint lies upon her ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... compression. But think, as is his due, upon the high-water marks of his abundant tide, and see how enviable the record of a poet who is our most brilliant and learned critic, and who has given us our best native idyll, our best and most complete work in dialectic verse, and the noblest heroic ode that America has produced—each and all ranking with the first of their kinds in English literature of the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... had ceased to snort his scorn; indeed, for ten minutes or so he had uttered no word or sound; but there was something in the pose of his ungainly body which strangely suggested that of a great dog preparing to spring. Presently the violinist recalled what he termed a "charming idyll of Normandy." ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... rather the spot is not propitious. Captivity appears to weigh upon the future mothers. Before listening to their wooers they must have the open air, the sudden joyful flight from cluster to cluster on the sunlit slope, all gold with everlastings. Apart from the idyll of the twirling passes, a mitigated form of the Cantharides' blows, the Cerocoma refused to yield before my eyes to the last ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... charming prose idyll "My Winter Garden" tries to persuade himself that he was glad he had never travelled, "having never yet actually got to Paris." Monotony, he says, "is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant, and morally useful. Marriage is monotonous; but there is much, I trust, to be said in favour of holy wedlock. ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... name, Ann Arbor, recalls an idyll of pioneer life. It sketches in a picture that is no doubt more charming than the bitter mid-winter reality faced by the first two families, whose tents were pitched in a burr-oak grove beside a little stream flowing toward ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... a moment very softly, almost as if to himself. "Neither will he forget," he said, "that our love was a summer idyll that came to us unawares in the days when we were young, and that though the idyll will come to an end, our love is a gift immortal—imperishable—indestructible—a flame that burns upwards and always upwards—reaching the Divine. And because ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... to his conversion to Christianity. "It is bucolic only in name, it is allegorical," writes George Long, "mystical, half historical, and prophetical, enigmatical, anything in fact but bucolic." The best-known imitation of his idyll is Pope's "Messiah." Pleasing as all these poems are, they do not represent rural life in Italy, they are in most part ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... conquered. . .a great all-inclusive strength of song, which is as a battle march to warriors, or as the refreshment of brooks and dates to the spent and toiling soldiers on their way, is more than the pretty idyll, whose sweet and plaintive story pleases the ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... is an almost perfect idyll. It is the best thing of the kind that has reached us from America since "Little Lord Fauntleroy" ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... literature. Everybody knows who the Poet is, but if they want to know him as a kind of Good Samaritan in a different way than they know him in his verses, they should read this charming idyll."—Boston Transcript. ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... on. On his side again Georgie had never said that he was in love with her (nor would it have been true if he had), but by his complete silence on the subject coupled with his constancy he seemed to admit the truth of this bloodless idyll. They talked and walked and read the masterpieces of literature and played duets on the piano together. Sometimes (for he was the more brilliant performer, though as he said "terribly lazy about practising," ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill of real pleasure, Dorian," interrupted Lord Henry. "But I can finish your idyll for you. You gave her good advice, and broke her heart. That was ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... was in nothing more remarkable than in its proof of the many-sidedness of the author. He offered mediaeval romance, and classical perfection touched with the romantic spirit, and domestic idyll, of which The May Queen is probably the most popular example. The "mysterious being," conversant with "the spiritual world," might have been expected to disdain topics well within the range of Eliza Cook. ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... peach orchards, vineyards and gardens, form a bright suburban belt. Two rivers, the Tarn and the Dourbie, water its pleasant valley, whilst over the town tower lofty rocks in the form of an amphitheatre. Nant may be described as a little idyll. After it Millau comes disenchantingly ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and Mrs. Fiske take the part of Ona, her presentation will make Tess seem like a pastoral idyll in comparison. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... this day of his. From bathing in pastoral he had been suddenly soused into tragedy's seething-pot. His idyll of the tanned gipsy, with her glancing eyes and warm lips, had been spattered out with a brushful of blood; the scene was changed from sunny life to wan death. Here were the staring eyes of a dead man, and his mouth twisted awry in its last ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... we come across are only strong in their criticism of the State and of the law. As to their constructive ideal, a few preach an idyll that they themselves would never care to practise, while others, like the editor of Liberty, Boston, fall back upon an actual bourgeois system. In order to defend their Individualism they reconstruct the State with all its attributes (law, police, and the rest) after ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... for your little idyll," he said. "Come, you know what the end of it must be. We need ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... patriot acclaims in him the poet who has sung the myths and legends dear to the German race. The sensuous and voluptuous libertine is enchanted by the eroticism of the "Roman Elegies." The domesticated reader is drawn by that chaste idyll, Herman and Dorothea. The Spinozist and Pantheist are attracted by the general tendencies of his philosophy. The Christian is at liberty to interpret "Faust" in a sense which is favourable to his religion. The Liberal politician can point to the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... kind, Wise, fond of books and love, of generous mind; Knows well his friend, but better knows his foe; Scatters his wealth; when asked he ne'er says No, But gives as kings should give. Idyll, xiv. 60. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... lover of her choice, whom we at Fellside have all known as plain John Hammond. He is an admirable young man, and sure to make a great figure in the world, as no doubt you know better than I do, for you are in the way of hearing all about him. His courtship of Mary is quite an idyll; and the happy issue of this romantic love-affair has cheered and comforted me more than anything that has happened ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Connecticut, Vermont, and mountainous New Hampshire, abound in charming minor streams and picturesque scenery. The delights of this New England fishing and camping have been faithfully immortalised in that incomparable prose idyll "I Go a Fishing," by Prime. Maine, however, is the United States angler's paradise. This involves at least a twenty-four hours' journey by rail and steamer, if you would reach the famous lake region of that sporting ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... a confectioner, and, like Marion in the "Ballad of Forty Years," "Adrienne's dead" in a convent. That is all the story, all the idyll. Gerard also wrote the idyll of his own delirium, and the proofs of it (Le Reve et la Vie) were in his pocket when they found him dead in La ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... was grazing peacefully. The sky seemed a deeper blue through the willow-branches. The tender green of the grass was wonderfully refreshing to the eyes. The cow had a beautiful coat of glossy brown that shone in the sunlight. I abandoned myself to the charm of the little idyll that was spread out before me and forgot the war ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... description of the Lotus Club, for instance, I felt instinctively that Madame de Verneuil would wince at the sound of tripe; I conveyed to her my own childish impression of the magnificence of Paragot's bedchamber, and the story of our wanderings became an Idyll ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... your memory is packed with pleasant fancies. You have been among "blown fields" and "flowerful closes"; you have passed quaint roadside-inns and picturesque cottages; you are familiar with the cheery, ever-changing idyll of the highway and the bustle of animal life; with horses that really gallop, and dogs that really bark; with charming male and female figures in the most attractive old-world attire; with happy laughter and artless waggeries; with ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... in Ypres. It was in the course of a bicycle tour in 1896 or '97, a fact which afforded me some very poignant points of comparison. The chief thing that is impressed on my memory was a curious and pathetic little idyll which is thus recorded in ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Madam, that when you open this book, you will not find a "Treatise on Morality". Here are only the simple and pastoral loves of a poor and obscure village priest. An idyll in the shade of the parsonage limes and under the motionless eye of the weather-cock ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... I have carried through my scheme. I have outwitted Ravengar. I have saved Camilla from death at his hands. I can look forward to an idyll—brief, perhaps, but ecstatic—in a villa with the loveliest view on all the Mediterranean. I ought to be gay. And yet I am not. And it is not the knowledge of my fatal disease that saddens me. No; I think I have been saddened by a day and a night spent with that coffin. It is ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... The ingenuous idyll is soon over. The females, who grow more numerous from day to day, inspect the premises; they buzz outside the glass galleries and the reed dwellings; they go in, stay for a while, come out, go ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... cabbages and charcoal. She provided her, at a risible charge, with succulent meals. She told her tales of her father and mother, of her neighbours, of the domestic differences between the concierge and his wife (soothing idyll for an Ariadne!), of the dirty thief of a brigadier of gendarmes, of her bodily ailments—her body was so large that they were many; of the picturesque death, through apoplexy, of the late M. Bidoux; ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... body and mind, he forgot Synesius, Victoria, and the rest, and seemed to himself to wander all night among the vine-clad glens of Lebanon, amid the gardens of lilies, and the beds of spices; while shepherds' music lured him on and on, and girlish voices, chanting the mystic idyll of his mighty ancestor, rang soft and fitful through ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... luminous rooms are fresh and sweet-smelling as when their soft mattings were first laid down. The carven pillars of the alcove (toko) in my chamber, leaves and flowers chiselled in some black rich wood, are wonders; and the kakemono or scroll-picture hanging there is an idyll, Hotei, God of Happiness, drifting in a bark down some shadowy stream into evening mysteries of vapoury purple. Far as this hamlet is from all art-centres, there is no object visible in the house which does not reveal the Japanese sense of beauty in form. The old gold-flowered lacquer-ware, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... answered more truly to the individuality behind it. He told her of his bringing up, of his wandering with the sheep on the mountains, of his reading among the heather, of 'Lias and his visions, of Hannah's cruelties and Louie's tempers—that same idyll of peasant life to which Dora had listened months before. But how differently told! Each different listener changes the tale, readjusts the tone. But here also the tale pleased. Elise, for all her leanings towards new schools in art, had the Romantic's imagination and the Romantic's ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... methods, she kept the rest well at work in any time that was available. She determined not only to have dances, but to give in addition a short Greek play, and selected for that purpose the famous fifteenth idyll of Theocritus. ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... are all-important, not only in connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first time satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students of Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of the Venetian idyll generally. ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... seek his fortune—to attempt, at least, to wake the grandeur-enchanted Princess from her passionless dream of lonely, loveless sovereignty. He came, was seen, and conquered! But not at once; ah, no; for this charming royal idyll had its changing strophes, marking deepening degrees of sentiment—admiration, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... the young couple on their wedding. Gay, indeed, must have been the sights which it witnessed on that happy day, for our ancestors knew how to put their hearts into a wedding, and Merry England was never merrier then when the bridegroom led home the bride. We may borrow once again from Deloney's idyll, to recreate ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... sisters about her. She entered into their lives as few have been able to do. She treated them as human beings, saw the romance and tragedy in their patient lives, wept over their trials, and rejoiced in their joys. There was one little idyll of harem life ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... beside the bed College prizes and medals, while everywhere were the roses he loved. His peasant mother stood beside the body of her scholar son, whose hopes and thoughts she had shared, and through the window came the bleating of distant sheep. It was the idyll of Scottish University life. ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... and powder of the green-room, the tobacco clouds of the tavern, the crowded streets where hungry genius went afoot one day, and rode in a coach the next—in a word, out of the Town as Harry Fielding knew it—we step, in the year 1734, into the idyll of his life, his marriage with Charlotte Cradock. For to Fielding the supreme gift was accorded of passionate devotion to a woman of whose charm and virtue he himself has raised an enduring memorial in the lovely portrait ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... Magazine, and I tore up my Paper. Your Elizabeth knows (I think) all about this Lady: who, I suppose, is connected with Lincolnshire: for the Reviewer speaks of some of the Poems as relating to that Coast—Shipwrecks, etc. I was told that Tennyson was writing a sort of Lincolnshire Idyll: I will bet on Miss Ingelow now: he should never have left his old County, and gone up to be suffocated by London Adulation. He has lost that which caused the long roll of the Lincolnshire Wave to reverberate in the measure ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... poem "Lancelot and Elaine," Tennyson has followed closely on the lines of the original story, both as to general design and detail. The idyll "Geraint and Enid" does not, of course, belong to this history at all, but is taken from the "Mabinogian," a collection of Welsh legends translated into English by Lady Charlotte ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone |
