"Lyric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... half-humorously disclaims the capacity for lofty themes, but, especially as he grows older and more philosophic, and perhaps less lyric, half-seriously attributes whatever he does to persevering ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... were performing a little rite. Her eyes filled with tears. "Harboro!" she cried, "do you need to ask me that?" Her fingers sought his face and traveled with ineffable tenderness from line to line. It was as if she were playing a little love-lyric of her own upon a beautiful harp. And then she fell upon his breast and pressed her cheek to his. "Harboro!" she cried again. She had seen only the ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... is the index of the soul. The voice of the two Pitts was the same voice, we have been told—a deep, rich, cultivated lyric-barytone. It was a trained voice, a voice that came from a full column of air, that never broke into a screech, rasping the throat of the speaker and the ear of the listener. It was the natural voice carefully developed by right use. The power of Pitt ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... of epic should be included the half descriptive, half lyric poems which were popular among the English, dealing chiefly with nature, the seasons of the year, etc. There belong also to this division numerous didactic poems in which a prosaic content is dressed up in poetic form, such as compendiums of physics, ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... to many of our readers the name which stands at the head of this sketch is unknown, and that those who recognize it will only know it as that of the author of the well-known lines upon the death of Sir John Moore—a lyric of such surpassing beauty, that so high a judge as Lord Byron considered it the perfection of English lyrical poetry, preferring it before Coleridge's lines on Switzerland—Campbell's Hohenlinden—and the finest of Moore's Irish melodies, which ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... the disturbance of the state, an absolute government will certainly more effectually prohibit them from, or punish them for publishing such thoughts, than a free one could do. But how does that cramp the genius of an epic, dramatic, or lyric poet? or how does it corrupt the eloquence of an orator in the pulpit or at the bar? The number of good French authors, such as Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, and La Fontaine, who seemed to dispute it with the Augustan age, flourished under the despotism of Lewis ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... told him in Rome, the young man was a Sentimentalist with no exact vision of life. His heart was perpetually distorting whatever his mind told him was fact. This woman, with her beauty, her love of music, had touched him at the lyric moment of life, when reality was but the unstable foundation for dream. Life as might be, glowing, colored, and splendid,—life as it was within him, not as this hideous maelstrom all about him reported. And why not the I, the I! cried the spirit of youth, the egotistic spirit of the age. For ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... illustrated the annals of England! The divine conceptions of Milton, the luxuriant fervour of Thomson, the vast discoveries of Newton, the deep wisdom of Bacon, the burning thoughts of Gray, the masculine intellect of Johnson, the exquisite polish of Pope, the lyric fire of Campbell, the graphic powers of Scott, the glowing eloquence of Burke, the admirable conceptions of Reynolds, the profound sagacity of Hume, the pictured page of Gibbon, demonstrate how mighty and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... last fashion, friend, that hook? To hang your hat on? 'Tis a useful crook!' Emphatic: 'No wind, O majestic nose, Can give THEE cold!—save when the mistral blows!' Dramatic: 'When it bleeds, what a Red Sea!' Admiring: 'Sign for a perfumery!' Lyric: 'Is this a conch?. . .a Triton you?' Simple: 'When is the monument on view?' Rustic: 'That thing a nose? Marry-come-up! 'Tis a dwarf pumpkin, or a prize turnip!' Military: 'Point against cavalry!' Practical: 'Put it in a lottery! Assuredly 'twould be ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... say no more of them; but there are other worthy deeds of which no poet has worthily sung, and which are still wooing the poet's muse. Of these I am bound to make honourable mention, and shall invoke others to sing of them also in lyric and other strains, in a manner becoming the actors. And first I will tell how the Persians, lords of Asia, were enslaving Europe, and how the children of this land, who were our fathers, held them back. Of these I will speak first, and praise ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... that Galds lacks the lyric flame which touches with poignant emotion the common things of life. He did not entirely escape the rhetoric of his race. And he was curiously little interested in the passions of sex—too little to be altogether human, perhaps. ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe. This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play-writers be; and show them what religious, what glorious ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... sounds, the song of crickets, coming in full choir upon the wind, and fancied that, if moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that. Finally, he took a draught at the Shaker spring, and, as if it were the true Castalia, was forthwith moved to compose a lyric, a Farewell to his Harp, which he swore should be its closing strain, the last verse that an ungrateful world should have from him. This effusion, with two or three other little pieces, subsequently written, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... investigation), to put my reader in possession of the facts so unfamiliar to the modern oracles of classical mythology! Briefly, it appears that in the best period of ancient Greece nine Muses were recognised, namely, Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry; Euterpe, of lyric poetry; Erato, of erotic poetry; Melpomene, of tragedy; Thalia, of comedy; Polyhymnia, of sacred hymns; Terpsichore, of choral song and dance; Clio, of history; and Urania, of astronomy. The last two seem to have very little in common with the addiction to singing and dancing characteristic ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... Poets and critics have been unanimous in their praise of this exquisite lyric, which, had she written nothing more, would alone have been amply sufficient to vindicate Aphara Behn's genius and immortality. It was a great favourite with Swinburne, who terms it 'that melodious and magnificent song'; Mr. Bullen is warm in its praise, whilst Professor Saintsbury ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... first Gipsy lyric then came another to which the captain especially directed my attention as being what Sam. Petalengro calls 'The girl in the red chemise'—as well as I can recall his words. A very sweet song, with a simple but spirited chorus, and as the sympathetic electricity of excitement seized ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... brazen solution of his own wicked and brazen conundrum. France, such was the proposition, had worked a miracle upon English ground; as if with some magician's rod, she had called up spawn innumerable of authors, lyric, epic, dramatic, pastoral, each after his kind. But by whom had France moved in this creation as the chief demi-urgus? By whom, Mr. Pope? Name, name, Mr. Pope! 'Ay,' we must suppose the unhappy man to reply, 'that's the very question which I was going to answer, if you wouldn't ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... May Century pictured brave.) It was a miracle of rare device, Costing "a pile," but cheap at any price! A damsel with a five-stringed "Jo" In a vision once I saw; It was an Alabama maid, And on her banjo light she played, Singing of sweet Su-san-nah! Could I revive within me Amphion's lyric song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me As the music loud and long That sure did raise this dome in air, That mighty dome!—those halls of price! COLUMBIA'S magic set them there, And all who see cry, "Rare! O rare! This beats great KUBLA KHAN'S device! Chicago outsoars Xanadu! COLUMBIA'S World's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various
... she like? Does tragedy or comedy favor her most? You see," he added apologetically, "when people begin to talk about anybody, we Grubstreet hacks thrive on the gossip. It is deplorable"—with regret—"but small talk and tattle bring more than a choice lyric or sonnet. And, heaven help us!"—shaking his head—"what a vendible article a fine scandal is! It sells fast, like goods at a Dutch auction. Penny a line? More nearly six pence! If I could only bring myself to deal in such merchandise! If I were ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... poet-like, even by sorrow,—he lives and loves, and chants the deep, homely beauty of his lays. He is as genuine, as wholesome and real as sweet-flag and clover. Even when he utters pure sentiment, as in that perfect lyric, "My Psalm," or in the intrepid, exquisite humility—healthful and sound as the odor of new-mown hay or balsam-firs—of "Andrew Rykman's Prayer," he maintains the same attitude of realism. He states God and inward experience as he would state sunshine and the growth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... no rhyme that is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat; There is no metre that's half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; And the loveliest lyric I ever heard Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.— If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful parts of speech. And the natural art that they say these with, My soul would sing of beauty and ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... the greatest poet of Poland during its existence as an independent kingdom. His Laments are his masterpiece, the choicest work of Polish lyric poetry ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... or to admit so much as this, however, is not to say the last word. The question is whether Wordsworth, however unequal to Shelley in lyric quality, to Coleridge or to Keats in imaginative quality, to Burns in tenderness, warmth, and that humour which is so nearly akin to pathos, to Byron in vividness and energy, yet possesses excellences of his own which place him in other respects above these master-spirits ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... was often irregularly used for 'song' or 'poem.' A proper sonnet in Clement Robinson's poetical anthology, A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, 1584, is a lyric in ten four-line alternatively rhymed stanzas. Neither Barnabe Googe's Eglogs, Epyttaphes, and Sonnettes, 1563, nor George Turbervile's Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French word 'quatorzain' was ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... the witness of her contemporaries. Sappho was at the height of her career about six centuries before Christ, at a period when lyric poetry was peculiarly esteemed and cultivated at the centres of Greek life. Among the Molic peoples of the Isles, in particular, it had been carried to a high pitch of perfection, and its forms had become the subject of assiduous study. Its ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... Esq. a young Irish gentleman, of whom Lord Charlemont had become the friend and patron. He afterwards published "Thoughts on Lyric Poetry, with an Ode to the Moon;" an "essay on Ridicule, Wit, and Humour;" and a translation of the Argonautics of Appollonius Rhodius. He died ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... which the Literary Opinion had copied; and he was the greatest possible success. Most of it I feel sure the school didn't understand. But just as he finished the last two lines—those lines the magazine had called "as perfect in winged lyric quality as any lines in the English language could be"—the Byrd, whom Sam had groomed carefully and brought in from the brier-patch for the occasion, rose, and, with his freckles black with the intensity of his comprehension of the poem, spread his ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... prefer the more beautiful to the better attested reading. I have often excised weak or superfluous stanzas when sure that excision would improve; and have not hesitated to extract a few stanzas from a long poem when persuaded that they could stand alone as a lyric. The apology for such experiments can only lie in their success: but the risk is one which, in my judgement, the anthologist ought to take. A few small corrections have been made, but only ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... the people; song was on their lips. The early spring of Italy came later to the northern latitudes, but when it did come, it brought with it Marot and Ronsard in France, Wyatt and Surrey in England. More significant than the output of the greater poets was the wide distribution of lyric talent. Not a few compilations of verses offer to the public the songs of many writers, some of them unknown by name. England, especially, was "a nest of singing birds," rapturously greeting the dawn, and the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... For the lyric poets the cuckoo is "companion of the spring," "darling of the spring;" coming with the daisy, and the primrose, and the blossoming sweet-pea. Where the sound came from I could not tell; it puzzled Wordsworth, with younger eyes than ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to the tune. Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, which records a piece of Scottish news of no importance whatever, has become an English nursery rhyme. In Jamie Douglas an historical fact has been interwoven with a beautiful lyric. Indeed, the chances of corruption ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... joy that one gets watching a handicraftsman at his work, a goldsmith hammering out his gold into those thin plates as delicate as the petals of a yellow rose, or drawing it out into the long wires like tangled sunbeams, so perfect and precious is the mere handling of it; or the little lyric interludes that break in here and there like the singing of a thrush, and are as swift and as sure as the beating of a bird's wing, as light and bright as the apple-blossoms that flutter fitfully down to the orchard grass after a spring shower, and look the lovelier for the rain's ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... the pieces in the Shih are ballads, some are songs, some are hymns, and of others the nature can hardly be indicated by any English denomination They have often been spoken of by the general name of odes, understanding by that term lyric poems that were ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... encounters in this degenerate age. Well, her next essay in creative composition is my supper, which will be an equally spirited impromptu. To-morrow she will darn and sew me an epic; and her desserts will continue to be in the richest lyric vein. Such, sir, are the poems of Lisa, all addressed to me, who came so near to gallivanting ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... Gabriel Maxenius, however, was the first to publish a work on Finnish national poetry, which brought to light the beauties of the Kalevala. It appeared in 1733, and bore the title: De Effectibus Naturalibus. The book contains a quaint collection of Finnish poems in lyric forms, chiefly incantations; but the author was entirely at a loss how to account for them, or how to appreciate them. He failed to see their intimate connection with the religious worship ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... sarcastic. His people, a people among whose many fine qualities moderation in prosperity cannot be reckoned, seemed for a time to be drunk with pride. Even Boileau, hurried along by the prevailing enthusiasm, forgot the good sense and good taste to which he owed his reputation. He fancied himself a lyric poet, and gave vent to his feelings in a hundred and sixty lines of frigid bombast about Alcides, Mars, Bacchus, Ceres, the lyre of Orpheus, the Thracian oaks and the Permessian nymphs. He wondered whether Namur, had, like ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... eminently just. For Camoens was his model; not the Camoens of the epic, but the Camoens of the lyrics and the sonnets, where the passion of tenderness finds its supreme utterance. Braga has noted five stages of development in Joao de Deus's artistic life—the imitative, the idyllic, the lyric, the pessimistic and the devout phases. Under each of these divisions is included much that is of extreme interest, especially to contemporaries who have passed through the same succession of emotional experience, and it is highly probable that Caturras and Gaspar, pieces as witty as anything ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... the concertina played "Matamoras," Jones continued his lyric, when two Mexicans leaped at each other, and the concertina stopped ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... long ago in a family, for one of the best and bravest whom this country has ever known. And more than one has brought back from the war a sorrowful narrative of a long farewell inclosed in as brief and touching words as those of the following lyric:— ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... fame, For still they soared unutterably high: I've looked on Ida with a Trojan's eye; Athos, Olympus, AEtna, Atlas, made These hills seem things of lesser dignity, All, save the lone Soracte's height displayed, Not NOW in snow, which asks the lyric Roman's aid ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... Scandinavian poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in professional and literary hands. The mediaeval minstrels and jongleurs (who may best be studied in Leon Gautier's Introduction ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... the Samson Agonistes are works which, though of very different merit, offer some marked points of resemblance. Both are lyric poems in the form of plays. There are perhaps no two kinds of composition so essentially dissimilar as the drama and the ode. The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the cluster that would have rotted on the tree, and bears it to the wine-press to change it into perfumed wine. Listen! there is, a dozen hours from Alexandria, towards the west, not far from the sea, a nunnery, the rules of which, a masterpiece of wisdom, deserve to be put in lyric verse and sung to the sound of the theorbo and tambourines. It may truly be said that the women who are there, submissive to these rules, have their feet upon earth and their faces in heaven. They desire to be poor, that Jesus may love them, modest, that He may gaze upon them; chaste that He ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... sometimes fell upon the earth And those who saw it wept with joy and fright. "Thou art Apollo, than the sun more bright!" They cried. "Our music is of little worth, But thrill our blood with thy creative mirth Thou god of song, thou lord of lyric might!" ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... containing the 'topmost note in the stupendous agony of the drama,' are rhymed. The management of rhyme is a difficult and very delicate art; it is an instrument that requires a first-class performer, like Mr. Swinburne, to bring out its potency; to this art the English lyric, the ode and the song, owe their musical perfection. Mr. Swinburne, in an essay upon Matthew Arnold's New Poems (1867), has said, truly, that 'rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in England'; and that 'to throw away the natural grace ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... one lays himself liable to the accusation of having forsaken democracy. For all that, "fundamental brainwork" is behind every respect-worthy piece of writing, whether it be a lightsome lyric that seems as careless as a redbird's flit or a formal epic, an impressionistic essay or a great novel that measures the depth of human destiny. Nonintellectual literature is as nonexistent as education without mental discipline, or as ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... I remember it, a most exquisite night—a white poem, a frosty, starry lyric of light. It was one of those nights on which one might fall asleep and dream happy dreams of gardens of mirth and song, feeling all the while through one's sleep the soft splendour and radiance of the white moon-world outside, as one hears soft, far-away music sounding ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... fall, its literary fortunes express themselves, when we try to generalise, in a series of curves, alternate rises and declines, which may be repeated again and again. In English literature out of the unknown past rose the Anglo-Saxon lyric and epic, Deor's Complaint, Beowulf, and the poems of Caedmon and Cynewulf. From the death-like sleep of our language which followed the Norman Conquest rose the heights of thirteenth-century romance. From the ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... publisht in three volumes. During his Sea and Land ministry he was brought in contact with seamen and this finds expression in his later works taking character from life on the sea. Many of his verses have found place in Christian hymnology, notably such a lyric as "Jesus, Savior, pilot me over life's tempestuous sea," with that sweet verse "as a mother stills her child Thou canst hush the ocean wild." Another hymn was "Wrecked and struggling in mid ocean, clinging to a ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... at the Lyric Theatre is | |written in accordance with Lord Wynlea's | |dictum quoted above. It is mannerly, well | |poised, ingratiating and deft. As a minor | |effort in the high comedy style it is | |welcome, ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... studied on that account. The Druid proper was governor, judge, philosopher, expounder, and executioner. The ovaidd, or ovates, were the priests, chiefly concerned in the study of theology and the practice of religion. The bards were heroic poets of rare lyric power; they kept the national traditions in trust, and claimed the second sight and the power of prophecy. Much has been said of their human sacrifices in colossal images of wicker-work—the "immani magnitudine simulacra" of Caesar—which were filled with human victims, and which crackled ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... and the short poems, especially Lycidas, were great favourites with her. One might have supposed that she would not like Wordsworth. As a matter of fact, she loved him and thoroughly understood him and his philosophy of life. She did not merely read the lyric and elegiac poems like Ruth, but had gone through and enjoyed The Excursion and many of the longer poems. Coleridge she loved, and Southey, and Crabbe, and Gray, and Dr. Johnson, and indeed the whole of English poetic literature. In modern poetry she read freely Tennyson ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... epos, a saying or oracle, the term "epic" is generally given to some form of heroic narrative wherein tragedy, comedy, lyric, dirge, and idyl are skilfully blended to form ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... fishermen have grown fewer, and the men who still swing the axes and haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and silent. "Labor" looms vast upon the future political and social horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric note. They have turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the swift and fierce insistence of the short story, illustrated by the Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... his long silence to some purpose. Those who remember his pre-war achievements in the field of polychromatic romanticism will hardly be prepared for his present development, which lifts him at a bound from the overcrowded ranks of lyric-writers to the uncongested heights whereon recline the great masters of epic poetry. And yet it was perhaps inevitable. The thunder and the reek of war (the last two years of which, we believe, were spent by Mr. Geek in the Egg Control Department) could scarcely have failed to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... story, "Erec et Enide," carries chiefly a moral of courtesy. His is poet-laureate's work, says M. Gaston Paris; the flower of a twelfth-century court and of twelfth-century French; the best example of an admirable language; but not lyric; neither strong, nor deep, nor deeply felt. What we call tragedy is unknown to it. Christian's world is sky-blue and rose, with only enough red to give it warmth, and so flooded with light that even its mysteries count ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... going—a matter of some seventy-nine verses. Seventy-eight were quite unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cowpunchers monstrously. They, knowing him to be a singular man, forebore ever to press him, and awaited his own humor, lest he should weary of the lyric; and when after a day of silence apparently saturnine, he would lift his gentle voice ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... lyric begins by wondering how and why the strangers have come: then come thoughts of the voyage and places they must have passed; the coast, where Phineus was haunted by the Harpies, the enchanted sea beyond the Symplegades, ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... the promise had come to him. Although his mission was not properly a prophetic one,—although, in the main, it belonged to him to describe poetically what had come to him through prophetic inspiration, yet prophetic inspiration and sacred lyric are frequently commingled in him. The man who is "the sweet psalmist of Israel" claims a [Hebrew: naM] in 2 Sam. xxiii. 1, and, in ver. 2, says that the Spirit of God spake by him, and His word was upon ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... friends? Of course we are. Old rivals too, In commerce and adventure the world over. From JOHN THE GREAT'S time to the present, you In Africa have been a daring rover; "The Rover's free"! Ah! that's good lyric brag— He is not free to trample ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... two forms of speech,—the one spoken in the northern part of the country. This, the langue d'oil, became at length the French language. But the langue d'oc, a soft and musical tongue, survived long enough to become the vehicle of lyric strains, mostly on subjects of love and gallantry, still familiar in mention, and famous as the songs of the troubadours. The flourishing time of the troubadours was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Provencal is an alternative name ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... on to singing and nearly brought down the roof of Pinoli's restaurant. Cholmeley, the awful being of whose classic taste in Greek iambics I once stood in awe, sang with great feeling a fragment of lyric literature of which the following was, as far as I ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... woman, lapsing, as she occasionally did lapse, into the easy Italian of the lyric stage. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... herself. Words seemed crowding to her tongue. She would not give them utterance; but her look spoke much at the moment. What, Yorke tried to read, but could not. The language was there, visible, but untranslatable—a poem, a fervid lyric, in an unknown tongue. It was not a plain story, however, no simple gush of feeling, no ordinary love-confession—that was obvious. It was something other, deeper, more intricate than he guessed at. He felt his revenge had not struck home. He felt that ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... was a lyric of merit. The words were non-sense, as befitted the play, but the music was worthy of something better. Delmars struck into it in a rich tenor that owned a quality that ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... by name, Your friend, little Cally, your wishes proclaim; Read this and you'll soon learn to know it, I'm not your papa the great lyric poet. ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... Liddell and Scott definition: "any art over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... all these difficulties in the way, there still remains a body of verse in Browning's work which will richly repay any reader. The lyrics and short poems like The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Pippa Passes, Prospice, O Lyric Love, The Last Ride, One Word More, How They Brought the Good News, Herve Riel, the epilogue to Asolando, The Lost Leader, Men and Women, and A Soul's Tragedy will give any reader a taste of the real Browning. If you like these poems, then try the more ambitious poems like A ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... that this lyric, except for its penultimate verse, soon to be quoted, does not seem to me what Mr. Chesterton calls it—"delightful." Nothing, plainly, did bring these two together; she may have looked jealously at his models, and ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... conveyed—by the way in which the writer has done his work, the subject chosen being only his vehicle. Where a man who has something to say looks about for means to say it worthily, he may select a tale, a philosophical disquisition, a familiar essay, a drama or a lyric poem. He may choose badly or well, but in any case it is ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... represent the three vices of Dutch literature—of losing themselves in the clouds, of creeping on the ground, of entangling themselves in the meshes of mysticism—are grouped a number of epic, comic, satiric, and lyric poets, most of whom flourished in the seventeenth and a few in the eighteenth century. Many of them are renowned in Holland, but none possesses sufficient originality to attract the attention of the ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... Madame George Sand must be gratified this time! Your article this morning upon her autobiography really did hit the bull's-eye, plumb! What fire! what enthusiasm! what lyric strains!" ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sundry more special denominations; the most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satyric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others; some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with; some by the sort of verse they like best to write in; for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that numerous ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... things of art we began, at the landmarks set by Leonardo and Michael Angelo; and are come now, not quite at random, to the lyric and elegiac loveliness of Andrea del Sarto. To praise him would need sweeter and purer speech than this of ours. His art is to me as the Tuscan April in its temperate days, fresh and tender and clear, but lulled ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... her friends, or producing good humour and happiness in the family circle. She had formed the acquaintance of Neil Gow, the celebrated violinist, and composed, at his particular request, the words to his popular tune "Farewell to Whisky,"—the only lyric from her pen which has hitherto been published. In all the collections of Scottish song, it appears as anonymous. In the present work, it is printed from a copy in one ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... not be aware, Miss Tazewell, that the lyric to which you have reference is celebrated, both for its antiquity, and the pleasing harmonies that must ever commend it to the taste of the true lover of music; although I allow that to a disciple of the modern and more flimsy school of this glorious ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... in the Iliad. The poem is almost wholly devoted to the praise and glorification of a single hero; it retains very much of the old manners of the earlier stages of epic poetry, before it ceased to be lyric. It is a poem ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... he settled in New Orleans, where he became a professor of law in the University of Louisiana. Though the author of a volume of poems of more than usual excellence, it is the melancholy lyric, My Life is like the Summer Rose, that, more than all the rest, has given him a niche in the temple of literary fame. Is it necessary to quote a stanza of ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... breast, Sang on, prophetic of serener days, As confident as June's completer hours. And I stood listening like a hind, who hears A wood nymph breathing in a forest flute Among the beech-boles of myth-haunted ways: And when it ceased, the memory of the air Blew like a syrinx in my brain: I made A lyric of the notes ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... Yet, as is generally known, this dramatic and lyric adaptation of the famous romance is not particularly happy. I was much embarrassed and I pretended not to understand, but I never dared to go ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... him across the golden spire of the pinnacle of Fame, and whose fine frenzy has as yet given him but a scurvy mundane support, when Scripsit brings home his modest rasher, and finds, on unfolding it, that it is wrapped in the unsold sheets of his last lyric,—doesn't he think that the tallow which helped him to pen the thoughts in the midnight watches was the costliest of feu sacre? When Senator Patriota sits brooding over the speech which has carried the opposition against him, and sees his honorable friend slipping into the place he has manoeuvred ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... the last, and the most interesting, of these recruits, and a good example of Murchard's somewhat morbid assertion that our old friend "liked 'em juicy." It was indeed a fact that Culwin, for all his mental dryness, specially tasted the lyric qualities in youth. As he was far too good an Epicurean to nip the flowers of soul which he gathered for his garden, his friendship was not a disintegrating influence: on the contrary, it forced the young idea to robuster bloom. And in Phil Frenham he had a fine subject for experimentation. The ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... of the Esthonians. Varieties of Literature from Foreign Literary Journals and Original MSS., now first published. London, 1795, pp. 22-44 (reprinted in "Folk-Lore Journal," iii. pp. 156-169, 1885). Contains twelve specimens of lyric poetry, undoubtedly based on some German publication. The anonymous compiler makes the strange mistake of regarding the Esthonians ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... every note Of every lung and tongue and throat, Ay, every rhythm and rhyme Of everything that lives and loves And upward, ever upward moves From lowly to sublime! Earth's multitudinous Sons of Light, I heard them lift their lyric might With each and every chanting sprite That lit the sky that wondrous night As far as ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... and which was held up to ridicule by the great Lockhart. More than ten years followed in which the poet wrote nothing, then he began a literary career which lifted him to the highest place in the literary world, a place which he has since held, and as a lyric poet he has never ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... stay in Milan, and breathed with rapture the incense burned in abundance before him. The Italian Journal in its account of the coronation reached lyric heights: ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Having fastened upon Germany, he questions himself similarly with reference to the cities. Yorick's love of lists, of mock-serious discrimination, of inconsequential reasonings is here copied. The call upon epic, tragic, lyric poets, musicians, etc., which follows here is a further imitation of ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... written in about five early years. Tennyson went on to a patriarchal age, but there is little of his later work that bears comparison with what he wrote before he was forty. Browning produced volume after volume, but, with the exception of an occasional fine lyric, his later work is hardly more than an illustration of his faults of writing. Coleridge deserted poetry very early; Byron, Shelley, Keats, ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... How did the two situations affect Una? 10. Note the teachings in xxiii (prayer), xxiv (absolution), and xxv (mortification of the flesh). 11. Observe that Faith teaches the Knight his relations to God; Charity, those to his fellow-men. 12. Explain the lyric note in l. 378. 13. Give an account of the knight's visit to the Hill of Contemplation. Explain the allegory. 14. Find a stanza complimentary to Queen Elizabeth. 16. What prophecy ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... A lyric conception—my friend, the Poet, said—hits me like a bullet in the forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running down the spine, —then a gasp and a great jump of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to get the fullest measure of music from this lyric gem you should put a strong emphasis on the final "ing." Joshua always did and the summer people never seemed to tire of hearing him recite it. There are ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... out all joy from his life and made him long for death, in spite of his feeling that he was in some measure a help and comfort to his sister." Under the influence of this great sorrow he wrote The Two Voices, Ulysses, "Break, Break, Break," and began that exquisite series of lyric poems, afterwards joined together in the In Memoriam. His friendship for Hallam remained throughout life with him as one of his most ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Palazzo del Te is the Villa Farnesina, raised on the banks of the Tiber by Baldassare Peruzzi for his fellow townsman Agostino Chigi of Siena. It is an idyll placed beside a lyric ode, gentler and quieter in style, yet full of grace, breathing the large and liberal spirit of enjoyment that characterised the age of Leo. The frescoes of Galatea and Psyche, executed by Raphael and his pupils, have made this villa famous in the annals of Italian painting. The memory of the Roman ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... is this same lyric cry that has been crystallised for all time, so far as the American people are concerned, in "The Old ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... child Monona loudly, and was hushed by both parents in simultaneous exclamation which rivalled this lyric outburst. They were alone at table. Di, daughter of a wife early lost to Mr. Deacon, was not there. Di was hardly ever there. She was at that age. That age, ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... on the fingers. Philomela, daughter of Pandion, changed into a nightingale. Phyllis, the S. Phyllis of a former lyric (To Groves). Gild the ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... that we are indebted for the connection of a national error, and for the cure of our Pindaric madness. He first taught the English writers that Pindar's odes were regular; and though certainly he had not the lire requisite for the higher species of lyric poetry, he has shown us that enthusiasm has its rules, and that in mere confusion there is neither ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... million bits of quartz a glow through which pirouetted the antic sand-fleas. Carl's cigarette had the fragrance that comes only from being impregnated with the smoke of an outdoor fire. The waves were lyric, and a group at the next fire crooned "Old Black Joe." The two lovers curled in their nest. Hand ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... we are not here much concerned. They are not fairly to be classed among "supers," and they pertain almost exclusively to the lyric stage. It is to be noted, however, that they are in some sort evidence of the connection that once existed between the Church and the Theatre; the ecclesiastical and the laical drama. At any rate, the chorus singers often undertake divided duties in this respect, and accept engagements ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... dipped into a little valley and rose again, breasting the slope of a wooded hill which thrust itself out from the steeper flank of the mountain-range. Down the hill-side a song floated to meet us—that most noble lyric of old Robert Herrick: ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... followed at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, as well as the Latin poetry of the same period, is rich in proofs of the powerful effect of nature on the human mind. The first glance at the lyric poets of that time will suffice to convince us. Elaborate descriptions of natural scenery, it is true, are very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age, poetry had something else to paint nature vigorously, but no effort to ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... {lyric} poems, the more easily to support his poverty, began to make a tour of the celebrated cities of Asia, singing the praises of victors for such reward as he might receive. After he had become enriched ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... of pity for outraged humanity, her anger at the cruelties of the slave-driver aye ready with knout or knife, are manifest in every line. Beyond the intense interest of the pure narrative we have passages of a rhythm that is lyric, exquisitely descriptive of the picturesque tropical scenery and exotic vegetations, fragrant and luxuriant; there are intimate accounts of adventuring and primitive life; there are personal touches which lend a colour only personal touches can, as Aphara tells her prose-epic ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... that the cynic sneers At such a rule of life; That, after but a few short years, Dissension should be rife. Ah! Lady, you'll avoid heart-ache, And scorn of bard satiric, If haply you should deign to take A lesson from our lyric. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various |
