"Lyric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... himself in a whole literature of so-called plays, which may possibly be studied, and even acted, by societies organized to that laudable end. But the dramatist who declares his end to be mere self-expression stultifies himself in that very phrase. The painter may paint, the sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself,[5] but the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Our purpose to inflame Our soldiers' arteries with lust of fame; To give them something in the lyric line That shall be tantamount to fumes of wine, Yet not too heady, like the champagne (sweet) That lately left them dormant in the street, So that the British, coming up just then, Took them for swine and not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... claim some capacity in the diviner flights of lyric letters, friend. You are not to despise poetry. Nay—rather contemn those who bring scorn to the name of poet—vain writers for filthy pence—fellows ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... publication, in 1855, of the Poems, in two volumes, entitled "Men and Women," Browning reviewed his work and made an interesting reclassification of it. He separated the simpler pieces of a lyric or epic cast—such rhymed presentations of an emotional moment, for example, as "Mesmerism" and "A Woman's Last Word," or the picturesque rhymed verse telling a story of an experience, such as "Childe Roland" and "The Statue and the Bust"—from their more complex companions, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... 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 ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... and came a child to Ohio; but William H. Lytle, dear to lovers of poetry as the author of the fine lyric, "Antony and Cleopatra," was born in Cincinnati, of the old Scotch-Irish stock, in 1826. He had everything pleasant in life and he enjoyed his prosperity, but when the war came he met its call halfway. At Chickamauga he fell, pierced by three bullets, ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... this Volume the productions of very distant periods. The lyric pieces were written in earlier youth; I now think the Ode the most worthless species of composition as well as the most difficult, and should never again attempt it, even if my future pursuits were such as allowed leisure for poetry. The poems addressed to the heart ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... that work (my own excepted) is known to exist. Goodeson's (printed at the end of the last century) is the only copy approaching to anything like completeness, and that is very unlike Purcell's Tempest. Did A.R. find in Purcell's Tempest the music of the beautiful lyric, "Where the Bee sucks?" No. Yet Purcell composed music to it. The absence, then, of "The Owl is abroad," is no proof that Purcell did not write music for that ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... heart and life. Soon the Achilles in the sky looked down upon 20,000 young Achilles walking through the streets beneath. With what admiration do men recall the intellectual achievements of Athens! What temples, and what statues in them! What orators and eloquence! What dramas! What lyric poems! What philosophers! Yet one ideal man who never lived, save in a poet's vision, turned rude tribes into intellectual giants. Thus each nation hungers for heroes. When it has none God sends poets to invent them as soul food for the nation's youth. The best gift to a people is not vineyards ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and they are filled with anecdotes, songs and stories adapted to the maintenance of patriotism and of devotion to the sacred person of His Majesty and to the Napoleonic dynasty."—To this end, the police likewise improves, orders and pays for dramatic or lyric productions of all kinds, cantatas, ballets, impromptus, vaudevilles, comedies, grand-operas, comic operas, a hundred and seventy-six works in one day, composed for the birth of the King of Rome and paid for in rewards to the sum of 88,400 francs. Let the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... still sung; Queen Mary loved music, and wrote verses in French; and James VI., the last occupant of the Scottish throne, sought reputation as a writer both of Latin and English poetry. Under the patronage of the Royal House of Stewart, epic and lyric poetry flourished in Scotland. The poetical chroniclers Barbour, Henry the Minstrel, and Wyntoun, are familiar names, as are likewise the poets Henryson, Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lyndsay. But the authors of the songs of the people have been forgotten. In a ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... we passed 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... "ragtime" band, playing tom-tomic strains—the lyric style of dinner-gong music that tears holes in the air. The leader was an imitator of Sousa and had his gymnastic eccentricities down to a fine point. He executed a fantasia on his horn of plenty that brought a shower of silver ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... that anything more acute, delicate, and discriminating, and, I must add, more entirely valueless and pedantic, I do not think I ever heard. It must have required immense and complicated knowledge. He was tracing the development of a certain kind of dramatic lyric, and what surprised me was that he supplied the subtle intellectual connection, the missing links, so to speak, of which there is no earthly record. Let me give a single instance. He was accounting for a rather sudden change ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cases, as in the few poems of shipwreck or of mental conflict, we can only wonder at the gift of vivid imagination by which this recluse woman can delineate, by a few touches, the very crises of physical or mental struggle. And sometimes again we catch glimpses of a lyric strain, sustained perhaps but for a line or two at a time, and making the reader regret its sudden cessation. But the main quality of these poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor sometimes exasperating, seemingly wayward, but ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... will admit, though, that Peter has his lure. I read about him in the Tavistock Gazette, one of the few papers, I fancy, which does not belong to Lord NORTHCLIFFE; and this is how the lyric (it is really a lyric, although it masquerades as an advertisement) runs, not only in the paper but in my head: "To be let, by Tender" (this is not an oath but some odd legal or commercial term) "as and from Lady Day all that nice little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... with little variety of images, and a still scantier stock of language, is obliged to turn his few words to many purposes, by likenesses so clear and analogies so remote as to give his language the semblance and character of lyric poetry interspersed with grotesques. Something not unlike this was the case of such men as Behmen and Fox with regard to the Bible. It was their sole armoury of expressions, their only organ ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Roth's stirring "Chariot Race" and St. Gaudens's equestrian statue of General Sherman. Sculpture was profusely used to beautify buildings. Wholly original and charming were the four groups for the Temple of Music: Heroic Music, Sacred Music, Dance Music, and Lyric Music. Perched in every corner were figures of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... is't not? Is that well managed or not? Is the "thin Blue line" well disciplined or not? Have you such absolute perfection of "alltogetherishness" on your lyric stage as the Force voluntarily maintains—in its own interests, and obedient to its own peculiar ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... 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 ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... the other little masterpieces of story-telling in verse are unfortunately untranslatable, as are all poems but a lyric or two, now and then, by a happy accident. A translated poem is a boiled strawberry, as some one once put it brutally. But the tales which M. Coppee has written in prose—a true poet's prose, nervous, vigorous, flexible, and firm—these ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... of thought; whose gift it is to find speech in dumb things and eloquence in the ideal half of the living world; to whom sorrow is a melody and joy sweet music; to whom the humblest effort of a humble life can furnish an immortal lyric, and in whom one thought of the Divine can inspire a sublime hymn. Another stoops and takes a handful of clay from the earth, and with the pressure of his fingers moulds it to the reality of an unreal image seen in dreams; or, standing before the vast, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... Bergerac furnished more laughable specimens. No phrase of Rombus equals the order given by the Pedant to his son when sending him to Venice to engage in commerce: "Since thou hast never desired to drink of the pool engendered by the hoof of the feathered horse,[248] and as the lyric harmony of the learned murderer of Python has never inflated thy speech, try if in merchandise Mercury will lend thee his Caduceus. So may the turbulent AEolus be as affable to thee as to the peaceful nests of halcyons. In short, Charlot, thou must go." Sidney kept entirely to these ineffectual attempts, ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... lyre take similar care that their young disciple is temperate and gets into no mischief; and when they have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the poems of other excellent poets, who are the lyric poets; and these they set to music, and make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children's souls, in order that they may learn to be more gentle, and harmonious, and rhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action; for the life of man in every part has need of ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... like to? The hills are one long glory to-day." It was not the note of her prayer, it was well-ordered and calm. Still, Steering's heart leaped like a boy's at her friendliness, and he began to speak his gratitude in a lyric tune: ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... were seeking to catch some lyric exordia as they flew by immersed in the billows ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... said, if we only had important personages, formed by great studies and situations in life, it might still go well with us, at least as far as our young lyric poets are concerned." ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... belongs also another lyric. It is printed in Hawthorn and Lavender, to which I have already referred, and is one of Mr. Henley's most ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... conscious of a great depression,—a 'fit of the blues,' which he attributed partly to the damp, lowering weather. Idly he turned over the leaves of a first edition of Tennyson's poems,—pausing here and there to glance at a favourite lyric or con over a well-remembered verse, when the echo of a silvery horn blown clear on the wintry silence startled him out of his semi-abstraction. Rising, he went instinctively to the window, though from that he could see nothing but his own garden, looking ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... on the field of Goito; it was won. It was won against odds. At Pastrengo they witnessed an encounter; this was a battle. Vittoria perceived that there was the difference between a symphony and a lyric song. The blessedness of the sensation that death can be light and easy dispossessed her of the meaner compassion, half made up of cowardice, which she had been nearly borne down by on the field of Pastrengo. At an angle on a height off the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... In the second lyric, An Belinden, he pictures in the same tone of half regret the case in which he finds himself, and the picture has an eloquent commentary in his letters of the time. He who had lately spent his peaceful evenings in the solitude of his own ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... century, and was, in fact, the parent of the vaccination which has superseded it, and which is merely inoculation with matter derived from another source, the cow. She was also an authoress of considerable repute for lyric odes and vers de societe, &c., and, above all, for her letters, most of which are to her daughter, Lady Bute (as Mme. de Sevigne's are to her daughter, Mme. de Grignan), and which are in no respect inferior to those of the French lady in sprightly wit, while in the variety of their subjects ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... shreds;—never was a man so violently exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "shop" as a poetic dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... seemed to be no doubt in his mind that the victim of his fun, even when it outraged common sensibilities, must enjoy it as much as he. Who but Eugene, after being the welcome guest, at a European capital, of one of our most ambitious and refined ambassadors, would have written a lyric, sounding the praises of a German "onion pie," ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... this: We grant the major premises, but why look to the work of prose fiction as the main instrument in this necessary process of, so to speak, sympathising humanity together? Cannot this be done far more effectively through biography and autobiography, for example? Isn't there the lyric; and, above all, isn't there the play? Well, so far as the stage goes, I think it is a very charming and exciting form of human activity, a display of actions and surprises of the most moving and impressive sort; but beyond the opportunity it affords for saying startling and thought-provoking ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... box you can haf all your wishes," asserted the Professor, still in the German lyric strain over his triumph. "It iss the box of enchantments. You haf but to will the change you would haf taig place—it iss done. The substance ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... irresistible charm for him; and he once declared that he would almost rather have been Ireland than Shakespeare; and then it was his delight to write Greek versions of a poem that might attach the mark of plagiarism to Tennyson, or show, by a Scandinavian lyric, how the laureate had been poaching from the Northmen. Now it was a mock pastoral in most ecclesiastical Latin that set the whole Church in arms; now a mock despatch of Baron Beust that actually deceived the Revue des Deux Mondes and caused quite a panic at the ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... 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 and South the old bucolic sentiment still survives,—that ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... a life that was wild and free, free, free, And a life that was wild and free." To this charming lyric there was a chorus of, "Then hurrah for the pirate bold, And hurrah for the rover wild, And hurrah for the yellow gold, And hurrah for the ocean's child!" the mild enunciation of which highly moral and appropriate chant appeared to give Mr. Poletiss great satisfaction, as he turned his half-shut ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... 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 ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... of lyric—especially when it came to the last verse—here, there, and everywhere he scored them through with a ruthless hand; and with a renewed sense of usefulness, and a conscience well at ease, he returned the much deleted ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... we have to notice is the collected edition of Motherwell's Poems, which has just issued from the Glasgow Press, under the auspices of Mr James M'Conechy. William Motherwell must always stand very high in the list of the minor Scottish poets, and one lyric of his, "Jeanie Morrison," is as pathetic as any in the language. But of him so much has already been said in former numbers of MAGA, that we may dispense with present criticism: and we shall merely draw the attention of the lovers of the supernatural to a more terrific temptation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... outlines, and even these have been the subject of many learned disputes. She was born near the close of the seventh century B.C., either at Mytilene or at Eresos in the island of Lesbos. She grew to maturity at the former place, and became one of the two great leaders of the AEolian school of lyric poetry. From the fragments of her poetry, and those of her great rival, Alcaeus, it is evident that the two were not envious of each other's fame, but lived in the most friendly intercourse. Of the events of her life, we have only two. One, referred to in the Parian marble ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... passion for the lyric stage, and now there is nothing to prevent—" did a slight shadow here darken also her sunny eyes, gone instantly?— "I shall make music my life's aim. Fortunately I have money of my own to enable me to ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... from another heaven than that created by his own celestial genius upon the long lines of pilgrims from every nation of the earth to the gushing fountain of poesy opened by the touch of his magic wand; if he could be permitted to behold the vast assemblage of grand and glorious productions of the lyric art called into being by his own inspired strains, he would weep tears of bitter anguish that, instead of lavishing all the stores of his mighty genius upon the fall of Ilion, it had not been his more blessed lot to crystallize in deathless ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... broke in a cloud of gold. The song of a mocking-bird in the poplars of the little graveyard came to her with unsuspected melody—a melody drawn from the freshness, the loneliness, the half-awakened calls from hidden nests and the lyric ecstasy ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... faces of those who dance with it. It is the Fires of Mora—come, God alone knows how—from Erin—to this place. The Fires of Mora!" He contemplated the hushed folk before him; and then from his lips came that weirdest, most haunting of the lyric legends ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... difference and disparity among the old editions of the poets and romancists; and there are, and always will be, a distinguished minority, of which the selling prices may be expected to remain firm. Such men as Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, Massinger, and among the lyric group Barnfield, Watson, Constable, Wither (earlier works and Hallelujah), Carew, Herrick, Suckling, and Lovelace, are to be ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... sons of Sophocles composed tragedy and wrote some lyric poems. But there exist no remains of their works, nor anything particular respecting themselves; some loose anecdotes excepted, which Plutarch has related respecting one of them of the name of Antiphon, who wrote a tragedy by which Dionysius the tyrant obtained a prize, long after ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... When any man is awake to the fact that the public is a vile patron, when he is conscious also that his bread and his fame are in their gift—it is a stern passage for his soul, a touchstone for the strength and gentleness of his spirit. Jonson, whose splendid scorn took to itself lyric wings in the two great Odes to Himself, sang high and aloof for a while, then the frenzy caught him, and he flung away his lyre to gird himself for deeds of mischief among nameless and noteless antagonists. Even Chapman, who, in The Tears of Peace, compares "men's refuse ears" to those gates in ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... many bands of music,—among these the very artistic one of Pagsanhan belonging to the escribano, Don Miguel Guevara,—swarms of Chinamen and Indians, who, with the curiosity of the former and the piety of the latter, awaited anxiously the day on which was to be celebrated the comic-mimic-lyric-lightning-change-dramatic spectacle, for which a large and spacious theater had been erected in the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the poet Gascoigne, and the elder of our fascinating trio, is conspicuous for an unswerving, whole-hearted attachment to nature and rural scenes. It is in the pastoral lyric where, with tenderest devotion, he pursues, untrammelled, a light and free-born fancy. His fertile, varied muse, laden with the passionate exaggerations of love-lorn swain, is yet charged with richest ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... 1850, Charlotte Bronte paid another visit to London, and later to Scotland, where she found Edinburgh "compared to London like a vivid page of history compared to a dull treatise on political economy; as a lyric, brief, bright, clean, and vital as a flash of lightning, compared to a great ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... 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 with ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... and all kinds of pagan folk-lore. 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 of the Finns ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... as characteristic of the nineteenth as of the sixteenth century. The depletion of our lyric poetry, if everything relating to the singer's love affairs were omitted, is appalling even to contemplate. Yet, if this were the extent of love's influence upon poetry, one would have to class it, in kind if not in degree, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... better production than either of Wordsworth's, superior to Hogg's, and, though not so intellectual as Shelley's, rivals it in truth. Mackay's is the lark itself, Shelley's is himself listening, with unwearied ears and tightly-stretched imagination, to the lark. Who is surprised that Eric Mackay's lyric, 'The Waking of the Lark,' sent a thrill through the heart of America? This poem, which appeared in the New York Independent, is undoubtedly the lark-poem of the future. From the opening to the closing stanza there is not an imperfect verse, not a commonplace. ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... persistently as to become a nuisance, and the only way to get rid of it is to whistle or sing myself. For instance, I may be mentally reciting for my solace and delectation some beloved lyric like "The Waterfowl," or "Tears, Idle Tears," or "Break, Break, Break"; and all the while, between the lines, this fiend of a subcerebral vocalist, like a wandering minstrel in a distant square, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... something evaporates—some quite peculiar freshness, naivete, indiscreetness, which, can never be recaptured. Take a few typical instances. Coleridge lost the poetical gift altogether when he left his youth behind; Wordsworth wrote all his best poetry in a few early years; Milton lost his pure lyric gift. But the most salient instance of all is Tennyson; in the two earliest volumes there is a perfectly novel charm, a grace, a daring which he lost in later life. He became solemn, mannerised, conscious of responsibility. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... conduct their own horses in the rapid career. [41] Ten, twenty, forty chariots were allowed to start at the same instant; a crown of leaves was the reward of the victor; and his fame, with that of his family and country, was chanted in lyric strains more durable than monuments of brass and marble. But a senator, or even a citizen, conscious of his dignity, would have blushed to expose his person, or his horses, in the circus of Rome. The games were exhibited at the expense of the republic, the magistrates, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... owes less to Buerger than English owes to Burns, but it owes much. Buerger revived the ballad form in which so much of the finest German poetry has since been cast. With his lyric gifts and his dramatic power, he infused a life into these splendid poems that has made them a part of the folk-lore of his native land. 'Lenardo und Blandine,' his own favorite, 'Des Pfarrers Tochter von Taubenhain' (The ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... poem is built out of the simplest of technical elements, the precise tone and color of language employed to articulate impulse and mood, and the reproduction of objective substances for a clear visualization of character and scene, all tend by a sure and unfaltering composition, to present a lyric art unique in English poetry of the last ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... the truest Schubertian style. I like to fancy that the melody with its serene, lyric beauty is a picture of the fair Rosamunde herself. The first variation, a plaintive melody over an agitated accompaniment, I should be inclined, still referring to Rosamunde and regarding each variation as expressing an experience in her life, to entitle "Moods." The second variation is more ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... ordinary birds that is most regularly seized with the fit of ecstasy that results in this lyric burst in the air, as I described in my first book, "Wake Robin," over thirty years ago, is the oven-bird, or wood-accentor—the golden-crowned thrush of the old ornithologists. Every loiterer about the woods knows this ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... friends at heart," she resumed, "because she used to sing his songs. Ah, how did it go?" and Mrs. Hilbery, who had a very sweet voice, trolled out a famous lyric of her father's which had been set to an absurdly and charmingly sentimental air ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... soon as his countenance lighted with animation, it revealed a character rich in various possibility, a vital force which, by its bright indefiniteness, made some appeal to the imagination. Often he had the air of a lyric enthusiast; often, that of a profound thinker; not seldom there came into his eyes a glint of stern energy which seemed a challenge to the world. Therewithal, nothing perceptibly histrionic; look or speak as he might, the young man exhaled an atmosphere of sincerity, and persuaded others ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... talk of the best poem which the war has produced; and opinions usually vary. My own vote, so far as England is concerned, is still given to Julian Grenfell's lyric of the fighting man; but if France is to be included too, one must consider very seriously the claims of La Passion de Notre Frere le Poilu, by Marc Leclerc, which may be had in a little slender paper-covered book, at a ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... was of poetry in general and I was much struck with his frequent happy application of quotations to the little events of the drive and phases of feeling that came up as the day went on. The sun set gloriously, "So stirbt ein Held," said Bancroft, as he burst with feeling into the beautiful lyric of which these words are a line. The best German poetry seemed to be at his tongue's end and he recited it with sympathy and accuracy which called out much admiration from the cultivated German ladies with whom we were driving. Most interesting ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... first employed in celebrating the praises of the gods. The fragments of the Orphic hymns, and those of Linus and Musaeus, show these poets entertained sounder notions of the Supreme Being than many philosophers of a later date. There are lyric fragments yet remaining that bear striking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... that slight hand Could Raphael or Leonardo trace. Nor could the poets know in Fairyland The changing wonder of your lyric face. ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... "After the 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 ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... and at last himself. With him, as with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In Dramatic Lyrics he discovered the one thing that he could really do better than any one else—the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre of that field ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... to me." She started up again, with a shudder, and lifted screening hands like one who dreads missiles. "It drove me to marry. I made believe that I preferred being the wife of a Russian noble to being the greatest lyric actress of Europe; I made believe—I acted that part. It was because I felt my greatness sinking away from me, as I feel my life sinking now. I would not wait till men said, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... was speaking to himself. "It might work—it might add interest—" Mr. Heatherbloom waited patiently. "Would you have any objections," earnestly, "to my making a little addenda to the sign on the chariot of cadence? What's the Matter with Mother? 'The touching lyric, as interpreted by Horatio ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... 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 lay in his cold, calculating ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... alleged afflatus, the fellow—so different from us—is neither to hold nor to bind. The easiest way with him seems to be a pitying contempt. "For all good poets," says Socrates sagely in the Ion, "epic as well as lyric, compose their lovely strains, not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian dances are not quite 'rational,' so the lyric poets are, so to speak, not quite 'all ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... gratitude and love of whoever can read the language which he makes musical with solace and aspiration. The present volume, while it will confirm Mr. Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric poets, deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty of epic narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. In our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red pepper of ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of the same inconstant April color, but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance's were always points of highlight, and always meaning another thing than the thing they meant yesterday. But it was hard to see why this earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face that was as gay as his was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder, and though his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words. ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... have 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. ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... 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 to ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were and what they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us again in their literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their architecture, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square,—a builded geometry. Then we have it once again in sculpture, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... crags. The breath of morn Still lingers in the valley; but the bee With restless passion hovers on the wing, Waiting the opening flower, of whose embrace The sun shall be the signal. Poised in air, The winged minstrel of the liquid dawn, The lark, pours forth his lyric, and responds To the fresh chorus of the sylvan doves, The stir of branches and the fall of streams, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... these I shall have occasion to speak; but, as the title of the book implies,—for Antiphon means the responsive song of the parted choir,—I shall have chiefly to do with the lyric ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... poems of the 'Anthology' there are none that have become very popular, none that are capable of affording any very keen delight to the lover of poetry. One sees that their author's lyric gift was not of the highest order. What is heard is not so much the note of honest feeling as the effort of an active intellect, searching heaven and earth for clever and striking things to say. Instead of learning from the folk-song, Schiller had learned originally from ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... further. A landscape painter would not make a primary study of Angelo's anatomical drawings; a composer of lyric forms of music would not study Sousa's marches; nor would a person writing a story look for much assistance in the arguments of Burke. The most direct benefit is derived from studying the very thing one wishes ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... beadrolls of names he can string together from the rough Cornish and Devon coasts. Only out of a poetic-hearted people are poets born. The peasant writes ballads, though scholars and antiquaries collect them. The Hebrew lyric fire blazed in myriad beacons from every landmark. The soil of Palestine is trodden, as it were, with the footsteps of God, so eloquent are its mountains and hamlets with these records ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... this opera is not much above that ordinary kind, to which music is so often doomed to be wedded—making up by her own sweetness for the dulness of her help-mate—by far the greater number of the songs are full of beauty, and some of them may rank among the best models of lyric writing. The verses, "Had I a heart for falsehood framed," notwithstanding the stiffness of this word "framed," and one or two other slight blemishes, are not unworthy of living in recollection with the matchless air ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... the poems that come under such denomination. I confess it is not a little puzzling to find a narrative poem of some five hundred lines or more included under the heading of hymns; it would seem that nearly all lyric poetry of an essentially Christian character was so designated, to separate it from secular or pagan poetry. In Prudentius' first published work, 'Liber Cathemerinon,' we find hymns composed absolutely after the manner of St Ambrose, in the same or in similar ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... evident that if the author of the lyric was not describing Indian squaws when he alluded to the 'scowling' females whose 'nimble poignards dare the day,' he certainly ought to have been. But the allusion to 'the bows,' settles the matter. Bows and arrows are not used in the confederate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... mountain spring; But—when it's bitter with base treachery— It dams itself against all utterance, And either mines the soul, or, breaking forth, Sweeps downward to destruction. Oh! 'tis true, Love is the lyric happiness of youth; And they, who sing its perfect melody, Do from the honest parish register Still take their tune. And so must you. For you Are now in the very period of youth When myriads of unborn ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... from this interview, and, flinging himself at his desk, attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the language of one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric which he began thus:— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... in which the stage alone can give the full significance to a dramatic poem, just as a lyric finds its full interpretation in music; but we prefer that a song of Goethe or Shelley should wait for its music, and in the meantime suggest its own aerial accompaniment, rather than be vulgarized in the setting. And even when set for the voice by a master, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... And this habit was kept up until Mr. Lincoln had found both his life work and his individual expression. Later he devoured Shakespeare and Burns; and the poetry of these masters of the dramatic and lyric form, sprung like himself from the common soil, and like him self-trained and directed, furnished a kind of running accompaniment to his work and his play. What he read he not only held tenaciously, but took into his imagination and incorporated ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... 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 ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... sojourn over the tinsmith's shop, Sunday, I drew down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness, such ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... She was a good listener, as women who have something else to think about often are; and so they rode along the twisting path, and the wind sang in the plumes of the bamboo trees, and Hartley believed that it sang a romantic lyric of platonic admiration, exquisitely hinted at by a tactful man, and properly appreciated by ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... majestically seated, instead of leaning on the window-ledge, has, in Scheffer's picture, I know not what touch of stiffness, of slightly theatrical. And the general impression is a cold dryness which contrasts with the lyric warmth of the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... to lyric poetry, because Sappho and Alcaeus were natives of Lesbos in Aeolia, and wrote in ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... The dramatic lyric and monologue in which Browning set forth the varieties of passionate experience was an art-form of immense possibilities, which it was a work of genius to discover. To say that Browning, the inventor of this amazingly ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... death of his "Lyric Love." The story of the most beautiful romance that the world has ever known thus falls into three distinctive periods,—that of the separate life of each up to the time of their marriage; their married life, with its scenic setting in the enchantment ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... intercourse between them, and their occasional intermarriages, seemed little short of monstrous to the ferocious exclusiveness of the Anglo-Saxon. [Footnote: Michelet notices this exclusiveness of the English, and inveighs against it in his most lyric style. "Crime contre la nature! Crime contre l'humanite! Il sera expie par la sterilite de l'esprit."] The Indians in the central part of Illinois cut very little figure in the reminiscences of the pioneers; they occupied ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... dreadful way of human birth, His shadow 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
... that even cultivated readers have found more real satisfaction in the "One-Hoss Shay" than in many a more celebrated lyric. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... of subtlety compatible with an individual self,—the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... looked into eyes. Many might voice the thought expressed by one: "I may boast that Paul Hayne was my friend, though it was never my good fortune to meet him." Many a soul was upheld and strengthened by him, as was that of a man who wrote that he had been saved from suicide by reading the "Lyric of Action." His album held autographed photographs of many writers, among them Charles Kingsley, William Black, and Wilkie Collins. He cherished an ivy vine sent him by Blackmore from ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... 1150 to 1190. The lyric poets of this period were for the most part Austrian and Bavarian knights who lived remote from the French border and were little influenced by the now well-developed art of the troubadours and trouvres. They got their impulse rather from the ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... poet, chiefly lyric, recalling Pindaric days, has sprung up lately in Athens. His rendering of the dramas of Sophocles into modern Greek for the stage in Athens and Constantinople, is said to have attracted much attention ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... did not write poetry himself, but he read poetry with a good deal of effect, and he would sometimes take a hint from one of Gifted Hopkins's last productions to recite a passionate lyric of Byron or Moore, into which he would artfully throw so much meaning that Myrtle was almost as much puzzled, in her simplicity, to know what it meant, as she had been by the religious fervors ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that Pushkin is, he is accordingly at his best only in his lyrics. But the essence of a lyric is music, and the essence of music is harmony, and the essence of harmony is form; hence in beauty of form Pushkin is unsurpassed, and among singers he is peerless. His soul is a veritable olian harp. No sooner does the wind begin to blow ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... opera-dancers is extremely well defined, as their names implies; for they most do congregate wherever an opera-house exists. Some, however, descend to the non-lyric drama, and condescend to "illustrate" the plays of Shakespeare. It is said that the classical manager of Drury Lane Theatre has secured a company of them to help the singers he has engaged to perform Richard the Third, Coriolanus, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... performance as Gorboduc must have been hailed as not only a novelty but a wonder. It was the first piece composed in English on the ancient tragic model, with a regular division into five acts, closed by lyric choruses. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark, standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its innumerable pillars, is not in the least gray with time—no grayer than a Greek lyric. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Denmark. For many years he made the aspects of life at sea his particular theme, and he contrived to rouse the patriotic enthusiasm of the Danish public as it had never been roused before. His various and unceasing productiveness, his freshness and vigour, and the inexhaustible richness of his lyric versatility, early brought Drachmann to the front and kept him there. Meanwhile prose imaginative literature was ably supported by Sophus Schandorph (1836-1901), who had been entirely out of sympathy with the idealists, and had taken no step while that school was in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... pomum" by "he's a daisy," and remarks, appropriately enough, "that this was well enough for 1898; but we would now be more inclined to render it 'he's a peach.'" Again, Peck renders "illud erat vivere" by "that was life," but, in the words of our lyric American jazz, we would be more inclined to render it "that was the life." "But," as Professor Gaselee has said, "no rendering of this part of the Satyricon can be final, it must always be in the slang of ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... before he saw her. The rhythms of a song, a tender and gay little lyric which she had sung to crowded drawing-rooms, but for him alone, long years past, floated out to him, clear and pure, through the clear, pure balm of the forest. He slipped quietly from his horse and saw her, through the window, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... that the "Invitation from a True Lover Settled Abroad," was not a single lyric, but a beautiful incident taken from some epic poem.[81] A messenger comes with a token to a lady at home, by which she may credit his message; he bids her take ship as soon as she hears the voice of the cuckoo, and go out to him who has all things ready about ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... and a lyric to be lyrical and heart appealing, must be inevitable. It must be the spontaneous expression of the heart of the author—an expression which had to come. It is the latent secret of the power of true hymns, for what must be ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... From these combined inspirations resulted, to the eternal glory of the Catholic faith and of Christian art, a composition without a rival in the history of painting, and, we may also add, without a name; for to call it lyric or epic is not enough, unless, indeed, we mean, by using these expressions, to compare it with the allegorical epic of Dante, alone worthy to be ranked with this marvellous production of the pencil ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... himself, every line seems to flow in its natural and most simple order; and where the music required repetition of a line, or a word, the iteration seems to improve the sense and poetical effect. Neither is the piece deficient in the higher requisites of lyric poetry. When music is to be "married to immortal verse," the poet too commonly cares little with how indifferent a yoke-mate he provides her. But Dryden, probably less from a superior degree of care, than from that divine impulse which he could ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... lead into a form of historical primitivism in which the products of the first poets were "extemporary effusions," rudely imitative of pastoral scenes or celebratory of the divine being. Thus the first generic distinction Ogilvie makes is between pastoral poetry and lyric; the function of the former is to produce pleasure, the latter to raise admiration of the powers presiding over nature. As poetry is more natural to the young mind than philosophy, so is the end of pastoral poetry more easily achieved than that of the lyric. The difference resides essentially ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... my bread and honey, set among A grove of spice; An ever brimming cup; a lyric sung After ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... this work that survives in common use is the immortal lyric, "I love thy kingdom, Lord," founded on a motif in the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm. This, with Doddridge's hymn, "My God, and is thy table spread?" continued for a long time to be the most important church hymn and ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Lara, Spain's foremost lyric poet of the nineteenth century, was born on the 25th of March, 1808, the year of his country's heroic revolt against the tyranny of Napoleon. His parents were Lieutenant-Colonel Don Juan de Espronceda y Pimentel and Doa Mara del Carmen ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... 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 ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... having such a name?" I queried, sadly. "Avis! Why, it is the very soul of music, clear, and sweet and as insistent as a bird-call, an unforgettable lyric in four letters! It is just the sort of name a fellow cannot possibly forget. Why couldn't you have been named Polly or Lena or Margaret, or something commonplace like ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... fine etching hardly less than a painting. Here we have neither the plastic effect of the sculpture nor the color of the painting. The essential features of the real model are left out. As an imitation it would fail disastrously. What is imitated in a lyric poem? Through more than two thousand years we have appreciated the works of the great dramatists who had their personages speak in the rhythms of metrical language. Every iambic verse is a deviation from reality. If they had tried to imitate nature Antigone and Hamlet would have spoken the prose ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you think he puts such a lot ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... founded by Princess Elena Couza in 1862, to provide for 230 orphan girls. The summer home of these girls is a convent in the Transylvanian Alps. Hotels and restaurants are numerous. There are two theatres, the National and the Lyric, which is mainly patronized by foreign players; but minor places of amusement abound; as also do clubs—political, social and sporting. Socially, indeed, the progress of Bucharest is remarkable, its political, literary and scientific ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Shooting Togs.' But, after all, Mr. Seaman's masterpiece up to date is certainly 'To the Lord of Potsdam.' ... This will live, or we are greatly mistaken, among the most effective examples of historical satire-lyric."—The Saturday Review. ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... most striking songs which the war has brought forth, we must class that grim Puritanical lyric, 'The Kansas John Brown,' which appeared originally in the Kansas Herald, and which is, as we are informed, extensively sung in the army. The ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... madrigal, catch, round, chorus, chorale; antiphon[obs3], antiphony; accompaniment, second, bass; score; bourdon[obs3], drone, morceau[obs3], terzetto[obs3]. composer &c. 413; musician &c. 416. V. compose, perform &c. 416; attune. Adj. musical; instrumental, vocal, choral, lyric, operatic; harmonious &c. 413; Wagnerian. Adv. adagio; largo, larghetto, andante, andantino[obs3]; alla capella[It][obs3]; maestoso[obs3], moderato; allegro, allegretto; spiritoso[obs3], vivace[obs3], veloce[obs3]; presto, prestissimo[obs3]; con brio; capriccioso[obs3]; scherzo, scherzando[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... stories, and whatever else is usually delivered in declamation. At the same time she had contracted an unhappy habit of accompanying what she delivered with gestures, by which, in a disagreeable way, what is purely epic and lyric is more confused ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... "relish to his song," {0f} by adopting "a diversity of structure in the metre;" for the lyric comes in occasionally to relieve the solemnity of the heroic, whilst at the same time the latter is frequently capable of being divided into a shorter verse, a plan which has been observed in one of the MSS. used on the present occasion; e. ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... never explain satisfactorily what the "pea-vine" was. His "Ring around and shake a leg, ma lady," was a triumph in the lyric line. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... which I strayed one evening, one of the nigger corner-men sang a song of which the nature may be sufficiently divined from the refrain, "And the tom-cat was the cause of it all." This lyric being loudly encored, the performer came forward, and, to my astonishment, began to recite a long series of doggerel verses upon Mr. Kipling's illness, setting ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... requested to furnish words for The Melodies of Scotland, he responded by contributing over 100 songs, on which perhaps his claim to immortality chiefly rests, and which placed him in the front rank of lyric poets. His worldly prospects were now perhaps better than they had ever been; but he was entering upon the last and darkest period of his career. He had become soured, and moreover had alienated many of his best friends by too freely expressing sympathy with the French Revolution, and the then unpopular ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... and the early inscriptions are rude and unskilfully executed; nor can we even assure ourselves whether Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, Kallinus, Tyrtaeus, Xanthus, and the other early elegiac and lyric poets, committed their compositions to writing, or at what time the practice of doing so became familiar. The first positive ground which authorizes us to presume the existence of a manuscript of Homer, is in the famous ordinance of Solon, with regard to the rhapsodies at the Panathenaea: ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... (1809) is somewhat unpleasantly superhuman, and if, at times, he mixes sex and religion like a mystic of the Middle Ages or a Spaniard of the Counter Reformation, he rises to wonderful lyric heights when he touches his own experiences, or when he expresses the note of the people. His use of the supernatural, of the subconscious mood, gives rise to such poems as The Lore-Lay, the legend ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... In the rendering of lyric poetry there are two extremes to be avoided. One is the musical tendency to obscure the sense, as in "sing-song" rendering; the other is the reactionary effort made by many would-be sensible people to make prose ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... 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
... in some measure prepared for it. But, to get rid of the details of history, which are always wearisome and usually inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been due to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all the wide ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... something, in a hazy sort of way. You had on a rose-colored gown that was distinctly wonderful, and when we tracked the German to the door of your room, you were wearing an evening coat, bright blue. But the main thing was your hair!" Here I became lyric. "An oak-leaf in the sunlight, Miss Falconer! Threads ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... a Polish Jesuit whose neo-Latin Horatian odes and Biblical paraphrases gained immediate European acclaim upon their first publication in 1625 and 1628.[1] The fine lyric quality of Sarbiewski's poetry, and the fact that he often fused classical and Christian motifs, made a critic like Hugo Grotius actually prefer the "divine Casimire" to Horace himself, and his popularity among the English poets is evidenced by ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... the basis of many a double meaning. There is, in fact, no lyric song describing natural scenery that may not have beneath it some implied, often indelicate, allusion whose riddle it takes an adroit and practiced mind ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous |
