"Lyric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of 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 or ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... 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
... literature worthy the name in that Ultima Thule. He is, indeed, not in any way to be blamed for not suspecting the possibility of a highly developed drama under conditions such as obtain in Iceland, even though he may well be aware that lyric poetry has been cultivated there with ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... step-son to 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 imagery and thought, full to overflowing with joyous abandonment, and ...
— 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)
... realise divine mysteries, when the miracle of the Incarnation was, as it were, worked for her in her own soul; when she heard in her own heart the beating of the heart of God; when his hand touched her with a tenderness that warmed her place of peace. She had hardly known this flamed and lyric creature for herself. It was as if her soul, resting after long flight, had contemplated for the first time the silver and ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... who have suffered more than himself. The poem is arranged in strophes, each one telling of some afflicted hero and ending with the same refrain: His sorrow passed away; so will mine. "Deor" is much more poetic than "Widsith," and is the one perfect lyric[16] of the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... pondered the lyric. It told its own simple story and could at once have been dismissed but for its divined and puzzling relationship to the popular society favourite of Nome, Alaska. What could ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Part For Ever Come to Me in Cherry Time On the Death of Mrs. Jessie Willis Thank God for Pleasant Weather The Master's Song The Missing Ship Jeannie Marsh Lucy Epitaph In Memory of John W. Francis, Jr Nature's Noblemen A Wall-Street Lyric King Cotton Words Adapted to a Spanish Melody Love in Exile To the Evening Star Welcome Home The Sycamore Shade Up the Hudson Only Thine Epigram on Reading Grim's Attack upon Clinton On Hearing that Morse ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... might pursue the footsteps of Diomede and Menelaus, and 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Boy-Poet of the Decadence,' and at 'To Julia in 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
... not long ago befell The tear-compelling incident I now propose to tell; So come, my sweet collector friends, and listen while I sing Unto your delectation this brief, pathetic thing— No lyric pitched in vaunting key, but just a requiem Of blowing twenty dollars ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... from the source from which 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 his tongue. In Acts ii. 30, 31, Peter declares that, by the divine promise, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... the 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 he had put ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... lyric. In the usual sense. They are not much different from poetry that praises gardens. The content is the distress of love, death, universal longing. The impulse to formulate them in the "cynical" vein (like cabaret songs) may, for example, might have arisen from the wish to feel superior. ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... romanticism were repellent to him, he could not endure the struggling for wonderful effects, for delicious excesses. "He loved Shakspeare only under many conditions. He thought his characters were drawn too closely to the life, and spoke a language too true; he preferred the epic and lyric syntheses which leave the poor details of humanity in the shade. For the same reason he spoke little and listened less, not wishing to give expression to his own thoughts, or to receive the thoughts of others, until after they had attained ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... more variously designated than Comus. Milton himself describes it simply as "A Mask"; by others it has been criticised and estimated as a lyrical drama, a drama in the epic style, a lyric poem in the form of a play, a phantasy, an allegory, a philosophical poem, a suite of speeches or majestic soliloquies, and even a didactic poem. Such variety in the description of the poem is explained ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... the soldier should care so little for martial songs, or the songs that are ostensibly written for him; but that is not the fault of Tommy Atkins. Lyric poets don't give him what he calls "the stuff." He doesn't get it even from Kipling; Thomas Hardy's "Song of the Soldiers" leaves him cold. He wants no epic stanzas, no heroic periods. What he asks for is something simple and romantic, something about a girl, ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... 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 ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... age of Italian poetry, which now followed at the end of the fifteenth century, 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, it is true, of natural scenery are very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age, the novels and the lyric or epic poetry had something else to deal with. Bojardo and Ariosto paint nature vigorously, but as briefly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... individual bit is necessary to the perfection of the whole. I allow that this is not the usual way of looking at it; but my pleasure lies in seeing it entire, making the tea-table into a kind of lyric, elevating the family life by the application of the principles of abstract beauty to its homeliest details. Pardon, Miss Beecham, but Mrs. Tozer is right, and you are wrong. The idea of carrying off a few lines of a poem in one's pocket for ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... probable that 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 were instanced by Shelley and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... directly from the study of the Greek and Roman classics. In all that Mistral has written there is very little that springs from his personal sorrows. The great body of his poetry is epic in character, and the best of his work in the lyric form gives expression not to merely personal emotion, but to the feeling of the race to ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... and the 'Adoration of the Shepherds' in the Scuola di San Rocco illustrate his unique power of presenting sacred history in a novel, romantic framework of familiar things. The commonplace circumstances of ordinary life have been employed to portray in the one case a lyric of mysterious splendour; in the other, an idyll of infinite sweetness. Divinity shines through the rafters of that upper chamber, where round a low large table the Apostles are assembled in a group ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... 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 ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... to stimulate the imagination more keenly and to enthral the feelings more completely. Upon a closer consideration it is seen that poetry and good prose have much in common, and that often it is really but a question of form, for lyric beauty glows in the phrases of our finest prose, and both heart and soul are moved ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... chanted; and though at first the chant of the poet was accompanied by the dance of the chorus, it ultimately grew into independence. Later still, when the poem had been differentiated into epic and lyric—when it became the custom to sing the lyric and recite the epic—poetry proper was born. As during the same period musical instruments were being multiplied, we may presume that music came to have an existence ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... 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, he took the first opportunity to send, by one of the Shaker brethren, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... college days, who sowed the wind to reap the whirlwind and won at last through strangest penance the prize of love, seizes the reader in the strait grip of its feverish interest. Miss Rives has outdone herself in the invention of a love story that rings with lyric feeling and touches every fiber of the ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... if necessary, all of Milton, all of Shakespeare but a song or two, much of Dante and some of Homer, to be secured in them for ever. My friend (of the Ramillies) and I were disputing about a phrase I had applied to lyric poetry as the infallible test of its merit. I asked for "the lyric cry," and he scorned me. I could find a better phrase with time; but the quatrain just quoted makes it unmistakable, as I think. Anyhow, it will be conceded that there was some putting off of the tie-wig, the ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... appearance among them, they generally have been swift to turn from him and to prefer to him not only foreigners, which would not necessarily be bad, but oftentimes the least respectable of musicians. The triumph of Rameau was of the briefest. Scarcely had his magnificent lyric tragedies established themselves when the Guerre des bouffons broke out, and popular taste, under the direction of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the other Encyclopedists, discovered the light Italian music of the day more "natural" and infinitely preferable to the severe and noble forms ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... "it is just the poetry, the reality of life, in all its stern glory,—because it is and must be stern if it is to be spiritual,—it is just that, it seems to me, that you are trying to reduce to a sort of pretty, facile lyric." ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the detectives say when tracking down a criminal. It is, however, of no consequence; but it was clear that the song she sang had moved her, for there was the glint of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the house, the words of the lyric singing themselves ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the poet was equally at home in the simpler lyric region of the Haynes Bayley school. Taking for his model the favourite drawing-room ballad of the period, "She wore a wreath of roses the night that first we met," he made a parody of its rhythmical cadence the medium for presenting some leading incidents in the career of a Circe of "the boozing ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... Mary Anderson asked the poet Longfellow what she could do to improve her voice. He replied, "Read aloud daily, joyous, lyric poetry." ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... 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 ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... 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 like ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... lyric theories mean utter smash To all his hostess cares for. Crude and rash, But musically 'precious.' His passionate philippics against Wealth Mammon's own daughters read, 'tis said, by stealth, And vote ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... is an "Official Number", containing the work of none but titled authors. Rheinhart Kleiner contributes the single piece of verse, a smooth and pleasing lyric entitled "Love Again", which is not unlike his previous poem, "Love, Come Again". As an amatory poet, Mr. Kleiner shows much delicacy of sentiment, refinement of language, and appreciation of metrical values; his efforts in this direction entitle ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... 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 of ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... demonstrated this in his vaudeville act "Staging an Act." He took a commonplace melody and built it up into a production—then the audience liked it. George Cohan did precisely the same thing in his "Hello, Broadway"; taking a silly lyric and a melody, he told the audience he was going to make 'em like it; and he ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... and her gilded harp between her knees, called upon the retiring woman at Son Vent. She enjoyed overwhelming the ladies of the island who did not know French with the superiority of the foreigner; she listened to the novelist's lyric eulogies of the originality of this African landscape, with its little white houses, spiny cacti, slender palms, and aged olive trees, in such striking contrast to the harmonious order of the broad fields of France. Then Dona Elvira, in the social gatherings at Palma, defended the authoress with ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... gathered; and the operas, the casts, were of absorbing interest. At once a memento of the heroic period of American music and of his first manhood, the faded crudely embellished strips of paper, bearing names, lyric tenors and sopranos of limpid, bird-like song long ago lost in rosy and nebulous clouds of fable and cherished affection, roused remembered pleasures sharper than any calm actuality of to-day. He paused ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... dancing certainly was primarily part of a religious rite; with music it formed the lyric art. The term, however, with them included all those actions of the body and limbs, and all expressions and actions of the features and head which suggest ideas; marching, acrobatic performances, and mimetic action all came ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... 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 mine, to ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... high in the heavens; his heart was lyric with joy; He plucked a posy of lilies; he sped like a love-sick boy. He stole up the velvety pathway—his cottage was sunsteeped and still; Vines honeysuckled the window; softly he peeped o'er the sill. The lilies dropped from his fingers; devils were choking his breath; Rigid ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... "common sense" of mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there was as striking an identity of form. In poetry this showed itself in the death of the lyric, as in the universal popularity of the rhetorical ode, in the loss of all delight in variety of poetic measure, and in the growing restriction of verse to the single form of the ten-syllable line. Prose too dropped everywhere its grandeur with its obscurity; and became the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... cold rain fell intermittently; the streets were deep with slush, and the soft ice made walking on the pavements uncomfortable, and even dangerous. But these things were not permitted to interfere with the determination of the lovers of the German lyric drama to bear testimony to their admiration for the artist who had done so much for their pleasure. The house was crowded in every part. Every seat had been sold days before. Many of the tickets had been bought by speculators, who, in spite ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Lyric poetry is by its excellence the chief art of England, as music is the art of Germany. A book of poetry is almost sure of fair appreciation in the English press which does not trouble to notice a "Sartor Resartus" or the first essays of an Emerson. The excessive ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... plain, remarkable for his unparalleled facility in speaking. He owed his universal popularity to the fact that at students' Parties he could at any time stand up and rattle off at a furious rate an apparently unprepared speech, a sort of stump speech in which humorous perversions, distortions, lyric remarks, clever back-handed blows to right and left, astonishing incursions and rapid sorties, were woven into a whole so good that it was an entertaining challenge ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Flacci . . . Od in locos communes ad lyric poseos studiosorum utilitatem digest. Studio & oper Josephi Langii. Hanovi, typis Wechelianis, apud Claudium Marnium & ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... appear that in the three great departments of poetry,—the epic, the lyric, and the dramatic,—the old Greeks were great masters, and have been the teachers of all ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... but it is its sincerity which gives it its value. Here are the little sharp experiences of life mirrored poignantly, sometimes feverishly, always truly. Each lyric is an instantaneous photograph of one of the many moments in existence which affect one briefly perhaps, but indelibly. Mr. Braithwaite says in his introduction that this author engages "life at its most reserved sources whether the form or substance through which it articulates ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... fat woman, lapsing, as she occasionally did lapse, into the easy Italian of the lyric stage. "She ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... these love endearments of namings, it seemed to him that in them were the ripplings of running waters, the tinklings of silver wind- bells, and the scents of the oleander and the jasmine. She was his poem of woman, a lyric delight, a three-dimensions of flesh and spirit delicious, a fate and a good fortune written, ere the first man and woman were, by the gods whose whim had been to make all men and women for ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... Chansons de Geste; the strange technicalities of 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 to his Epopees Francaises) ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... fascinating hesitation,— The charming of these charmers, who seem bound, I can't tell why, to this dissimulation,— Fair Adeline, with eyes fixed on the ground At first, then kindling into animation, Added her sweet voice to the lyric sound, And sang with much simplicity,—a merit Not the less precious, that ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Lyric Dance Arcade and Indian Palace of Asiatic Mystery. And I found myself close to the platform, listening to the cry of ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... 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. ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... inscription earlier than the fortieth Olympiad, 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: but for ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... in those who believe it possible for music to drive away the pestilence. Antiquity, however, as mentioned above, relates that Thaletas, a famous lyric poet, contemporary with Solon, was gifted with this power; but it is impossible to render the fact credible, without qualifying it by several circumstances omitted in the relation. In the first place, it is certain, that this ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... 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 ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... for the poetry this was not necessary. Poems of the size of Klopstock's Messiah or Gessner's Death of Abel appeared in the magazines only in selections or extracts, while on the other hand most of the lyric poems, being short, could very easily be reprinted entire in translation. With hardly an exception, the short poems of German authors appeared in America in the periodicals some time before they were ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... to philosophisings. It grows late apace. (Ah, Hulda, how like opals in the lyric April rain are your eyes in this first faint purple-pink of the tremulous dawn.... Were I a Heine!) In my far-away America, Hulda, in far-away New York, it is now onto midnight. I see Broadway, strumpet of the highways, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... before him a keyboard made up of a series of I's. The lyric and satiric writers play in the purely human octave; the critic plays in the bookman's octave; the historian in the octave of the investigator. When an author writes of himself, perforce he plays upon his own "I," which is not exactly that ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... very interesting circumstance connected with the birth of Moore, which deserves record. The fact of the birth, as every one knows, took place at Aungier-street, and its occasion was at a moment singularly appropriate for the lyric poet being ushered into the world. Jerry Keller, the wit and humorist, rented apartments in the house of Moore's brother, in Aungier-street, and had a dinner-party on the very day of the poet's birth. Just as the guests were assembled, and the dinner on ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... pushes number two over. Number two screams: that frightens the baby and he joins in. I call number one a naughty girl, take the persecuted one in my arms, and endeavor to comfort her by trotting to the old lyric:— ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... to this discourse of Candaules, and sought to penetrate the hidden sense of these lyric divagations. The king appeared to be in a state of extraordinary excitement: his eyes sparkled with enthusiasm; a feverish rosiness tinted his cheeks; his dilated nostrils inhaled the ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... wonder that a heart like Burns, which, for all its unsteadfastness, never lost its sensibility, nor even a sense of conscience, should have been visited by the remorse which forms the burden of the lyric to Mary in heaven, written three years after. ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... soul and lie Blind to the beauty of the earth, Deaf tho' a lyric wind goes by, Dumb in a storm ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... 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
... The present 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, and the mysterious Isle of Leuce ("White") ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... cotemporary, with the act."—Ib., p. 60. "The man has been traveling for five years."—Ib., p. 77. "I shall not take up time in combatting their scruples."—Blair's Rhet., p. 320. "In several of the chorusses of Euripides and Sophocles, we have the same kind of lyric poetry as in Pindar."—Ib., p. 398. "Until the Statesman and Divine shall unite their efforts in forming the human mind, rather than in loping its excressences, after it has been neglected."—Webster's Essays, p. 26. "Where conviction could be followed only by a ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... height of their renown in music, as well as what might be termed their golden era, with the establishment of the Italian opera, in the seventeenth century. At this period all the stages of Italy were the scenes of the lyric triumphs of this otherwise unfortunate class, some of whom accumulated vast fortunes. In the following century, as has been seen, Clement XVI abolished the practice as far as the church was concerned, and in the present century the first Napoleon ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... in this place to say anything particular of your lyric poems, though they are the delight and wonder of the age, and will be the envy of the next. The subject of this book confines me to satire; and in that an author of your own quality, whose ashes I will ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... been received into the circle of the gods. This at least is the case in Sanscrit as in Greek literature, where the hymn and ballad precede the epic. The epic poem becomes the stable form of poetry during the middle period in the history of literature, both in India and Greece. The union of the lyric and the epic produces the drama. The speeches uttered by the heroes in such poems as the "Iliad" are put into the mouths of real personages who appear in sight of the audience and represent with fitting gestures and costumes the characters of the story. ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... alone, For no eye marks us, or would know why we are here. Your husband is dead, your sister lives far away, Your father is bent with age; He has forgotten you, he scarcely leaves the house Any more. No one remembers your exquisite face, Your lyric voice! How you sang, even on the morning you were stricken, With piercing sweetness, with thrilling sorrow, Before the advent of the child which died with you. It is all forgotten, save by us, the memories, Who are forgotten by the world. All is changed, save the river and the hill— Even they ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... the first place among the lyric poets of Greece. The character and subjects of his poetry, of which the portions remaining to us are the Triumphal Odes, celebrating victories gained in the great games of Greece, are indicated by the lines ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... Jersey. But if he be a fool, he will stay and stay on until the town becomes all in all to him; until the very streets are his chums and certain buildings and corners his best friends. Then he is hopeless, and to live elsewhere would be death. The Bowery will be his romance, Broadway his lyric, and the Park his pastoral, the river and the glory of it all his epic, and he will look down pityingly on all the ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... practiced more sedulously than my comrade; and hence, no doubt, arose the interchange of positions, the disciple turned into the master. It was not, however, an overwhelming infatuation, a painful obsession; it was rather a recreation, almost a poetic feast. As our great lyric writer put it in the preface to his volume, Les Rayons et les ombres: 'Mathematics play their part in art as well as in science. There is algebra in astronomy: astronomy is akin to poetry; there is algebra in music: music ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... Anactoria I knew thy grace, I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes; But never wholly, soul and body mine, Didst thou bid any love me as I loved. Now I have found the peace that fled from me; Close, close, against my heart I hold my world. Ah, Love that made my life a lyric cry, Ah, Love that tuned my lips to lyres of thine, I taught the world thy music, now alone I sing for one who falls asleep ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... one of the supreme lyric expressions in the English language of the passion of love. Furthermore, Whitman's free unmetered swing, the glorious length of his stride, fell in with March's rhythmic idiom as though they had been ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... my departure my mother drove with me to Blasewitz, where there was an elegant entertainment at which the lyric poet Julius Hammer, the author of "Look Around You and Look Within You," who was to become a dear friend of mine, extolled in enthusiastic verse the delights of student liberty and the noble sisters ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... his eyes glowing as there fell from her lips the gentle love-song of a heart-broken Indian maiden, filled with its infinite sadness and despair. He knew the song. It was a lyric of the Crees. He had heard it before, but never as it came to him now, sobbing its grief in the low notes of the violin, speaking to him with immeasurable pathos from the trembling ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... details of the battle of Copenhagen see Southey's Life of Nelson. That conflict has been celebrated, in a noble lyric, by Campbell— ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... 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, ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... might find worthy, or to furnish original words to such music as might suit him. In the collection was the air—unknown at that time to Americans—to which Dr. Smith set the words now so widely known and sung. There was not the slightest idea on his part that he was producing a national lyric, but it caught the popular taste at once, and every year has fixed it more firmly in the hearts of the people as an expression of patriotic feeling. It was first sung at a children's festival at Park Street ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... when he was asked to sing, He gave the different nations something national; 'T was all the same to him—"God save the King," Or "Ca ira," according to the fashion all: His Muse made increment of anything, From the high lyric down to the low rational;[cx][194] If Pindar sang horse-races, what should hinder Himself from ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... of 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 eucharistic hymn in ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... various feelings and sensations gave birth to art. But in verse the use of number is more obvious; though some particular species of it, without the assistance of music, have the air of harmonious prose, and especially the lyric poetry, and that even the best of the kind, which, if divested of the aid of music, would be almost as plain and naked as common language. We have several specimens of this nature in our own poets [Footnote: It must here be ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... ineradicably complex, varying endlessly in their instances, and changing as we deal with them. I am inclined to think that the only really profitable discussion of sexual matters is in terms of individuality, through the novel, the lyric, the play, autobiography or biography of the frankest sort. But such generalizations as I can ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... "Lyric Declamation: Recitative, Song and Ballad Singing," will be discussed the practical application of these basic principles of Style to the vocal music of the German, French, Italian and ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... 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 pretty, ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... them. Then, again, the teachers of the 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; ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... 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
... 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 was ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... literature, had an 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 Tuileries. He had ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... acknowledged leader of the spirit of protest; in lyric music Rossini led; and Delacroix raised the standard of revolt in painting. With this new school, which called itself "Romanticism," Madame Scheffer and her sons sincerely sympathized. The term "Romanticism" of itself means little, or nothing, or everything, but the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... most august musings have a habit of stewing themselves down to some ferocious or jocular three-line comment. He may yearn desperately to compose a really thrilling poem that will speak his passionate soul; to churn up from the typewriter some lyric that will rock with blue seas and frantic hearts; he finds himself allaying the frenzy with some jovial sneer at Henry Ford or a yell about the High Cost of Living. Poor soul, he is like one condemned to harangue the vast, idiotic world through a keyhole, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... presence in the neighbourhood was in no wise surprising, for it was one of his favourite haunts when he was not engaged farther up the Avenue, in his daily labour, which was, as he explained to the chance acquaintance met at the ball in Lyric Hall described in "Cinderella," "mixing cocktails at the Knickerbocker Club." Only a few doors distant from the Ninth Street house there is an apartment hotel known as the Berkeley, and it was to a Berkeley ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... Carlyle's criticism of it; Poetry versus Tour-de-Force; "The Ring and the Book" begun in 1866; analysis of the poem; kinship of "The Ring and the Book" and "Aurora Leigh"; explanation of title; the idea taken from a parchment volume Browning picked up in Florence; the poem planned at Casa Guidi; "O Lyric Love," etc.; description and analysis of "The Ring and the Book," with quotations; compared as a poem with "The Inn Album," "Pauline," "Asolando," "Men and Women," etc.; imaginary volumes, to be entitled "Transcripts from Life" and "Flowers o' the Vine"; ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Miss Lilly Becker has studied with me for a period of three years. I consider her voice a lyric soprano ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... in st. 6. See the passage translated by Shelley from Bion (p. 63), 'Sleep no more, Venus:... 'tis Misery calls,' &c.; but here the phrase, ''Tis Misery calls,' is Shelley's own. He more than once introduces Misery (in the sense of Unhappiness, Tribulation) as an emblematic personage. There is his lyric named Misery, written in 1818, ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... "Those lyric feasts, Where men such clusters had, As made them nobly wild, not mad; While yet each verse of thine Outdid the meat, outdid ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... years saw Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Shakespeare, Chapman, Decker, and Ben Jonson at the head of our drama; Spenser, Warner, Daniel, and Drayton leading narrative poetry; the contributors to England's Helicon, published a year later, at the head of our sonneteers and lyric poets; and Sidney, Lyly, Greene, and Hooker in the van of our prose literature. The history of Meres's work, a dissertation from which is here extracted, is curious. In or about 1596, Nicholas Ling and John Bodenham ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... Hon. Stephen Coleridge has already established his position among the more tuneful writers of true lyric verse, and into all that he writes the poet puts delicacy and true emotion, the former never becomes mere phrase, the latter never degenerates into ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... all only about thirty thousand lines; but it includes epic, lyric, didactic, elegiac, and allegorical poems, together with war-ballads, paraphrases, riddles, and charms. Of the five elegiac poems (Wanderer, Seafarer, Ruin, Wife's Complaint, and Husband's Message), the Wanderer is the most artistic, and best portrays ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... exquisite as 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
... 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 ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... the ninetieth psalm. In the period of the judges we have only the song of Deborah and Barak. The perfect originality of all these primitive songs is acknowledged by all. It constitutes indeed one of their chief charms. With "the sweet psalmist of Israel" began the era of lyric song; with Solomon that of didactic, and with Hosea, Joel, Isaiah, and their contemporaries, that of prophetic poetry. The poets to whom, under the illumination of the Holy Ghost, these different forms of Hebrew poetry owe their origin, are all distinguished for their originality. So is also ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... 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 viewed as ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... 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
... the Times," his patriotic trumpet-call aroused Prussians to fight France. Napoleon tracked the lyric poet out; Arndt fled to Sweden; but continued to write for the cause. He returned ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... party is not willing to cut old friends. What to call 'em I don't know. Blank verse they are not, because of the rhymes.—Rhimes they are not, because of the blank verse. Heroics they are not, because they are lyric, lyric they are not, because of the Heroic measure. ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... overpraise— The gods, the ladies, and the king; And I, for one, endorse the thing. The heart, praise tickles and entices; Of fair one's smile, it oft the price is. See how the gods sometimes repay it. Simonides—the ancients say it— Once undertook, in poem lyric, To write a wrestler's panegyric; Which, ere he had proceeded far in, He found his subject somewhat barren. No ancestors of great renown; His sire of some unnoted town; Himself as little known to fame, The wrestler's praise was rather tame. The poet, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... road 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 ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... written in 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 ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... dear Sir, 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
... Ross I 'll daily sing, With vocal note and lyric string, And duly, when I 've drank the king, He 'll be my second toss. May Heaven its choicest blessings send On such a man, and such a friend; And still may all that 's good attend The worthy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Potidaea? Because in the former case every thing is ordered by law, and each of you knows long before-hand, who is the choir-master [Footnote: The choregus, or choir-master, of each tribe, had to defray the expense of the choruses, whether dramatic, lyric, or musical, which formed part of the entertainment on solemn occasions. This was one of the [Greek: leitourgiai], or burdensome offices, to which men of property were liable at Athens, of which we shall see more in other parts of our author.] of his tribe, who the gymnastic [Footnote: ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... critics have already assigned to H. H. her high place in our catalogue of authors. She is, without doubt, the most highly intellectual of our female poets.... The new poems, while not inferior to the others in point of literary art, have in them more of fervor and of feeling; more of that lyric sweetness which catches the attention and makes the song sing itself over and over afterwards in the remembering brain.... Some of the new poems seem among the noblest H. H. has ever written. They touch the high-water mark of her intellectual power, ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow passengers, the less I was tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... very good Latinist and hi improvising whole tragedies on any subject, chosen by the audience. When the subject is chosen, he develops his plan, fixes his dramatis personae and then strikes off in versi sciolti. He at times introduces a chorus with lyric poetry. I was present one evening at an Accademia given by him in the Palazzo Chigi. The subject chosen was Sophonisba and it was wonderful the manner in which he varied his plot from that of every other dramatic author ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... we want Examples of the same good sense in modern Times, even amidst the cruel inrodes that Art and Fashion have made upon Nature and the simplicity of Wisdom. Menage, the greatest name in France for all kind of philologic Learning, prided himself in writing critical Notes on their best lyric Poet, Malherbe: And our greater Selden, when he thought it might reflect credit on his Country, did not disdain even to comment a very ordinary Poet, one Michael Drayton. But the English tongue, at this Juncture, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... that are among the gifts sent to Cleon, seems to be indicated the degradation of the spiritual by its subjection to earthly ideals, as were the ideals of Greek art. This is more particularly indicated by the one white she-slave, the lyric woman, whom further on in his letter, Cleon promises to the King he will make narrate (in lyric song we must suppose) his fortunes, speak his great words, and describe his ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... is really inherent in the music. "Norma" was at that time even given for his benefit! He now took up the "Rienzi" material in earnest and projected a plan for the work which required the largest stage for its execution. The lyric element of the romance, the messengers of peace, the battle hymns, and the passion of love had already charmed his purely musical sense. It was however by a solid work for the theatre, of which the main feature should not be simply "beautiful verses and fine rhymes" but ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... military committee. The officers gathered in the club-room and drank long life to Leonard and confusion to Devers, and then little Sanders tuned up his guitar and sang. He was just back from leave, and a popular lyric of the day was one they called "The Accent On," for the last line of every verse was "with the accent on" some syllable of the last word of the previous line. There was nothing especially poetic ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... theorist, and an ardent specialist in grammar and the use of words, Malherbe reacted violently both against the misplaced and artificial erudition of the Pleiade and their unforced outbursts of lyric song. His object was to purify the French tongue; to make it—even at the cost of diminishing its flavour and narrowing its range—strong, supple, accurate and correct; to create a language which, though it might be incapable of expressing ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Or the best lyric pieces, how like they are to certain bird-songs! —clear, ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge and triumph which the outpouring of the male bird contains. (Is not the genuine singing, lyrical quality essentially ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... bumps and jars. It was very uncomfortable, her position being wretchedly cramped. Once she was startled to hear the driver break into song. It sounded like a Spanish love song and his voice was a lyric tenor and very musical. It was Pachuca! She determined to know what was ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... that the temptations to which the great lyric poet, Thomas Moore, was so often and so peculiarly exposed, were ever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... in a new walk of poetry; but in the then barbarous state of our Theatre, such a 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
... before they will let us pass. For example, one afternoon I was waylaid on my way to the women by the head of the household I was visiting, a fine old man of the usual type, courteous but opposed. He asked to look at my books. I had a Bible, a lyric book, and a book of stanzas bearing upon the Truth, copied from the old Tamil classics. He pounced upon this. Then he began to chant the stanzas in their inimitable way, and at the sound several other old men drew round ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... rendering of "bell um 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
... perturbing theme. It seems to combine the enduring lustre of a precious metal with the tenuity of gold-leaf. Even the most vivid emotions of grief and love, as well as the horrors of war, were banished from the Japanese Parnassus, where the Muse of Tragedy warbles, and the lyric Muse utters nothing but ditties of exquisite and melting sweetness, which soothe the ear, but never stir the heart: while their meaning is often so obscure as ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... Say how or when Shall we, thy guests, Meet at those lyric feasts, Made at the "Sun," The "Dog," the "Triple Tun," Where we such clusters had As made us nobly wild, not mad? And yet each verse of thine Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine. My Ben! Or come again, Or send to us, Thy wit's great ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan |
