"Lyrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mr. Greene's I wrote my first poem. I certainly exhibited no great precocity of lyrical genius in it, but the reader must remember that I was only a foolish little boy of ten or eleven at the time, and that I showed it to no one. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure. In the spring he read "L'Allegro," by request, and was inspired to lyrical outpourings on the subject of Arcady and the pipes of Pan. He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn that he might dress and go out to the archaic swing that hung from an apple-tree near the sixth-form house. Seating himself in this he would pump higher and ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... spilled the beans, the whole beans, and nothing but the beans. Having admitted us two to his secret, he dilated on it all the way back to Jerusalem, telling us all he knew of Feisul (which would fill a book), and growing almost lyrical at times as he related incidents in proof of his contention that Feisul, lineal descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, is the "whitest" Arab and most gallant leader of his race ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... glowing in the light of joyful recognition. He classifies his poems by different names, and they are of different themes, but they are after all of that unity which I have been trying, all too shirkingly, to suggest. One, for instance, is the pathetic story which tells itself in the lyrical eclogue "One Day and Another." It is the conversation, prolonged from meeting to meeting, between two lovers whom death parts; but who recurrently find themselves and each other in the gardens and the woods, and on the waters which they tell each ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... have been the precursors of Homer, though the poems ascribed to them (some of which still remain) were of much later date. Almost coeval with the Grecian gods were doubtless religious hymns in their honour. And the germe of the great lyrical poetry that we now possess was, in the rude chants of the warlike Dorians, to that Apollo who was no less the Inspirer than the Protector. The religion of the Greeks preserved and dignified the poetry it created; and the bard, "beloved by gods as ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... been a source of inspiration. In the very greatest lyricists we simply find the folk-song in a new shape: it has become more polished and artistic, and it has been made the instrument of personal lyrical utterance."—John Lees, M.A., D.Litt., "The German Lyric" (London, etc., ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... "Preface" to the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads," published in 1800. The poems in the first edition of "Lyrical Ballads," published in 1798, had been the joint production of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The volume was published in Bristol by Cottle. It met with a cold, if not scoffing, reception, altho among its contents were the "Lines ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Exmoor are of a horned variety; we all know what excellent mutton they make from its praises in "Lorna Doone," and John Fry's lyrical outburst over the saddle of mutton "six year old, and without a tooth in mun head," and sure to eat as soft as cream. John Fry was referring to the custom among the farmers of not killing their sheep until the teeth begin ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... Lamb in sustained intention, from Ruskin in firmness of structure, from Pater in variety of mood. Such prose as I mean must be serious, liquid, profound. It must probably eschew all broad effects of humour; it must eschew narrative; it must be in its essence lyrical, an outburst like the song of the lark or the voice of the waterfall. It must deal with beauty, not only the beauty of natural things, but the beauty of human relations, though not trenching upon drama; and, above all, it must take into itself the mystery of philosophical and scientific ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... particular passages, such as the description of the guilty happiness of Isabella and Mortimer, quoted in Mr. Arthur Bullen's admirable selection. This is to say that Drayton's genius was naturally not so much epical as lyrical and descriptive. In his own proper business as a narrative poet he fails as compared with Daniel, but he enriches history with all the ornaments of poetry; and it was his especial good fortune to discover a subject in which the union of dry ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... a Reader of Tennyson Dickens as a Man of Letters Swinburne's Lyrical Poetry Charlotte and Emily Bronte ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... energy. His flow of speech never faltered. He spoke of the New Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, Osiris and Ammon; waxed eloquent concerning Mut, Bubastis, Cheops, the Hyksos kings, cylinders, bezels and Amenophis III; and became at times almost lyrical when touching on Queen Taia, the Princess Gilukhipa of Mitanni, the lake of Zarukhe, Naucratis and the Book of the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Greek classic poetry Homer Greek lyrical poetry Pindar Dramatic poetry Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides Greek comedy: Aristophanes Roman poetry Naevius, Plautus, Terence Roman epic poetry: Virgil Lyrical poetry: Horace, Catullus Didactic poetry: Lucretius Elegiac poetry: Ovid, Tibullus Satire: Horace, Martial, Juvenal Perfection ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... naturally briefer in form. Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon" and Burns's "Tam O'Shanter" may be taken as types of the metrical tale. On the one side it approaches the metrical romance, and on the other the lyrical ballad. Since the days of Gower and Chaucer the metrical tale has added to English poetry some of ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed in miscellanies, such as the Passionate Pilgrim, England's Helicon, and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. Some were anonymous, or were by poets of whom little more is known than their names. Others were by well-known writers, and others, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... never happier than when at Skagen—the extreme northern point of Jutland—where he spent most of his summers. His painting was his favourite pastime, but poetry the serious work of his life. He was a very prolific writer, not only of verse and lyrical poems, but of plays and prose works, and was a very successful playwright. Drachmann's personality was a strong one, though not always agreeable to his countrymen. He had a freedom-loving spirit, and lived every moment of his life. Some of his best ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... The Cloud and The Skylark and The West Wind, no less than in The Mask of Anarchy. His idea of the State as well as his idea of sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberant imagination of a lover. The whole body of his work, whether lyrical in the strictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature of a Book ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... for, if her terpsichorean abilities still left something to be desired, the Warsaw critics, ever susceptible to feminine charms, went into positive raptures about her personal attractions. One of them, indeed, became almost lyrical ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... on Pure Intuition and the lyrical nature of art, delivered by Benedetto Croce before the International Congress of Philosophy ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... loveliness, and for whose imaginary woes he has excited more sympathy, than ever were bestowed on a supernatural being. Sir Walter Scott also endowed the White Lady of Avenel with many of the attributes of the undines, or water-sprites. German romance and lyrical poetry teem with allusions to sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders; and the French have not been behind in substituting them, in works of fiction, for the more cumbrous mythology of Greece and Rome. The sylphs, more especially, have been the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... comedies of the time, and by the poetry of Ariosto, we are compelled to believe that such illicit love was merely sensual, and owed its principal attractions to the scope it afforded for whimsical adventures. Yet Bembo's Asolani, Castiglione's panegyric of Platonic Love, and much of the lyrical poetry in vogue warn us to be cautious. The old romantic sentiment expressed by the Florentines of the thirteenth century still survived to some extent, adding a sort of dignity in form at least ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... result,—that is, a predominance of melody and plaintiveness. The British wren, for instance, stands in Barrington's table as destitute of both these qualities; the reed sparrow also. Our wren-songs, on the contrary, are gushing and lyrical, and more or less melodious,—that of the winter wren being preeminently so. Our sparrows, too, all have sweet, plaintive ditties, with but little sprightliness or compass. The English house sparrow has no song at all, but a harsh chatter that ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... earliest of his greater works, is unquestionably the most original, the most characteristic, the deepest and most lyrical of his productions. Here is the Sage of Craigenputtock at his best, at his grimmest, and, we must add, in his most incoherent mood. To make men think, to rouse men out of the slough of the conventional, the sensual, the ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Europe,—several times destroyed and built up again, till, in 1183, it was upheaved by an earthquake and swallowed by a flood. The ruins of Vineta are believed to be visible between the coast of Pomerania and the island of Ruegen. This tradition has suggested one of Wilhelm Mueller's—my father's—lyrical songs, published in his "Stones and Shells from the Island of Ruegen," 1825, of which I am able to give a translation by ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... and had perhaps forgotten the circumstance, when writing the Introductory Essay of 1830—they were announced, by an advertisement early in 1807, as "Six Epistles from Ettrick Forest," to be published in a separate volume, similar to that of the Ballads and Lyrical Pieces; and perhaps it might have been better that this first plan had been adhered to. But however that may be, are there any pages, among all he ever wrote, that one would be more sorry he should not have written? They are among the most delicious portraitures that ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... hero of Austerlitz had entrusted to its care. All the houses in the streets through which the procession was to pass were decorated. In front of many of them were to be seen the Emperor's bust crowned with laurels. The ever lyrical Moniteur said: "At the sight of these noble spoils, these startling proofs of the heroism of the French army, all hearts seemed to meet in a common feeling of admiration and gratitude which was but faintly expressed by the shouts issuing from the crowd ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Northland, almost without a plot, and having its chief interest in a primitively spontaneous man's reactions to a nature so overwhelming that it makes mere purposeless existence seem a sufficient end in itself. One may well question whether Hamsun has ever surpassed the purely lyrical mood of that book, into which he poured the ecstatic dreams of the little boy from the south as, for the first time, he saw the forestclad northern mountains bathing their feet in the ocean and their crowns in the light ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... restraint, indeed, the English couplet may sometimes be less inconvenient than the quatrain, as it is, on the whole, easier to run couplet into couplet than to run quatrain into quatrain; but the couplet seems hardly suitable for an English lyrical poem of any length, the very notion of lyrical poetry apparently involving a complexity which can only be represented by rhymes recurring at intervals. In the case of one of the three poems written by Horace in the ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... play of Spring in nature is the counterpart of the play of Youth in our lives. It is simply from the lyrical drama of the World Poet that I have ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... conception of character to render; and her acting in it is more beautiful and more poetical than it was possible for it to be in "Magda," or in "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray." But the play is not a good play; at its best it is lyrical rather than dramatic, and at its worst it is horrible with a vulgar material horror. The end of "Titus Andronicus" is not so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda." D'Annunzio has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leonardo da Vinci: "Cosa bella mortal passa, e non d'arte," and ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for the music of rhythm and the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... say to you one professional word respecting that art and the nature of poetry that you have been kind enough to connect with my name. The greater part of the verses I have written were that product of the lyrical period of youth which is by no means uncommon in modern civilization. It exhibits itself sometimes in the strangest manner, without connection with other culture, or even the most common intellectual opportunities. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... cumbrous English, but there are many who have known the charm even of an Anglicised version of "Myvanwy Vychan," and when he died, in 1887, he was acclaimed by such an authority as the Rev. H. Elvet Lewis, to be "one of the best lyrical poets of Wales," who had "rendered excellent service to the national melodies of 'Cymru Fu' by writing words congenial to their spirit,—a work which Robert Burns did for Scottish melodies." He was ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... sun-glare and blazing colours of the East; Mr. Barrie had demonstrated what could be done in a little space through the panes of his Window in Thrums. The National Observer was at the climax of its career of heroic insistence upon lyrical brevity and a vivid finish, and Mr. Frank Harris was not only printing good short stories by other people, but writing still better ones himself in the dignified pages of the Fortnightly Review. Longman's Magazine, too, represented a clientele of appreciative short-story ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... morning he drew up by the roadside to listen to some lyrical robin on an apple-bough, or to make friends with the black- belted Durham cows and the cream-colored Alderneys, who came solemnly to the pasture wall and stared at him with big, good-natured faces. A row of them, with their lazy eyes and pink tongues and moist india-rubber noses, ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... on the lyrical lips is sadder than laughter of ghosts Chained back in the pits of eclipse ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... possessed a romantic and a poetical soul, and there were rare occasions when he would offer a lyrical account of his adventures containing more color and detail. As, for example, his account of his fight ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... get in the country in England," said Mr. Bennett, suddenly striking a lyrical note, "are extraordinary. I had three for breakfast this morning which defied competition, simply defied competition. They were large and brown, and as ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... whose poetry is to us the most inexplicable—with all our reverence for his transcendent genius, we do not fear to say the most open to the most serious charges—on the score of its religion. From the first line of the "Lyrical Ballads" to the last of "The Excursion"—it is avowedly one system of thought and feeling, embracing his experiences of human life, and his meditations on the moral government of this world. The human heart—the human mind—the human soul—to use his own fine words—is "the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... of this book is to provide an anthology of English lyrical poetry earlier than the advent of the Sonnet with Wyatt and Surrey during the sixteenth century. It includes 152 poems, ranging between 1225 and 1550 A.D., an essay on Some Aspects of Mediaeval Lyric by E. ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... manufactured from these fibres, and are of extraordinary strength. Their nets, of an enormous size, are composed of these leaves, the work simply consists in cutting them into suitable lengths and fastening them together." This wonderful plant, which was so enthusiastically described, in the lyrical account just quoted, and in the hardly less exuberant one which La Billadiere afterwards gave of it, is known in our day ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... I know of no lyrical poet, at least among the moderns, who treats less of Nature as the mere outward form of things, or more passionately animates her framework with his own human heart, than does Robert Burns. Do you suppose when a Greek, in some perplexity of reason or conscience, addressed a question to the oracular ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... himself with literary labors. He has been writing a volume of poetry to appear in the epic form. He has also been busy upon a volume of philosophy, a drama of five acts in which Mazarin is to figure as the principal character, two volumes of lyrical poetry, and a romance upon a modern subject, for which he has been offered one hundred and ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... it, then, that this prophet is relying on? Is it a manuscript? Is it the recent invention of goose-quills which he is celebrating here with so much lyrical pomp, in so many, many lyrics? ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the verses are, or used to be, well known. A schoolboy, forbidden to return home at the holidays, is suspected to have written the lyrical Latin verses upon the rapture of returning home, and to have breathed out his life in the anguish of thus reviving the images which for him were never to be realized.... The reader must not fancy any flaw in the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... weighty or serious character, must be spoken or written in this pompous and antiquated style, owing to which, naturally, the country is almost destitute of orators. But the poets,—especially men of the sparkling fancy of Bellman, or the rich lyrical inspiration of Tegner, are not to be fettered by such conventionalities; and they have given the verse of Sweden an ease, and grace, and elegance, which one vainly seeks in its prose. In Stockholm, the French taste, so visible in the ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... best language, and often appeared in the slouching, slangy undress of the place and period, yet it never was rustic nor homespun, and sometimes struck me with its precision and fitness. Considerably softened toward him, I tried him with other literature. But vainly. Beyond a few of the lyrical and emotional poets, he knew nothing. Under the influence and enthusiasm of his own speech, he himself had softened considerably; offered to change horses with me, readjusted my saddle with professional skill, transferred my ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... within him speedily revived with all the power and with more than all the beauty of his first attempts. He meditated three subjects as the groundwork for lyrical dramas. One was the story of Tasso; of this a slight fragment of a song of Tasso remains. The other was one founded on the Book of Job, which he never abandoned in idea, but of which no trace remains among his papers. The third was the "Prometheus Unbound". The ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... loneliness, in accents charged with profound melancholy. The author of the "Amusement Philosophique" would have us believe that animals can speak. Nothing makes more for his opinion than the exquisite variety of lyrical howl in which a shut-out dog expresses every phrase of blighted affection, incommunicable longing, and supreme despair. Somehow he never, literally never, wakens his owners. He only keeps all the other people in a four-mile ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... dramatic nor the lyrical quality appears in this volume as it did once in the splendid "Bells and Pomegranates," which gave us such vivid shapes, and emotions so consistent and sustained, even though they were so often flawed by over-reflection. In this volume ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... establish a link between him and Whistler, though he is much less mysterious and diffuse. Whenever Degas plays with colour, it is with the same restraint of his boldness; he never goes to excess in abandoning himself to its charm. He is neither lyrical, nor voluptuous; his energy is cold; his wise spirit affirms soberly the true character of ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... an ardent, fearless personality, expressed in words of fire, are here again in all their lyrical richness.... ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... of the dullest. Then it seems to be born of wildness and remoteness, and to savor of some special benefit or good fortune. A spring in the valley is an idyl, but a spring on the mountain is a genuine lyrical touch. It imparts a mild thrill; and if one were to call any springs "miracles," as the natives of Cashmere are said to regard their fountains, it would ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... German biography and history as well as German poetry. From the list of translations reprinted here, however, have been excluded all translations of dramas except certain selections, such as songs or short scenes approaching the lyrical mood. In most of the portions of dramas reproduced the passages are too long for republication or the interest is wholly dramatic and not lyric. The subject of the present study is, then, specifically—the German lyric poetry which appeared in English ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... it will. They say that he—every one thinks it's a he—will take Massenet's place as a lyrical composer. I found her out by accidentally coming on the manuscript of a Melvin song that I knew. That's her secret that I spoke of. Do you mind my ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... letters to deal with: a novice who had not come humbly to be taught, but one who had come to take up his share of the inheritance, to sit down among the great, as in his natural place. He was not perhaps altogether unmoved by their insane advices to him, one of the greatest of lyrical poets, a singer above all—to write a tragedy, to give up the language he knew and write his poetry in the high English which, alas! he uses in his letters. Not unmoved, and seriously inclining to a more lofty measure, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... gauntlet of criticism in the Thalia.[13] With this for his chief occupation, Gohlis or Leipzig for his residence, and a circle of chosen friends for his entertainment, Schiller's days went happily along. His Lied an die Freude (Song to Joy), one of his most spirited and beautiful lyrical productions, was composed here: it bespeaks a mind impetuous even in its gladness, and overflowing ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... which form the staple of her poem, the dreamy and unpractical character of her style makes them fly still further from the subject. The force of her language is not sufficient to bind down and rivet our sympathies to the theme; and the lyrical portions of the drama, in particular, are so inarticulate, that we are compelled to pronounce this composition—partial to it as its authoress is—the least successful of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... clever. The Countess had written lyrical poems entitled "Cries of Liberty," and a drama of which Danton was the hero, and the moral too revolutionary for admission to the stage; but at heart the Countess was not at all a revolutionist,—the last person in the world to do or desire anything ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... documents of Indian mythology are the Vedas, usually reckoned as four in number. The oldest, again, of the four, is the Sanhita ("collection") of the Rig-Veda. It is a purely lyrical assortment of the songs "which the Hindus brought with them from their ancient homes on the banks of the Indus". In the manuscripts, the hymns are classified according to the families of poets to whom they are ascribed. Though composed on the banks of the Indus by sacred ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... his own. If he had attempted it in pure English, we may venture to predict that he would have failed. But had he allowed himself that free use of the Scottish dialect of which he was the supreme master, especially if he had shaped the subject into a lyrical drama, no one can say what he might not have achieved. Many of his smaller poems show that he possessed the genuine dramatic vein. The Jolly Beggars, unpleasant as from its grossness it is, shows the presence of this vein in a very high degree, seeing ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... 1800 (just after the completion of his visit to Stowey), he writes, "I would pay five and forty thousand carriages" (parcel fares) "to read Wordsworth's tragedy. Pray give me an order on Longman for the 'Lyrical Ballads.'" And in October, 1800, the two authors must have been on familiar terms with each other; for in a letter addressed by Lamb to Wordsworth, "Dear Wordsworth," it appears that the latter had requested him to advance money for the purchase of books, to ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... his contemporaries had introduced new versification, partly because he was old-fashioned to the backbone and partly because he had none of those lofty inspirations which naturally generate new forms of melody. He seldom trusts himself to be lyrical, and when he does his versification is nearly as monotonous as it is in his narrative poetry. We must not expect to soar with Crabbe into any of the loftier regions; to see the world 'apparelled in celestial light,' or ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... uniformity of style which marks the productions of each. In modern literature we find, at one and the same time, different styles of prose and poetry cultivated by one and the same author. A Goethe writes tragedy, comedy, satire, lyrical poetry, and scientific prose; but we find nothing like this in primitive literature. The individual is there much less prominent, and the poet's character disappears in the general character of the layer of literature to which he belongs. It is the discovery of such large layers of literature following ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... a change. They grew tired of scorning and hating reality, because it did not conform to their cherished dreams, and they began coolly to study it. The titanic heroes, who had become tiresome and anti-pathetic to the last degree, made way for ordinary mortals in their everyday surroundings. Lyrical exaltation was superseded by calm observation, or disintegrating analysis of the different elements of life; pathetic misery made way for cold irony, or jeeringly melancholy humor; and at last poetry was succeeded by prose, and the ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... me no small diffidence in attempting to decide what American lyrics are best worthy of preservation. That every reader of the "American Treasury" will find some favorite poem omitted, there can be little doubt. But the effort made in this book towards a careful estimate of our lyrical poetry is at any rate, I feel sure, in a ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... is believed, from others in the attempt made to include in it all the best original Lyrical pieces and Songs in our language, by writers not living,—and none beside the best. Many familiar verses will hence be met with; many also which should be familiar:—the Editor will regard as his fittest readers those who love Poetry so well, that he can offer ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the development of artistic ideas among the several groups of nations in Italy; and in particular we are no longer in a position to speak of the poetry of Italy; we can only speak of that of Latium. Latin poetry, like that of every other nation, began in the lyrical form, or, to speak more correctly, sprang out of those primitive festal rejoicings, in which dance, music, and song were still inseparably blended. It is remarkable, however, that in the most ancient religious ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... read the brief line within, and, a hand suddenly put out to the arbor, sank on its bench. There had been rain, but a late sun was again pouring over the sparkling grass, and robins were singing with a lyrical clearness. "What is it?" Arnaud demanded anxiously, tremulous in the unsparing ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... "inventor" or "finder"; and in his title, as well as in his functions, the minstrel-poet may remind us of the Norman trouvere. Garcilasso has translated one of the little lyrical pieces of his countrymen. It is light and lively; but one short specimen affords no ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... Aristophanes, taking advantage of his lyrical Bacchic licence, was found too much for political Athens. I would not ask to have him revived, but that the sharp light of such a spirit as his might be with us to strike now and then on public affairs, public themes, to make ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Gombauld grew lyrical. Everybody ought to have children—Anne ought to have them, Mary ought to have them—dozens and dozens. He emphasised his point by thumping with his walking-stick on the bull's leather flanks. Mr. Scogan ought to pass on his intelligence to little Scogans, and Denis ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... unmarketable that I had to own myself beaten in art, and to indict myself to journalism for the next ten years." Later on, he began to write again—"old dusty sheaves were dragged to light; the work of selection and correction was begun; I burned much; I found that, after all, the lyrical instinct had ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... is so interesting to the American public, we shall go into some particulars respecting it. To avoid tediousness, the eminent compositions of the English school may be reduced to two classes—lyrical and sacred; or, as some would divide it, into three, adding madrigalists. We can go back for the second class, as far as the time of Henry VIII. who was himself no mean composer in church music. Purcell, the well-known composer of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... aspirant learned in fact from Miss Dosson that a crisis in the history of his journal had recalled Mr. Flack to the seat of that publication. When the young ladies had gone—and when he didn't go with them; he accompanied them not rarely—the visitor was almost lyrical in his appreciation of his friend's work; he had no jealousy of the act of appropriation that rendered possible in its turn such an act of handing over, of which the canvas constituted the field. He was sure ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... knowledge of the heart, and in that vitality which makes Hamlet and Orlando, Lady Macbeth and Perdita, men and women of all time. They live; Calderon's people, like Ben Jonson's, move. There is a resemblance between the autos of Calderon and the masques of Jonson. Jonson's are lyrical; Calderon's less lyrical than splendid, ethical, grandiose. They were both court poets; they both made court spectacles; they both assisted in the decay of the drama; they reflected the tastes of their time; but Calderon is the more noble, the more splendid in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... cases, he declared, where disease was a higher sort of health. "Take," he said, "a genius with a pronounced neurosis. His body may be a precious poor medium for all ordinary purposes. But he couldn't have a more delicate, more lyrical, more perfectly adjusted instrument for his purposes than the nervous ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... shorter stories in the same style. Didactic poetry includes historical works such as the poem of the Albigeois crusade, ethical or moralising ensenhamens and religious poetry. But the dominating element in Provencal literature is lyrical, and during the short classical age of this literature lyric poetry was supreme. Nearly five hundred different troubadours are known to us at least by name and almost a thousand different stanza forms have been ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... together, and partly because success, even for a more poetical translator, is impossible in the premises. The authors of the Minnelay, in their elaborate rhyme-caprice, must have remained harmonious and lyrical, which is not the case with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... the children she had brought into the world, and how little there mingled with that any of those factors of pride and admiration that go to the making of heroic maternal love. She knew what is expected of a mother, the exalted and lyrical devotion, and it was with something approaching terror that she perceived that certain things in these children of hers she hated. It was her business she knew to love them blindly; she lay awake at night ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... said Jane, stoutly. (Good to be back with him, good to hear his purling brogue and his lyrical construction. He talked like an old song.) The door of the boarding-house opened at their ring and Jane hurried in. "Here's Mrs. Hills! Hello, Mrs. Hills! Here I am!" She embraced the ex-villager warmly and espied Emma Ellis in the shadows of the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... me letters in which the unknown writers scoffed at and derided me. That same year I published a new collection of poetry, "The Twelve Months of the Year;" and this book, though it was afterwards pronounced to contain the greater part of my best lyrical poems, ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... knowing, originated principally in his own inventive brain. Add to all this, the fiery eloquence of his "Confessions"—the labored speculation of his "Political Economy"—the curiously-perverted ingenuity of his "Klosterheim"—and the solemn, sustained, linked, and lyrical raptures of his "Suspiria," and we have answered the question, What has he done? But another question is less easy to answer, What can he, or should he, or shall he yet do? And here we venture to express a long-cherished opinion. Pure history, or that species of biography which ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... confessions as these, are addressed to God by one of those subterfuges by which it is necessary to approach the unseen and infinite, under at least a disguise of mortality. And the whole book, as no other such book has ever been, is lyrical. This prose, so simple, so familiar, has in it the exaltation of poetry. It can pass, without a change of tone, from the boy's stealing of pears: 'If aught of those pears came within my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin'; to a tender human affection: 'And now he lives ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... warm summer air and lovely country, coupled with the sincere affection with which I was inspired for our German Prince, and which had prompted my effort, elated me and worked me up to a high pitch of tension, in which I now formed a clear conception of the lyrical outlines of the 'Tannhauser March,' which first saw the light of day on the occasion of this royal welcome. I soon afterwards developed this theme, and thus produced the march which became the most popular of the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... against Thor. Poul Moeller's Collected Works I had received at my confirmation, and read again and again with such enthusiasm that I almost wore the pages out, and did not skip a line, even of the philosophical parts, which I did not understand at all. But Hertz's Lyrical Poems, which I read in a borrowed copy, gave me as much pleasure as Poul Moeller's Verses had done. And for a few years, grace and charm, and the perfect control of language and poetic form, were in my estimation the supreme thing until, on entering upon my eighteenth year, a ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... "pshaw" and "pooh" at Harry Gill and the Idiot Boy; but the deep and tremulous tenderness of sentiment, the strong-winged flight of fancy, the excelling and unvarying purity, which pervade all the writings of Wordsworth, and the exquisite melody of his lyrical poems, must ever continue to attract and purify the mind. The very excesses into which his one-sided theory betrayed him, acted as a useful counter-agent to the prevailing bad taste ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... drawn for a little time, until one of the animals had bitten a piece out of the Herr's shoulder; when the Lord Chamberlain interfered, and put a stop to this species of performance: and the grand Lyrical Drama, though brought out with unexampled splendour and success, with Monsieur Poumons as first tenor, and an enormous orchestra, had almost crushed poor Dolphin in its triumphant progress: so that great ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pint of port, throws light on "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," which, as the poet himself has stated, was "made at the Cock." Its opening ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... self-preservation they deliberately soaked themselves, to prevent the decay of their overprotected fibre. He perceived it even in Barbara—a sort of sentiment-proof overall, a species of mistrust of the emotional or lyrical, a kind of contempt of sympathy and feeling. And every day he was more and more tempted to lay rude hands on this garment; to see whether he could not make her catch fire, and flare up with some emotion or ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... speaking generally without stopping to distinguish as to subject, both are equally indispensable. Pathos, in situations which are homely, or at all connected with domestic affections, naturally moves by Saxon words. Lyrical emotion of every kind, which (to merit the name of lyrical) must be in the state of flux and reflux, or, generally, of agitation, also requires the Saxon element of our language. And why? Because the Saxon is the aboriginal ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... that Frank Osbaldistone is worthy of his lady; but here no man is a fair judge. In the four novels—"Waverley," "Guy Mannering," "The Antiquary," and "Rob Roy"—which we have studied, the hero has always been a young poet. Waverley versified; so did Mannering; Lovel "had attempted a few lyrical pieces;" and, in Osbaldistone's ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... him in leash during the years of adolescent enthusiasms when he might have become a lyric poet of the neoteric school. A Catullus or a Keats must be caught early. Indeed the very dogmas of the Epicurean school, if taken in all earnestness, were suppressive of lyrical enthusiasm. The Aetna shows perhaps the worst effects of Epicurean doctrine in its scholastic insistence that myths must now give way to facts. Its author was still too absorbed in the microscopic analysis ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... Balkan nationalities, Mr. Noel Buxton, M.P., writing of Sofia and other Balkan capitals, becomes quite lyrical in ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... tried to imitate the accepted form he was apt to lose his fire. He is inspired when he has a nation behind him and is the mouthpiece of sentiments, traditional, but also living and vigorous. He represents, therefore, a new period. The lyrical poetry seemed to have died out in England. It suddenly comes to life in Scotland and reaches unsurpassable excellence within certain limits, because a man of true genius rises to utter the emotions of a people in their most natural ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... "she who advances With rapturous, lyrical glances, Singing the song of the earth, singing ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... engaging and perhaps the most beautiful of our native trees. We said that it was the most individual of trees, that its variety was infinite, for you never find two alike, whether growing in a forest, in groups, or masses, or alone. We were almost lyrical in its praises. But the solitary thorn was always best, he said, and this one was perhaps the best of all he had seen: strange and at the same time decorative in its form, beautiful too in its appearance of great age with unimpaired vigour ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... John Tufton. Tradition records, but on what authority we know not, that Sir Philip Sidney wrote part of his "Arcadia" at this baronial mansion. Wordsworth's "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle" is one of his noblest lyrical effusions. "The Countess's Pillar," a short distance beyond the castle, was erected in 1656 by Lady Anne Clifford, as "a memorial of her last parting at that place with her good and pious mother, Margaret, Countess Dowager of Cumberland, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... opinion, and condemn'd by his infallibility, have been no body ever since, vox & praeterea nihil. Well, however this is determin'd, let me beg of my impartial Readers, to give me leave to try what I can be, I have had good fortune I am told by others in Lyrical Verse, which I am sure is one principal part of Poetry, I'll see now if I can match my Antagonist in Rallying Prose. Several ingenious Authors have already, I think, so well confuted his Assertions against the Stage, by proofs from the Antient Poets, the Primitive Fathers, and their ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... assistance. Some have written general histories of French literature; some have written histories of periods—the Middle Ages, the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries; some have studied special literary fields or forms—the novel, the drama, tragedy, comedy, lyrical poetry, history, philosophy; many have written monographs on great authors; many have written short critical studies of books or groups of books. I have accepted from each a gift. But my assistants needed to be controlled; they brought me twenty thousand pages, and that was too much. Some ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... said, "that religion was like a noble and generous boy with the lyrical heart of a poet, made by some sad chance into a king, surrounded by obsequious respect and pomp and etiquette, bound by a hundred ceremonious rules, forbidden to do this and that, taught to think that his one duty was to be magnificently ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... who, Puritan as he was, loved art with all his soul, only remarks on Shakspeare's marvellous lyrical sweetness, 'his native wood-notes wild'; what shame to the Puritans if they, too, did not discover the ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... definition of Liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in the Liberal century. Moderation is not a compromise; moderation is a passion; the passion of great judges. That Tennyson felt that lyrical enthusiasm could be devoted to established customs, to indefensible and ineradicable national constitutions, to the dignity of time and the empire of unutterable common sense, all this did not make him a tamer poet, but an infinitely more original ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... with the sword of strength in the face of the proud world." A similar anticipation of redemption, even before the catastrophe has taken place, we meet with in Ps. xciv. 1. The situation in the whole Psalm, yea in the whole cycle to which it belongs, the lyrical echo of the second part of Isaiah, is not a real, but an ideal one. This cycle bears witness that the singers and seers of Israel were living in the Future, in a manner which it would be so much the greater folly to measure by our rule as, for the ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... preaching easily as from Rabelais' easy chair, with all the Frenchman's wit, without his grossness. And, as we read, we feel how the ten years of experience, of thought, of study, have matured his views of life, how again the labour spent during their progress on lyrical composition, with perhaps the increasing influence over his taste of Virgil's poetry, have trained his ear, mellowed and refined his style. "The Epistles of Horace," says Dean Milman, "are, with the Poem of Lucretius, ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... arrived at this moment, driven from the plane-trees in the square by the din of the rejoicings, to demand my hospitality. I can hear him in the top of a cypress near by. From up there, dominating the lyrical assembly, at regular intervals he cuts into the vague orchestration of the Grasshoppers ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... again, did he possess that severe and lofty art of composition which seeks the highest beauty of design in architectural harmony supreme above the melodies of gracefulness in detail. He was essentially a lyrical as distinguished from an epical or dramatic poet. The unity of his work is derived from the effect of light and atmosphere, the inbreathed soul of tremulous and throbbing life, which bathes and liquefies ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... But, at all events, there is a closer connection with that Psalm; in it, too, David has in view the future destiny of his race, and we have here, in the last words, the prophetic conclusion of the lyrical effusion there. From this connection with chap. xxii., the closer limitation of the "words" follows. We learn from it that holy words only can be meant. The solemn introduction, and the parallelism with the blessings of Jacob and Moses, fully agree with and confirm this ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... piety. His sympathy with the poor bored me: the road he wanted us to build was tiresome. I could see nothing in poverty that appealed to me, nothing; I shrank away from it as from a degradation of the spirit; but his prose was lyrical and rose on broad wings into the blue. He was a great poet and teacher, Frank, and therefore of course a most preposterous professor; he bored you to death when he taught, but was an inspiration ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Commedia have been called epic poems; but I do not think that anyone could fail to admit, on a little pressure, that the experience of reading The Faery Queene or La Divina Commedia is not in the least like the experience of reading Paradise Lost or the Iliad. But as a poem may have lyrical qualities without being a lyric, so a poem may have epical qualities without being an epic. In all the poems which the world has agreed to call epics, there is a story told, and well told. But Dante's poem attempts no story at all, ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... contemporaries and of posterity has placed it next in point of merit to the Gerusalemme; and by Italians it is especially admired for its graceful elegance of diction. Leigh Hunt executed a very good translation of it, which he dedicated to Keats. Its choruses, which are so many "lyrical voices floating in the air," are very beautiful. It was designed for the theatre, and was acted with great splendour at the court of Ferrara, and a few years later at Mantua, when the well-known artist and architect Buontalenti painted the scenery. This ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... fanning wings of song. That some of our pet jewels are omitted was to be expected. The compiler does not find space for Rochester's most sincere-seeming stanzas, beginning, "I cannot change as others do"—among the sweetest and most lyrical utterances which could set the stay-imprisoned hearts of Charles II.'s beauties to bounding with a touch of emotion. Perhaps Rochester was not exactly a dramatist, though that point is wisely strained in other cases. We do not get the "Nay, dearest, think me not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... must have created a mild sensation amongst the surprised and delighted spectators, as, in shimmering dress and gossamer wings, these airy sprites danced around the astonished Corsites and sang the lyrical decree of punishment for his intrusion upon their domain. The incident is worth quoting in full, from the point where Corsites' labours ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... presume, the most rationalistic and scientific—century the world has yet passed through. We can imagine him asking whether, in all the past history of the human race, so great a zeal for poetry, romantic, lyrical-descriptive, speculative, has ever been manifested at once in such force and width in England, Germany, France, America. And we can fancy him completely satisfied with that single phenomenon. We can also imagine him setting opinion against ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Lulli et Scarlatti, and in the same year he sustained, before the faculty of the Sorbonne—where he now occupies the chair of musical criticism—a remarkable dissertation on The Origin of the Modern Lyrical Drama—his thesis for the Doctorate. This, in reality, is a vehement protest against the indifference for the Art of Music which, up to that time, had always been displayed by the University. In 1903 he published a remarkable Life of Beethoven, followed by a Life of ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland |
