"Midsummer Night" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if you please, from "the ancients." Like Voltaire, they reckoned Shakespeare a barbarian with native wood-notes wild. They took his plays and "made them into plays." They improved The Tempest, Timon of Athens, The Midsummer Night's Dream, and goodness knows how many more. Davenant, in search of material for entertainments, began it; Dryden continued it; even Shadwell had his dirty fingers in it. And this matters to us, for some of Purcell's most glorious ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... a paltering hand Clasps it laid close his peaked and gleaming face Propped in the pillow. Breathe silent, lofty lime, Your curfew secrets out in fervid scent To the attendant shadows! Tinge the air Of the midsummer night that now begins, At an owl's oaring flight from dusk to dusk And downward caper of the giddy bat Hawking against the lustre of bare skies, With something of th' unfathomable bliss He, who lies dying there, knew once ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... Theatre in Bristol in many child's parts. When my father went to the wall over the Lincoln Circuit, Mr. Chute engaged him as an actor, and I went with him. I remember in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'—I was Mustard Seed, I think, or Peas Blossom; at any rate, some small character that required very prettily dressing, and plenty of flowers on my little costume. I am as fond of flowers to-day as ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in snow like Jotunheim, and rime lay on it like a place long dead. But she bade Ironbeard go to Frankland, for it was so written. "A great kingdom waits," she said—"not for you, but for the seed of your loins." And Biorn shuddered, for they were the words spoken in her hut on that unforgotten midsummer night. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... answered, 'Yea, and why not I? Mine is the larger need, who am not meek, Pale-blooded, prayerful. Let me tell thee now. Here one black, mute midsummer night I sat, Lonely, but musing on thee, wondering where, Murmuring a light song I had heard thee sing, And once or twice I spake thy name aloud. Then flashed a levin-brand; and near me stood, In fuming sulphur blue and green, a fiend— Mark's way to steal behind one in the dark— For there ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... Finishing, she put her blind aside to have one freshening look at the trees in the square. It was quite cloudless now, the moon being just rising—the same moon that Agatha had seen, as a bright slender line appearing at street corners, on the Midsummer night when she and Nathariael Harper walked home together. She felt a deep interest in that especial moon, which seemed between its dawning and waning to have comprised the whole fate ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the "midsummer night's dream" that often comes to girls of seventeen, woke up to find that youth and love were no match for age and common sense. Philip had been flying about the world like a thistle-down for five-and-twenty years, generous-hearted, frank, and ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... much to see his "sad spirit of the elfin race" completely transformed. Was this the child-like, immature being of their strange visit to Miraflores? That whole episode seemed a kind of phantasy—a Midsummer Night's music—nothing more, perhaps something less. The very title of the play—The Second Surprise of Love—carried a mocking significance. Sometimes the soul speaks first, sometimes the senses first influence a life, but the turn, soon or late, must inevitably come ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... all the counsel that we two have shared, The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent When we have chid the hasty-footed time For parting us—Oh!—and is all forgot? Midsummer Night's Dream. ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... sound, stifled the voice of love. His jewelled sentences glittered, but left her cold. They lacked that spontaneity which renders even simple and hackeneyed phrases wonderful and unique. Ethel clearly realised that her hold upon the boy's imagination had been a fleeting midsummer night's charm, and that a word from Reginald's lips had broken the potency of her spell. She almost saw the shadow of Reginald's visage hovering over Ernest's letter and leering at her from between the lines in sinister ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... priest and Clorin; Daphnis' innocence is seemingly unstained by the hours he has spent with Cloe in the hollow tree; while the Sullen Shepherd, unregenerate and defiant, is banished the confines of pastoral Thessaly. What we have witnessed was no more than the comedy of errors of a midsummer night. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... was worst in the English conservatism and inequality, while discouraging all that was best in it. It is true that the ideal Englishman was too much of a squire; but it is just to add that the ideal squire was a good squire. The best squire I know in fiction is Duke Theseus in "The Midsummer Night's Dream," who is kind to his people and proud of his dogs; and would be a perfect human being if he were not just a little bit prone to be kind to both of them in the same way. But such natural and even pagan good-nature is consonant with ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... division almost to themselves. The mythological or pastoral character of their subject in most cases might not of itself have prevented their marking an advance in the dramatic composition of English playwrights. A Midsummer Night's Dream and much other work of Shakespere's show how far from necessary it is that theme, or class of subject, should affect merit of presentment. But Lyly's work generally has more of the masque than the play. It sometimes includes charming ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... and incontrovertible custom, and to show how plastic it is, and how easily pierced, and how readily transformed. He has a malicious pleasure in confusing the boundaries of nature and fancy, and mocking the purblind understanding. In the "Midsummer Night's Dream" we have an ambiguous and bewildering light, with the horizon always shifting, and the boundaries of fact and fable confused with an inseparable mingling of forms; both outwardly, as when Theseus enters the forest on the skirts of the fairy crew; and inwardly in the memories of the lovers. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... there are no such gripping fairy tales as those of the Brethren Grimm. During this vacation, too, I discovered the "Leprachaun," the little Irish fairy with the hammer. He was not at all like the English fairies in Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and, leaving out Ariel, I think I liked him ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... badly to model from, and for a moment was tempted to get his rook rifle—but what was the good of a dead rabbit—besides, they looked so happy! He put the glasses down and went towards his greenhouse to get a drawing block, thinking to sit on the wall and make a sort of Midsummer Night's Dream sketch of flowers and rabbits. Someone was there, bending down and doing something to his creatures. Who had the cheek? Why, it was Sylvia—in her dressing-gown! He grew hot, then cold, with anger. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... love in Omaha, and hear her knock back three times the length of France; Pyramus and Thisbe—with this difference: that the wall is no longer a barrier, but a sensitive messenger. It has become, indeed, in the words of Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the wittiest of partitions, and the modern Pyramus may apostrophize it ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... song (with something of the quality of the oriole's, robin's, and thrush's notes), making the day on which you first hear it memorable. This is one of the few birds that sing at night. A soft, sweet, rolling warble, heard when the moon is at its full on a midsummer night, is more than likely to come ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... will deny this, but there are people who will deny anything. There are some who will say that St. Paul would not have condemned the Falstaff plays, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and almost everything that Shakspeare ever wrote; but there is no arguing against this. 'Every man,' said Dr. Johnson, 'has a right to his own opinion, and every one else has a right to knock him down for it.' ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... of the Clans as that the late Lord Macaulay should appear anything like the Committal of the Seven Bishops to the Tower. I told the lady that she was unfair to eminent men if she hoped that celebrated engineers would look like tubular bridges, or that Sir Edwin Landseer would remind her of a "Midsummer Night's Dream." I mention this because, of all men in the world, my friend Charles Browne was the least like a showman of any man I ever encountered. I can remember the odd half disappointed look of some of the visitors ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... year a work was written, the score of which is marked "Berlin, August 6, 1826," when it must be remembered that he was seventeen years of age, which of itself was sufficient to rank him among the immortals—the overture to the "Midsummer Night's Dream." Full of lovely imaginings, with a wonderful fairy grace all its own, and a bewitching beauty, revealing not only the soul of the true poet, but also the musician profoundly skilled in all the art of orchestral effect, it is hard to believe that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Dick pointed out the general direction of the deer park which hides the shelter-house from the sanatorium, and if you'll believe it, with snow so thick I had to scrape it off the lantern every minute or so, those children planned to give something called A Midsummer Night's Dream in the deer park among the trees in the spring, to entertain ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... together Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition. —Midsummer Night's Dream. ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of A Midsummer Night's Dream I shall never forget ... Hildreth as Titania in her green tights ... I sat in the back (she would not allow me in the front because it might fluster her, she pleaded) and enjoyed a sense of blissful ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Midsummer Night came clear and cool. Henrik was in Christiania, and was to be one of a party to spend the night on the hills above the city. Marie was not with them, and ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... disheartenment; all of which marshalled themselves to memory's foreground as the question of division was talked pro and con by the entire family while camped at the base of the snow-capped mountains on that midsummer night. ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... offered to take him as a pupil, but his father preferred to bring him up in the musical atmosphere of his own home. There the boy perfected himself as a piano player and wrote a host of early compositions. The overture to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was written in 1826, when Mendelssohn was but seventeen years old. Two years later his first opera, "The Marriage of Camecho," was given at the Berlin Opera. In Berlin, Mendelssohn became the leading figure in the propaganda for the music of Bach. Having ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... the midsummer night had settled again, except for the voices of the whippoorwill ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... asserting her right to this illustrious descent; and accordingly she quartered the Mab arms with her own,—three acorns vert, with a grasshopper rampant. It was as merry a little court as could possibly be conceived, and on a fine midsummer night it would have been worth while attending the queen's balls; that is to say, if you could have got a ticket, a favour not ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Day, Marguerite and I have spent the morning at the piano, playing Mendelssohn's delicious fairy music from the Midsummer Night's Dream. ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... a girdle around the earth in forty minutes," prophesied Puck in "Midsummer Night's Dream." The boastful fairy did not succeed in accomplishing this wonder until midnight on the Fourth of July, 1903. On that day the Pacific cable from the United States to Hawaii, to Midway Island, to Guam, and to Manila, began operations. The men worked hard that last ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... supported by an assertion of Jonson's—that Shakespeare wrote with a current pen, heedless of blots and little changes. He was, it is evident, not one of the correct authors. But it seems unlikely that no pains of rewriting went to the making of the speeches in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Hamlet's address to the skull. Shakespeare, one feels, is richer than any other author in the beauty of first thoughts. But one seems to perceive in much of his work the beauty of second thoughts too. There have been few great ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... world's dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream[626] admits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden,[627] the nimble air of Scone ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... we could get from sedentary poets, who had never mingled in the vicissitudes, the dangers, or excitements of the chase, such descriptions of hunting and other athletic games, as are to be found in Shakspeare's Midsummer Night's ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... his door, one midsummer night, After the sun had sunk in the west, And the lingering beams of golden light Made his kindly old face look warm and bright, While the odorous night-wind whispered "Rest!" Gently, gently, he bowed his head.... There were angels waiting ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... of the yearly Christmas play at court has been settled; the Master of the Revels has chosen from the rich stores of his manuscripts "The Midsummer Night's Dream", graciously adding that "for wit and mirth it is like to please her Majesty exceedingly." A high honor, indeed, for its author. For, not then, as now, were plays written primarily for the ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... a few weeks since, to take the early train from Providence to Boston; and for this purpose I rose at two o'clock in the morning. Everything around was wrapped in darkness and hushed in silence. It was a mild, serene, midsummer night,—the sky was without a cloud,—the winds were [v]whist. The moon, then in the last quarter, had just risen, and the stars shone with a luster but little affected ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... uninterrupted flow of tone on which the melody should float. Most pianists play them too fast. Mozart and Schumann protested against the tendency to take their slow pieces too fast, and Chopin suffers still more from this pernicious habit. Mendelssohn in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and Weber in "Oberon," have given us glimpses of dreamland, but Chopin's nocturnes take us there bodily, and plunge us into reveries more delicious than the visions of an opium eater. They should be played in the twilight and in solitude, for the slightest foreign sound breaks ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... and Tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Loves Labors Lost, his Love Labours Wonne, his Midsummer Night Dreame, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy his Richard the 2., Richard the 3., Henry the 4., {11} King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet. As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speake with Plautus tongue, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... double cherry seeming parted. But yet a union in partition, Two lovely berries moulded on one stem." 'Midsummer Night's ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... were all examined in the course of their researches. But Lady Penelope declared loftily and decidedly for Shakspeare, as the author whose immortal works were fresh in every one's recollection. Shakspeare was therefore chosen, and from his works the Midsummer Night's Dream was selected, as the play which afforded the greatest variety of characters, and most scope of course for the intended representation. An active competition presently occurred among the greater part of the company, for such copies of the Midsummer Night's Dream, or the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... giants with crabs' claws, men with fiery eyes, women that turn into deadly serpents, vague, misty souls of ancestors, that pass through the branches and appear to their descendants; all that we dream of in our northern midsummer night wakes ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... lettres of that new time, to such grave and politic uses was first suggested; he is the genius of that company, that even in such frolic mad-cap games as Love's Labour's Lost, and the Taming of the Shrew, and Midsummer Night's Dream, could contrive to insert, not the broad farce and burlesque on the old pretentious wordy philosophy and pompous rhetoric it was meant to dethrone only, and not the most perilous secret of the new philosophy, only, but the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had,—But man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had.—Midsummer Night's Dream. ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... pompous spectacle that midsummer night upon those narrow seas. The moon, which was at the full, was rising calmly upon a scene of anxious expectation. Would she not be looking, by the morrow's night, upon a subjugated England, a reenslaved Holland—upon the downfall of civil and religious ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... ran through Sylvia's Journal, is a little too grown-up to be included; nor can the "Heroines of the Poets," which appeared in the same place, be dragged in to augment the scanty list, any more than the "Midsummer Night's Dream" or "Keats's Poems." It is singular that the fancy of Mr. Anning Bell, which seems exactly calculated to attract a child and its parent at the same time, has not been more frequently requisitioned for this purpose. In the two "Banbury Cross" volumes there ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... calm, midsummer night, forty years ago, this house was broken into by burglars. They got in through the Green Room window, which was always left open during the warm weather. We—my mother, your Aunt Deborah, and I—were awakened by a loud shriek for help. Recognising Alicia's ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... disengage myself. One word again made me a captive: that word was now "Lafontaine;" and at the same moment I saw the sylph bounding to my side. What was I to think of this extraordinary combination? All was as strange as a midsummer night's dream. The "colonel," as if fatigued, leaned against the pillar, and slightly removing his mask, I saw, with sudden rejoicing, the features of that gallant young friend, whom I had almost despaired of ever seeing again. "Wait in this spot until I return," was all that I heard, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... sent was indeed a most excellent Bass, but that at present he only wanted a Counter-Tenor. Could I believe my friend had ever read Shakespeare, I should certainly conclude he had taken the hint from Theseus in the Midsummer Night's Dream. ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is no less sincere than "Hamlet," "The Mikado" as faithful to its mood of satiric frolicking as Ibsen's "Ghosts" to its mood of moral horror. Sincerity bars out no themes; it only demands that the dramatist's moods ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... poet than Shelley is their author. Their warm, yet delicate and ethereal imagination will be appreciated by all; but by none so thoroughly as by him who has himself arisen from sweet dreams of one beloved, to bathe in the aromatic air of a southern midsummer night. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... had beaten the roll as a drummer—a roll of victory for those who had been ready to retreat. There was a golden treasure in his bosom, the power of sound; it burst forth on his violin as if the instrument had been a complete organ, and as if all the elves of a midsummer night were dancing across the strings. In its sounds were heard the piping of the thrush and the full clear note of the human voice; therefore the sound brought rapture to every heart, and carried his name triumphant through the land. That was a ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... verse many words beginning with the same letter. But this knack, whatever be its value, was so frequent among early writers, that Gascoigne, a writer of the sixteenth century, warns the young poet against affecting it; Shakespeare, in the Midsummer Night's Dream, is supposed to ridicule it; and, in another play, the sonnet of ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... ambrosial foliage of the tree whose pale blossoms were still murmurous with bees. Eric was leaning back in an easy chair, with Wildney sitting on the grass, cross-legged at his feet, while Montagu, resting on one of the mossy roots, read to them the "Midsummer Night's Dream," and the ladies ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... invitation, and that he drove over with Mary Arden, his wife, sitting on the front seat holding the baby, and all the other seven children sitting on the straw behind. And we may be sure that the eldest boy in that brood never forgot the day. In fact, in "Midsummer Night's Dream" he has called on his memory for certain features of the show. Elizabeth was forty-one years old then, but apparently very attractive and glib of tongue. No doubt Kenilworth was stupendous in its magnificence, and it will pay you to take down from its shelf Sir Walter's novel ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... (Cf. Plato Tim. p. 533, C. D.) See the examples adduced by the commentators. Schrader on Musaeus 5, and Boyes, Illustrations to Sept. c. Th. 98. Shakespeare has burlesqued this idea in his exquisite buffoonery, Midsummer Night's ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... up slowly, and his consciousness seemed to travel even more slowly back from the fairy doings of a midsummer night. Under the observant eyes bent upon it, his face changed extraordinarily from the face of untroubled, almost immortal childhood to the face ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... mean?" he cried. "You must be crazy! For there isn't a single person in all Pleasant Valley that hasn't heard Kiddie Katydid singing his tiresome song on a fine midsummer night." ...
— The Tale of Kiddie Katydid • Arthur Scott Bailey
... environment, surroundings (situation) 183; circumjacence &c 227 [Obs.]. anchorage, mooring, encampment. plantation, colony, settlement, cantonment; colonization, domestication, situation; habitation &c (abode) 189; cohabitation; a local habitation and a name [Midsummer Night's Dream]; endenization^, naturalization. V. place, situate, locate, localize, make a place for, put, lay, set, seat, station, lodge, quarter, post, install; house, stow; establish, fix, pin, root; graft; plant &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... that all the sweet and beautiful things in the Bible would not make one play of Shakespeare; all the philosophy in the world would not make one scene in Hamlet; all the beauties of the Bible would not make one scene in the Midsummer Night's Dream; all the beautiful things about woman in the Bible would not begin to create such a character as Perditu or Imogene or ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... calling. He is enthusiastically devoted to his profession, and enjoys his acting quite as much as his auditors. In putting his pieces on the stage, he is lavish of expense, and whenever he can control this part of the performance, it leaves nothing to be desired. Some years ago he brought out "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at a Philadelphia theater, in a style of magnificence rarely witnessed on any stage. The scenery was exquisite, and was a collection of artistic gems. The success of the piece was very decided in Philadelphia, but when it was reproduced, with the same ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... from his "Alceste"—and the actually correct way of interpreting and playing it; (b) a passage from the scherzo of Mendelssohn's string quartet,—to show how a gay subject can be treated in the minor mood—and M. Saint-Saens adds: "Mendelssohn's scherzo of his 'Midsummer Night's Dream' is in sol minor but it evokes no idea of sadness, although oftentimes those who play it, deceived by its minor mood, give it a melancholy character, which is very far from ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... great ways of borrowing, as EMERSON said, and in his new Fantasy Sir JAMES BARRIE has given us a very charming variation on A Midsummer Night's Dream (with echoes of Peter Pan and The Admirable Crichton). Certainly I got far more fun out of his deluded lovers in the Magic Wood than I ever extracted from the comedy of errors which occurred between the ladies and gentlemen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... the myriad lights of heaven were hung out, as George and Gertrude alighted from their carriage in front of Colonel Harris's residence. They had been to the Grand Opera House, where they had witnessed Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," beautifully played by Julia Marlowe and her company. Between the acts, George and Gertrude talked much of the strike, of labor troubles in general, and earnestly discussed the ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... the same, Feb, 23.-Oxfordshire and Colchester elections. Sir John Bland's suicide. English Opera. "Midsummer Night's Dream." Walpole at a fire. Lady ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... course, alluded to Biron and Rosaline; and there are other obvious prolusions, as the scene of the masque with the courtiers, compared with the play in A Midsummer Night's Dream.—ED.] ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... squarer I take to be a cholerick, quarrelsome fellow, for in this sense Shakespeare uses the word to square. So in Midsummer Night's Dream it is said of Oberon and Titalia, that they never meet but they square. So the sense may be, Is there no hot-blooded youth that will keep him company ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... pressure of a gentle breeze. There is no tragic pursuit of slave-hunters, no tramp of horses to terrify the bleeding victim, no howlings of ravenous bloodhounds,—nothing that would seem to make the issue freedom or death. No! all is as still as a midsummer night in the same clime. The woman—this daughter of slavery's vices—cherishes a love for freedom; the hope of gaining it, and improving those endowments nature has bestowed upon her, freshens her spirits and gives her life to look forward without desponding. Maxwell is her friend; he has witnessed ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... a strange scene my father came on. He pulled up his big red-roan horse at the crossroads, where the long lane entered the turnpike, and looked at the stiff, tragic figure. He rode home from a sitting of the county justices, alone, at peace, on this midsummer night, and God sent this ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... leisure to meditate on much besides the crops; he knew so much of the crops that his thoughts could easily run free from them; he used to meditate on who they were that lived in briar and thorn tree, and danced as folk said all through midsummer night, and sometimes blessed and sometimes harmed the crops; for he knew that in Old England were wonderful ancient things, odder and older things than many folks knew. And his eyes had leisure to see much ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... chosen to play the part of Hermia in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Her family shared her pleasure—they felt that a great distinction had come to them. Gyp and Jerry, particularly, were immensely excited. Jerry, who had only been to the theatre twice in her life, ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... midsummer night, up hill and down hill, by cross-road and bye-lane, until, as they climbed a long ascent, they beheld a tall figure standing upon the top of the hill, in the attitude of one who waits; and who, spying them, immediately raised a very stiff left arm, whereupon ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... hear that in this church Mendelssohn's Wedding March was first played at a wedding. The 'Midsummer Night's Dream' music had just been published as a pianoforte duet, when Mr Samuel Reay, of Tiverton, made an arrangement of it for the organ, and the first marriage at which the march was played was that of Mr Tom Daniel and Miss Dorothea ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... sad, no doubt, but it does not begin to be as sad as having no fairies at all. There must have been a few in England in Shakespeare's time, or he could never have written The Tempest or the Midsummer Night's Dream; but where have ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... gray dawn lightens the darkness of a midsummer night soon after two o'clock. Philip watched it come, knowing that it was his last sight of day,—as we ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... and studied harmony and counterpoint under Clarence Eddy, and the piano under Ledochowski. It is interesting to note that Kelley was diverted into music from painting by hearing "Blind Tom" play Liszt's transcription of Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream" music. I imagine that this idiot-genius had very little other influence of this sort in his ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... has said, "time and place are so purely imaginary and so much a matter of indifference that the adoption of a purely conventional standard of manners, or at least the exclusion of any definitely fixed one, is here desirable." This is shown in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... all his adventures, and all that had happened to him since that midsummer night, seven long ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... concerning the fate of the soul after death,[136] above cited from Montaigne. We might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz's lines, trace the verses on the "shaping fantasies" of "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,[137] to such a passage ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... than this early effort, were produced in the next few years. The most ambitious of these was the "Woman of Arles," which he had elaborated from a touching short story and for which Bizet composed incidental music as beautiful and as overwhelming as that prepared by Mendelssohn for the "Midsummer Night's Dream." ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... stages. 119. Shakspere indirectly tells us his thoughts, if we will take the trouble to learn them. 120. Three stages of thought that men go through on religious matters. Hereditary belief. Scepticism. Reasoned belief. 121. Shakspere went through all this. 122. Illustrations. Hereditary belief. "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Fairies chiefly an adaptation of current tradition. 123. The dawn of doubt. 124. Scepticism. Evil spirits dominant. No guiding good. 125. Corresponding lapse of faith in other matters. Woman's purity. 126. Man's honour. 127. Mr. Ruskin's view of Shakspere's ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... the less eager activity of the other children; and they had betaken themselves to occupations that did not admit of his companionship. Laurence sat in a recess near the book-ease, reading, not for the first time, the Midsummer Night's Dream. Clara was making a rosary of beads for a little figure of a Sister of Charity, who was to attend the Bunker Hill fair and lend her aid in erecting the Monument. Little Alice sat on Grandfather's footstool, with a ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lyrics, in its smaller way, affects us with a sense of uniqueness, as surely as the sublimer works of a supernatural cast,—Marlowe's "Faustus," the "Faust" of Goethe, "Manfred," or even those ethereal masterpieces, "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." More than one, while otherwise unique, has some burden or refrain which haunts the memory,—once heard, never forgotten, like the tone of a rarely used but distinctive organ-stop. Notable among them is Buerger's "Lenore," that ghostly and resonant ballad, the lure and foil ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... stage. The mill-stream banks, overgrown with willow, hazel, and guelder rose made convenient places to wait in till your turn came; and a grown-up who had seen it said that Shakespeare himself could not have imagined a more suitable setting for his play. They were not, of course, allowed to act on Midsummer Night itself, but they went down after tea on Midsummer Eve, when the shadows were growing, and they took their supper—hard-boiled eggs, Bath Oliver biscuits, and salt in an envelope—with them. Three Cows had been milked and were grazing steadily with a ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... combining the agility of Ariel with the lively impertinence of the inhabitants of Lilliput. Yet with what ease, elegance, and lingering love does he draw his petty Pucks, till, though too tiny for touch, they become palpable to vision! On the whole, had not the "Tempest" and the "Midsummer Night's Dream" existed before the "Rape of the Lock," the machinery in it would have proclaimed Pope a man of creative imagination. As it is, it proves wonderful activity of fancy. Shakspeare's delicate creations are touched again without crumbling at the touch, clad in new down, fed ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... "'Midsummer Night's Dream,' you midget!" exclaimed Mrs. Eberstein. "Have you read that? And everything else ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... said a pert-looking, little pug-nosed man, who had taken upon himself the part of Quince the carpenter, in the Midsummer Night's Dream. "You, Nick Bottom," continued he, addressing another, ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... at his door one midsummer night, After the sun had sunk in the west, And the lingering beams of golden light Made his kindly old face look warm and bright, While the odorous night winds whispered, "Rest!" Gently, gently, he bowed his head; There were angels waiting for him, I know; He was sure of his happiness, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... knows the delight of utilizing the same material over and over again. Here is one instance. An interior set, neutral in tones and with no marked characteristics of style and period, was built to serve in Acts I and V of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Hangings, furniture, costumes gave it the proper appearance. Later it was used in Ulysses. It has also housed Moliere's Doctor in Spite of Himself (Le Medecin Malgre Lui) and The Wealthy Upstart (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme), ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... king Otho, actually perished by means of one day's pleasure excursion from Athens, though meeting neither thief nor robber. He lost his way: and this being scandalous in an ex-chancellor of the exchequer having ladies under his guidance, who were obliged, like those in the Midsummer Night's Dream, to pass the night, in an Athenian wood, his excellency died of vexation. Where may not men find a death? But we ask after the calculation of any office which takes extra risks: and, as a basis for such a calculation, we submit the range of tour sketched by ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... trace his influence upon later writers would be to write a history of the Elizabethan stage. In the foregoing remarks I have continually indicated Shakespeare's debt to him in matters of detail. The Midsummer Night's Dream is from beginning to end full of reminiscences from the plays of the earlier dramatist, transmuted, vitalized, and beautified by the genius of our greatest poet. It is as if he had witnessed in one day a representation of all Lyly's dramatic work, and wearied by the effort of attention ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... liberty, for describing things which really exist not, if they are founded on popular belief. Of this nature are fairies, pigmies, and the extraordinary effects of magic; for it is still an imitation, though of other men's fancies: and thus are Shakespeare's "Tempest," his "Midsummer Night's Dream," and Ben Jonson's "Masque of Witches" to be defended. For immaterial substances, we are authorised by Scripture in their description: and herein the text accommodates itself to vulgar apprehension, in giving angels the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... Mendelssohn spent, with his parents and sister Fanny, several years of his wonderful youth; and the "Gartenhaus" of this estate witnessed the memorable private performance of the work which first revealed his greatness to the world,—the "Overture to the Midsummer Night's Dream." ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton |
