"Poetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... judgment, the only things worth living for. To gain his confidence became her great desire. But this had received a severe shock. Mr. Ludolph had lost all faith in everything save money and his own will. Religion was to him a gross superstition, and woman's virtue and truth, poetic fictions. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... fountain with a statue of Pegasus, with an inscription in Italian verse purporting that Pegasus having stopped there one day to refresh himself at this fountain, found the place so pleasant that he remained there ever since. This is a poetic nation par excellence. Affiches are announced in sonnets and other metres; and tho' in other countries the votaries of the Muses are but too apt to neglect the ordinary and vulgar concerns of life, yet here it by no means diminishes industry, and the ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... into welcome oblivion; James had escorted Lincoln to the platform; Stephen stood immediately behind him, alert to show him any courtesy; and Roger, as Chief Justice, was about to administer the oath of office. It was a rare case of poetic justice. ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... State Line, in what is now Lewisville, Chester county, Pennsylvania, where his son William was born, early in the present century. He was a stonemason by trade, and though comparatively uneducated, was possessed of a brilliant imagination, and so highly endowed by nature with poetic ability that he frequently amused and delighted his fellow-workmen by singing songs which he extemporized while at his work. There is no doubt that his granddaughter, the subject of this sketch, inherited ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... legend of the origin of Marseilles. It is only so far historical that it gives us in poetic and romantic form the main facts, that the first colony settled at Marseilles without opposition, that after a while it got embroiled with the Gaulish tribes of the neighbourhood, and that a second Ionian colony came to strengthen the first. But this second colony arrived B.C. 542, fifty-seven ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... in which such scenes are generally described as being carried on. Ladies may perhaps think that Mary should have been deterred, by the very boyishness of his manner, from thinking at all seriously on the subject. His "will you, won't you—do you, don't you?" does not sound like the poetic raptures of a highly inspired lover. But, nevertheless, there had been warmth, and a reality in it not in itself repulsive; and Mary's anger—anger? no, not anger—her objections to the declarations were probably not based on the ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... the amendment (Hiram R. Revels) was a colored man of respectable character and intelligence. He sat in the seat which Jefferson Davis had wrathfully deserted to take up arms against the Republic and become the ruler of a hostile government. Poetic justice, historic revenge, personal retribution were all complete when Mr. Revels' name was called on the roll of the Senate. But his presence, while demonstrating the extent to which the assertion of equal rights had been carried, served ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... his life. And was it Magdalen alone to whom he chiefly looked up as his helper and guide? So he thought; but before the time of separation had come, he had found out that Thekla was far prettier than ever Vera had been, and with a mind and principle—no Flapsy, but a real sympathetic and poetic nature, which had grown up in these years. Young as she was, their destinies ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... we started to plunge once more into the unknown. On reaching the top edge of the plateau we witnessed a wonderful sight, rendered more poetic by the slight vagueness of a veil of mist. To the south of Diamantino was the Serra Tombador, extending as far as S. Luiz de Caceres, about 250 kil. as the crow flies to the south-west. Then below us was the Lagoa dos Veados with no outlet, and close by the head-waters of the Rio Preto (a ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... expenses, and to help his family. It was very characteristic of the Californians to take this dramatic and effective way of collecting a fund. Men who would have been very likely to meet a subscription-paper with indifference, on being appealed to in this poetic manner, with no word spoken, only seeing the discarded crutches and the white wings above, with moist eyes laid their little tribute below, as if it were a satisfaction to do so. I thought how the little newsboy's face would have brightened if he could have seen it, and hoped that ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... clearly at direct issue with Ben Jonson, whose introduced phrases, "pleaded nonage," "wardship," "pupillage," &c., seem to smack too much of legal technology to countenance the supposition of poetic license. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... figure of a man emerged. Pausing by the horse rack he surveyed the two men and boy, if not with indifference, at least with apathy. Just above his head swung the sign with its legend, "Slosson—Entertainment"; but if he were Slosson, one could take the last half of the sign either as a poetic rhapsody on the part of the painter, or the yielding to some meaningless convention, for in his person, Mr. Slosson suggested none of those qualities of brain or heart that trenched upon the lighter amenities of life. He was black-haired ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... admire Sir Walter Scott," he exclaimed with sudden animation. "Is not his 'Lady of the Lake' exquisite in its flowing grace and poetic ...
— Good Stories from The Ladies Home Journal • Various
... the Rose is unmistakably feminine, from the delicate complexion of its flower, the Ivy is not less so from the tender sentiment of attachment expressed by its whole form and life. In her infinite array of poetic symbols, Nature has given us nothing so exquisitely typical of all that is best in woman, as that which may be found in the graceful curves and in the firm strength of this vine. In youth and beauty, she clings to the husband ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... or three years afterwards, in the autumn of 1816, he abandoned Kentucky and went into Indiana. Some writers have given to this migration the interesting character of a flight from a slave-cursed society to a land of freedom, but whatever poetic fitness there might be in such a motive, the suggestion is entirely gratuitous and without the slightest foundation.[19] In making this move, Thomas's outfit consisted of a trifling parcel of tools and ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... perception, of rare discrimination, all will admit. He was a humorist as delicate and fanciful as Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, Bill Nye, James Whitcomb Riley, Opie Read, or Bret Harte in their happiest moods. Within him ran a poetic vein, capable of being worked in any direction, and from which he could, at will, extract that which his imagination saw and felt most. That he occasionally left the child-world, in which he longed to linger, to wander among the older children of men, where intuitively ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... reconciled to this enormity. Truly may it be said that the world looks darker for it. In one way or another, here and there and all around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life. The domestic fire was a type of all these attributes, and seemed to bring might and majesty, and wild nature and a spiritual essence, into our in most home, and yet to dwell with us in such friendliness that its mysteries and marvels ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Chinatown base in Wade Street, I turned my steps in the same direction as upon the preceding night; but if my own will played no part in the matter, then decidedly Providence truly guided me. Poetic justice is rare enough in real life, yet I was destined to-night to witness ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... false interpretation, and utterly unpoetical. It is even doubtful whether [Hebrew: unable to transliterate. txt Ed.] ('ruach') in this place means 'spirit' in contradistinction to 'matter' at all, and not rather air or wind. At all events, the poetic decorum, the proportion, and the antithetic parallelism, demand a somewhat as much below God, as the horse is below man. The opposition of 'flesh' and 'spirit' in the Gospel of St. John, who thought in Hebrew, though he wrote ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... masculine and feminine—fir and beech. She smiled at the fancy; and much graceful badinage went on between them. I had never before seen John in the company of women, and I marvelled to perceive the refinement of his language, and the poetic ideas it clothed. I forgot the truth—of whose saying was it?—"that once in his life every man becomes ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... combats of civilization; still obstinately clings to its hunger and its liberty, its tents and its tatters, and still exercises, as it has exercised for centuries, an indescribable and indestructible fascination upon poetic minds, passing it on as a mysterious ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... in which he sees her. It was this remarkable power that took Paris by storm when he became famous in the lover's part in the Dame aux Camelias. It is a short part, really comprised in two scenes, but, as he acted it (he was its original representative), it left its poetic and exalting influence on the heroine throughout the play. A woman who could be so loved—who could be so devotedly and romantically adored—had a hold upon the general sympathy with which nothing less absorbing and complete could ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... mountain, being one of the spurs of the greater Sonnstein, and rises precipitously, looming, massive and lofty, like a very fortress for giants, where it stands right across that road which, if you follow it long enough, takes you on through Zirl to Landeck—old, picturesque, poetic Landeck, where Frederic of the Empty Pockets rhymed his sorrows in ballads to his people—and so on, by Bludenz, into Switzerland itself, by as noble a highway as any traveller can ever desire to traverse on a summer's day. The Martinswand ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... why?" said the poet's friend. "Why not cease to think of conciliating your wife? Russians are unreasoning aborigines. Why not take up life in a simple poetic way with Tenise, and avoid the Rue de ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... They show also that he was in thorough sympathy with his son's intellectual life. The letter written by Lanier to his father from Baltimore in 1873 may lead one to think otherwise. Mr. Lanier was opposed, as were most of the men of his section, to a young man's entering upon a musical or poetic career, but more than two hundred letters written by son to father and many from father to son prove that their relations during the entire career of the poet were unusually close and sympathetic. In ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... usual, accepts Johnston's statement about poetic love on the Congo as gospel truth, without examining ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... curses Elgin and all his works. The passage as a whole suggests the essential difference between painting and poetry. As a composition, it recalls the frontispiece of a seventeenth-century classic. The pictured scene, with its superfluity of accessories, is grotesque enough; but the poetic scenery, inconsequent and yet vivid as a dream, awakens, and fulfills the imagination. (Travels in Albania, by Lord Broughton, 1858, i. 380; ii. 128, 129, 138; The Odyssey, xxiv. 74, sq. See, too, Byron's letters to his mother, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... poets had at times risen to sublimer poetic flights than this, while others contended that the clear-cut decision of thought it expressed placed the poem ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... natural sciences. The connection between these branches are numerous and strong at every step. Drawing has a very intimate and important relation to the objects described in history, natural science, arithmetic, and geography; while the songs learned should express in those poetic and rhythmic forms which appeal so strongly to the feelings, many of the noblest ideas suggested by travel, scenery, history, and the experiences ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... was lavish with her interest in all he said, and in her quick, responsive, and poetic play of fancy—ardent and glowing—glad to give out from her soul its best to this man who had befriended her father in their utmost need and who had saved her own and her mother's life. She knew always when a cloud ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... when I see the prairie-floor waving with its harvest to be, and hear the clack and stutter of the tractor breaking sod on the outer quarter and leaving behind it the serried furrows of umber, I feel there is something primal and poetic in the picture, something ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... early training been received at Rome, where pedant was pitted against pedant, where every teacher was forced by rivalry into a partizan attitude, and all were compelled by material demands to provide a "practical education," even Vergil's poetic spirit might ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... meanwhile, has he his fair share of that mysterious chemical agent without which health is impossible, the want of which betrays itself at once in the dull eye, the sallow cheek—namely, light. Believe me, it is no mere poetic metaphor which connects in Scripture, Light with Life. It is the expression of a deep law, one which holds as true in the physical as in the spiritual world; a case in which (as perhaps in all cases) the laws of the visible world are the counterparts of those of the invisible world, and Earth ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of the beautiful day, which he knew was glowing without, Bertin sought a poetic subject. He felt somewhat dreamy, however, after his breakfast and his cigarette; he pondered awhile, gazing into space, in fancy sketching rapidly against the blue sky the figures of graceful women in the Bois or on the sidewalk of a street, lovers by the water—all ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... is eloquence carried to its height, whether in verse or in prose, that constitutes for the Frenchman sublimity. The difference is a difference of blood. English blood is Teutonic in base, and the imagination of the Teuton is poetic. French blood, in base, is Celtic; and the imagination of ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... of those moments when gray glimpses of the old cathedral, or a warm breath of perfumed air from the garden, or some slight sound, such as the note of a night bird breaking the silence, fired a train of deep emotion, and set his whole poetic nature quivering, to the unspeakable joy of it; joy sanctified by reverence, and enlarged beyond ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Italy. The gayest of the finest ladies and gentlemen the world ever saw, the illustrissimi of that polite age, united with monks, priests, cardinals, and scientific thinkers in establishing the Arcadia; and even popes and kings were proud to enlist in the crusade for the true poetic faith. In all the chief cities Arcadian colonies were formed, "dependent upon the Roman Arcadia, as upon the supreme Arch-Flock", and in three years the Academy numbered thirteen hundred members, every one of whom had first been obliged ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... heightened by that peachy bloom peculiar to brunette's, instead only a warm, bright and ruddy hue, which some might consider as approaching the rustic. Her eyes, as they sparkle with delight at the pretty array of bright colors, might not be admired as of the poetic or ideal type, but in their depths lurks a keen and significant expression of the peculiarly intelligent and earnest appeal that seldom speaks in vain. The neat and cosy parlor, with its many articles of female handiwork, speak for the taste and talent ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... exercise. My books, all of which you are expecting, I have begun, but I cannot finish them for some days yet. The speeches for Scaurus and Plancius which you clamour for I have finished. The poem to Caesar, which I had begun, I have cut short. I will write what you ask me for, since your poetic springs are running dry, as soon as ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... woods. In its van were two flags borne side by side, one green, the other red. Both were surrounded by a troop in bright armor. No need for him to ask to whom they belonged. They told him of Mecca and Mahomet—on the red, he doubted not seeing the old Ottomanic symbols, in their meaning poetic, in their simplicity beautiful as any ever appropriated for martial purposes. The riders were Turks. But why the green flag? Where it went somebody more than the chief of a sanjak, more than the governor of a castle, or even a province, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... adhered to from the proclamation of the Republic, showed him how to be disloyal and untrue. The tragedy is one which is bound to be deeply studied throughout the whole world when the facts are properly known and there is time to think about them, and if there is anything to-day left to poetic justice the West will know to whom to ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... obsolete in the prose language, and the use of special compounds and phrases, such as hildendre (war-adder) for 'arrow,' gold-gifa (gold-giver) for 'king,' ... goldwine gumena (goldfriend of men, distributor of gold to men) for 'king,'" etc.—Sw. Other poetic words ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... attained to the likeness of Christ. What, then, was John the Baptist like? What picture of him and his character can we form to ourselves in our own imaginations? for that is all we have to picture him by—helped— always remember that—by the Holy Spirit of God, who helps the imagination, the poetic and dramatic faculty of men; just as much as He helps the logical and argumentative faculty to see things and men as they really are, by the spirit of love, which also is the spirit of ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... garret, fresh interests awaited him. Sometimes, he tells us in the "Peau de Chagrin," he would "study the mosses, with their colours revived by showers, or transformed by the sun into a brown velvet that fitfully caught the light. Such things as these formed my recreations: the passing poetic moods of daylight, the melancholy mists, sudden gleams of sunlight, the silence and the magic of night, the mysteries of dawn, the smoke-wreaths from each chimney; every chance event, in fact, in my curious world became familiar ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... awaits the one who is a good self-advertiser and can find the use of the poetic daisies, goldenrod, and thistle, the all-pervading "pusley," and such ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... Canto II forms a good example of the latter difficulty, and is omitted in the German and French versions to which I have had access. The translation of foreign verse is comparatively easy so long as it is confined to conventional poetic subjects, but when it embraces abrupt scraps of conversation and the description of local customs it becomes a much more arduous affair. I think I may say that I have adhered closely to the ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... party who could speak and understand the English language. As Beverly sat and watched his virile, mocking face, and studied his graceful movements, she found herself wondering how an ignorant, homeless wanderer in the hills could be so poetic and so cultured as this ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the course of it, you will arrive at the conception of the right heroical woman for you to worship: and if you prove to be of some spiritual stature, you may reach to an ideal of the heroical feminine type for the worship of mankind, an image as yet in poetic outline only, on our ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... force, had trained his sight. The mixture of astuteness with his scruple, of egoistic policy with his stiffness for doctrine, gave him an advantage over Danton, that made his life worth exactly three months' more purchase than Danton's. It has been said that Spinozism or Transcendentalism in poetic production becomes Machiavellism in reflection: for the same reasons we may always expect sentimentalism in theory to become under the pressure of action a very self-protecting guile. Robespierre's mind was not rich nor flexible enough for true statesmanship, and it is ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... poetic justice is observed, virtue is rewarded; and if the mirror is held up to Nature, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... prepared for a burst of description. But the present describer is a matter-of-fact personage; and though he makes no attempt at poetic fame, has the faculty of telling what he saw, with very sufficient distinctness. "I never experienced more disappointment," is his phrase, "than in my first view of the Ottoman capital. I was bold enough at once to come to the conclusion, that what I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... struggle at the church door. His casque, which was captured in the skirmish that there took place, is yet to be seen in the church, and the fame of this redoubtable attempt, which was long held in remembrance through the country side, excited the poetic genius of a rhymer of the day to embody it in a ballad, entitled "Dick and the Devil," which is now rare and difficult ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... march of modern society to the dead level of "Americanism." It need not be said that the story is told with all M. Renan's consummate charm of storytelling. All that it wants is depth of real feeling and seriousness—some sense of the greatness of what he has had to give up, not merely of its poetic beauty and tender associations. It hardly seems to occur to him that something more than his easy cheerfulness and his vivid historical imagination is wanted to solve for him the problems of the world, and that his gradual transition from the Catholicism ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... have tried, while carefully preserving the main outline of each story, to treat it exactly as the ancient bard treated his own material, or as Tennyson treated the stories of the MORT D'ARTHUR, that is to say, to present it as a fresh work of poetic imagination. In some cases, as in the story of the Children of Lir, or that of mac Datho's Boar, or the enchanting tale of King Iubdan and King Fergus, I have done little more than retell the bardic legend with merely a little compression; ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... Highness the Princess Priscilla of Lothen-Kunitz was up to the age of twenty-one a most promising young lady. She was not only poetic in appearance beyond the habit of princesses but she was also of graceful and appropriate behaviour. She did what she was told; or, more valuable, she did what was expected of her without being told. Her father, in his youth and middle age a fiery ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... town would lie desolate, a hollow shell in the dust, without her. Miss Pratt would be gone—gone utterly—gone away on the TRAIN! But to-night was just beginning, and to-night he would dance with her; he would dance and dance with her—he would dance and dance like mad! He and she, poetic and fated pair, would dance on and on! They would be intoxicated by the lights—the lights, the flowers, and the music. Nay, the flowers might droop, the lights might go out, the music cease and dawn come—she and he ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... The "Poetic Edda," a collection of deliberate experiments in poetry and not of casual popular ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... leading characters of a class too long unheeded by the pens of writers who seek novelty as their chief object. Perhaps this forgetfulness is only prudence in these days when the people are heirs of all the sycophants of royalty. We make criminals poetic, we commiserate the hangman, we have all but deified the proletary. Sects have risen, and cried by every pen, "Arise, working-men!" just as formerly they cried, "Arise!" to the "tiers etat." None of these ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... sick. He was country-born himself, and, being no mere dreamer of dreams, realised that it was as well that country people should not flinch at the less poetic side of their lives, but this callousness struck him as horrible in a young child like Phoebe. Yet as he saw Ishmael wince he regretted the very sensibility in the boy, the lack of which had shocked ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... house is the manse of the parish of Frith and Stennis; and the poet was the son of the Rev. John Malcolm, its minister. Here, when yet a mere lad, dreaming, in the quiet obscurity of an Orkney parish, far removed from the seat of war and the literary circles, of poetic celebrity and military renown, he addressed a letter to the Duke of Kent, the father of our Sovereign Lady the reigning Monarch, expressing an ardent wish to obtain a commission in the army then engaged in the Peninsula. The letter was such as to excite the interest of his ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... of them appeared just before Caesar Augustus was born, and was most poetic and touching and romantic in its feelings and aspects. It was a dream. It was dreamed by Caesar Augustus's mother, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... assist. For the strife is in this instance between the Chela's will and his carnal nature, and Karma forbids that any angel or Guru should interfere until the result is known. With the vividness of poetic fancy Bulwer Lytton has idealized it for us in his "Zanoni," a work which will ever be prized by the occultist while in his "Strange Story" he has with equal power shown the black side of occult research and its deadly perils. Chelaship was defined, the other ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... than I that the words, "The spell thou hast cast upon me lasts forever," are not a mere poetic fancy, but bitter reality. Besides love and desire, I have for her an immense liking, the tenderness of affection, and am drawn to her with the irresistible force of the magnet to iron. And it cannot be otherwise, for she is still the same Aniela, and is not changed in the least. ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... The prophet's style was quaint and picturesque when he compared the great king to a sheep-stealer; but the object was not to insult the king, it was to make him think, to rouse him; to let him see by the light of a poetic fancy the gulf to which he was descending, that he might thereafter love mercy, walk humbly, and, controlling his passions, keep untarnished the lustre of the Crown. David let other men's wives alone after that flight of Nathan's ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... height of Auchcairnie, to watch and weary for the long-expected carrier's cart wending its slow way from the south and, when the parcel reached his hand, with eager, trembling fingers, opening it up, to have all the joy of virgin authorship awakened in his soul. In these days a poetic production from the country seemed a phenomenon—as great, to use an expression of De Quincey's, as if "a dragoon horse had struck up 'Rule Britannia,'" and no doubt, many an eyebrow in Auld Reekie rose ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... companions at school. He tried to act as a Christian and think only pure thoughts about women. The talk, however, was always of girls and of being in love. His mind was often engrossed with amatory ideas of a poetic, sensuous nature, his sexual experiences having a firm hold on his imagination, while they gave him gratifying assurance of actual knowledge concerning things merely imagined by most ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of my terror at my own results when I found myself betrayed into writing down some contradictions from the Bible. With that poetic dreaming which is one of the charms of Catholicism, whether English or Roman, I threw myself back into the time of the first century as the "Holy Week" of 1866 approached. In order to facilitate the realisation of those last sacred days of God incarnate ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... included what she believes to be a just proportion of poetry. The poems have been chosen with a view to the fact that they are varied in form and sentiment; and that they exhibit in no small degree the tendencies of modern poetic thought, with its love of ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... the drum being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack, gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... with a violent effort, threw off that sudden weakness. From those who serve art devotedly there radiates a kind of glamour. She left Monsieur Harmost that afternoon, infected by his passion for music. Poetic justice—on which all homeopathy is founded—was at work to try and cure her life by a dose of what had spoiled it. To music, she now gave all the hours she could spare. She went to him twice a week, determining to get on, but uneasy at the expense, for monetary conditions were ever more embarrassed. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... syllables? How many syllables are there in the second foot in the first line? How many other feet are there containing the same number of syllables? Examine the feet that contain three syllables. On which syllable is the accent placed when there are three syllables in the foot? A poetic foot of three syllables which bears the accent on the third syllable is called an anapestic foot. The meter of this poem, then is anapestic tetrameter, varied by an added syllable in most of the odd-numbered lines and by an iambic foot at the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Flowery End was the poetic name of the mean little row of red-brick houses inhabited exclusively by Mrs. Tufton and her colleagues at the mills. To get to it you turn off the High Street by the Post Office, turn to the right down Avonmore Avenue, and then to the left. There you find Flowery End, and, fifty yards further ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... I sketched for the first time the complete myth of the "Nibelungen", such as it henceforth belongs to me as my poetic property. My next attempt at dramatizing the chief catastrophe of that great action for our theatre was "Siegfried's Death". After much wavering I was at last, in the autumn of 1850, on the point of sketching the musical execution of this drama, when again the obvious impossibility of ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... used in mathematics do not constitute the science but merely represent to the senses the invisible ideas of the principle of mathematics. The visible does not constitute the invisible, but may carry its messages as we learn to read its poetic and mystic pages. The visible speaks to the mortal nature, but the invisible beyond and above, speaks to the ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... The other, the eagerness and ardour with which he was attached to the cause of human happiness and improvement; and the fervent eloquence with which he discussed such subjects. His conversation was marked by its happy abundance, and the beautiful language in which he clothed his poetic ideas and philosophical notions. To defecate life of its misery and its evil was the ruling passion of his soul; he dedicated to it every power of his mind, every pulsation of his heart. He looked on political freedom as the direct agent to effect the happiness ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... poetic affection is still preserved by a little girl who is now grown up, and has little girls of her own. It was attached to a Christmas-gift—a locket containing a scrap of blue-gray wool. ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... forget you!" he answered, gazing into the dark eyes. "Your remembrance made powerless that lotus flower, Europe, which steeps out of the memory of many of my countrymen the hopes and wrongs of our land. It seemed as if the spirit, the poetic incarnation of my country was you, frank and lovely daughter of the Philippines! My love for you and that for her fused ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... fit to be a judge, he would not have fallen. That he did fall is proof enough that he was not fit. God did not intend it. My father's aspirations were not the call of a stern vocation, they were mere poetic ambition. If he had ever by great ill-fortune lived to be made Deemster, he would have found himself out, and the island would have found him out, and you yourself would have found him out, and all the world would have ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... no means equally poetic with the Gaelic, regarded as a language, and ill-serves to represent her utterance. Much that seems natural in the one language, seems forced and unreal amidst the less imaginative forms of the other. I will nevertheless attempt in English what ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... principle of creative work in his statement that the purpose of art is to fulfil the incomplete designs of nature—that is, aid nature by using her speech, yet telling her story the way she ought to have told it but did not. This is his great doctrine of "poetic justice." ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... exterior is to-day as perfect as it could have been two centuries ago; and the dignity and sovereign chastity of its marble surfaces—spoiled by no misplaced ornamentation, and unsullied by vandal—make of this poetic shrine an offering to love surpassed in beauty by nothing in all the world ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... Don't exaggerate. Poetic licenses are not valid in business prose. The American people don't want to be humbugged and the merchant who figures upon too many fools, finds himself looking into a mirror, usually about a half hour after the sheriff has come ...
— The Clock that Had no Hands - And Nineteen Other Essays About Advertising • Herbert Kaufman
... aspects of his school days in his oft cited story of 'William Wilson'. Probably there is the usual amount of poetic exaggeration in these reminiscences, but they are almost the only record we have of that portion of his career and, therefore, apart from their literary merits, are on that account deeply interesting. The ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... 'furnishes the poetic gospel I preach. I always considered him the boss poet. Here's ...
— Options • O. Henry
... voice sank, and the words Grant, Lincoln, Sherman, "furlough," "mustered out," ring like bells, deep-toned and vibrant. I shared dimly in every emotional utterance of the neighbors who came to call and a large part of what I am is due to the impressions of these deeply passionate and poetic years. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... with less artificial, cadavre, fastidious touch; but Mr. Shorthouse, speaking strictly, as to temper and tempo is a trifle more rugged; and never a shadow of suspense suffered he to stir a hand's breadth, that is, rest 'twixt poetic certainty and doubt, lest the ultimate end should all-attainable be or not. For freedom from this, and other literary ambiguity, yet never manifesting anxiety of freeing himself in prose from its insidious and arbitrary restraint, I attribute his tragical, ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... read an ethical purpose into descriptive or dramatic touches which are merely descriptive or dramatic. But he has for his author not only that intense sympathy which is the best basis for criticism, but a real justness of poetic taste which the learned and painstaking German commentator frequently wants. That he was a sound and accurate scholar in that somewhat narrow sense of the word which denotes a grammatical and literary mastery of Greek and Latin, goes without saying. Men of his generation were more apt to ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... anything; and if one's ancestors count, then an old Dutch Knickerbocker," he returned, with a soft, amused laugh. "But I believe I cannot boast of any English descent, such as the son of a hundred earls. That doesn't sound as poetic as the daughter of a ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... was not in the right when he asserted that he had seen the miraculous issue of phantoms. I confess that when I read it first I smiled with the rest, for his description of the process was not very poetic. He declared that he saw a white vapor steam from the side of the psychic, like vapor from a kettle, forming a little cloud, and from this nebulous mass various phantasms appeared, ranging from a little child to a full-grown man. It is curious how ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... which pervades it, and proves that the author was not merely a churchman in profession, but a Christian at heart. Its defects of rude rhythm, irregular constructions, and obsolete phraseology, are those of its age; but its beauties, its unflagging interest, and its fine poetic spirit, are characteristic ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... a breakfast set for our nest in your odd moments, and I'll buy it from you when my ship comes home. Oh! and we are both going to be very successful, are we not, darling? and we won't have any trouble at all in supporting our pet Daisy and her kitty-cat. You know, Primrose, my gifts lie in the poetic and novelistic line. I have really thought of a glowing plot for a story since I came to London, and Mr. Dove is to be the ruffian of the piece. I'll introduce Mrs. Dredge and poor Miss Slowcum too, and, of course, you'll ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... story is that of the Cenci. The beautiful Beatrice Cenci—celebrated in the painting of Guido, the sixteenth century romance of Guerrazi, and the poetic tragedy of Shelley, not to mention numerous succeeding works inspired by her hapless fate—will always remain a shadowy figure and one of ...
— Quotes and Images From "Celebrated Crimes" • Alexander Dumas, Pere
... delivering himself of some poetic rapture, addressed, as it seemed, to the mud banks of the Essex shore, and feigned to perceive neither Ludar nor me till he came ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes. This power which only tears men's bodies to pieces has never been so horribly abused as the intellectual power, the imaginative power, the poetic, religious power that can enslave men's souls. As a teacher of Greek I gave the intellectual man weapons against the common man. I now want to give the common man weapons against the intellectual man. ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... intelligent edility of Hyeres, he has been interred, below this frugal stone, in the garden which he honoured for so long with his poetic presence.) ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... plays, and other social and semi-social functions, was generally silent and deserted earlier in the day; and the quiet and the view over Paradise river from the west windows of the sanctum appealed to the poetic soul of the chief editor. Dorothy, who was a very practical person herself, had a vast admiration for Frances' dreamy, imaginative temperament, and enjoyed her work as business manager of the "Argus" chiefly because it brought her into close contact with Frances; while ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... of his theme, and by the comprehensive manner in which he has treated it, Milton has been enabled by his poetic genius to give to the world in his 'Paradise Lost' a poem which, for sublimity of thought, loftiness of imagination, and beauty of expression in metrical verse, is unsurpassed in ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... repairing the monument in October, 1835, the Rev. George Attwood, curate of Framlingham, discovered the remains of the Earl lying embedded in clay, directly under his figure on his tomb. It is difficult now to find what high treason the chivalrous and poetic and gallant Earl had been guilty of; but at that time our eighth Henry ruled the land, and if he wished anyone out of the way, he had not far to go for witnesses or judge or jury ready to do his wicked and wanton will. To the shame of England be it said, the ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... Macbeth; he gives rein to his poetic imagination, and breaks out in an exquisite lyric, a lyric which has hardly any closer relation to the circumstances than ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... appearance, though now and then some bay with its purple hills running to the blue sea, its surrounding mesas and canons blooming in semi-tropical luxuriance, some conjunction of shore and mountain, some golden color, some white light and sharply defined shadows, some refinement of lines, some poetic tints in violet and ashy ranges, some ultramarine in the sea, or delicate blue in the sky, will remind the traveller of more than one place of beauty in Southern Italy and Sicily. It is a Mediterranean ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... strange, sweet, playful, rustic creatures, . . . . linked so prettily, without monstrosity, to the lower tribes. . . . . Their character has never, that I know of, been wrought out in literature; and something quite good, funny, and philosophical, as well as poetic, might very likely be educed from them. . . . . The faun is a natural and delightful link betwixt human and brute life, with something ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spirited, lively, glowing, sparkling, racy, bold, slashing; pungent, piquant, full of point, pointed, pithy, antithetical; sententious. lofty, elevated, sublime; eloquent; vehement, petulant, impassioned; poetic. Adv. in glowing terms, in good set terms, in no measured terms. Phr. "thoughts that breath and words that ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... exalts us through the best of us, by telling us something new yet not strange, something that we recognise, something that we too have known, or surmised, but had never the delivering speech to tell. 'There is a pleasure in poetic pains,' says Wordsworth: but, Gentlemen, if you have never felt the travail, yet you have still to understand the ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Italian themes bear testimony to the profound influence of Italy upon him. In his teens, he came under the influence of Pope and Byron, and wrote verses after their styles. Then Shelley came by accident in his way, and became to the boy the model of poetic excellence. ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... the red shirt might have remained in poetic uncertainty had it not been mentioned a few years ago in a volume of reminiscences published by an English naval officer. The men employed in the Saladeros or great slaughtering and salting establishments for ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... the saloon of Colonel Boozy, labeled the Karl Augustus Bockerheisen Club. As Mr. Bockerheisen looked out and saw Colonel Boozy's association, and realized that whereas Boozy was planting and McCafferty was watering, yet he was to gather the increase, a High German smile would come upon his poetic countenance, and he would bite his finger-nails rapturously. And, on the other hand, as Colonel Boozy heard the drums and fifes of the Bockerheisen Club, and saw its transparency glowing in the street, he would summon all his friends to the bar to take a drink ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... of boundless admiration both of the widow (that most beautiful woman, as he said) and of her daughter, who, in the Captain's eyes, was a still greater paragon. If the pale widow, whom Captain Richard, in his poetic rapture compared to a Niobe in tears—to a Sigismunda—to a weeping Belvidera, was an object the most lovely and pathetic which his eyes had ever beheld, or for which his heart had melted, even her ripened perfections and beauty were as nothing compared to the promise of that extreme loveliness ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... formal avenues and marshy country which we passed. When we stopped to change horses, I closed my eyes upon the whole scene, and was transported immediately to some Grecian solitude, where Theocritus and his shepherds were filling the air with melody. To one so far gone in poetic antiquity, Ghent is not the most likely place to recall his attention; and I know nothing more about it, than that it is a large, ill-paved, dismal-looking city, with a decent proportion of convents and ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... matter of fact, she had glanced down the coulee to its wide-open mouth, and had thrilled briefly at the wordless beauty of the green spread of the plain and the hazy blue sweep of the mountains, and had come suddenly into the poetic mood. She had even caught a phrase,—"The lazy line of the watchful hills," it was,—and she was trying to fit it into a verse, and to find something beside "rills" ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... the World imagine you are therefore exempt from the tenderness of Love, it rather seems you were on purpose form'd for that Soft Entertainment, such an Agreement there is between the Harmony of your Soul and your Person, and sure the Muses who have so divinely inspir'd you with Poetic Fires, have furnisht you with that Necessary Material (Love) to maintain it, and to make it burn with the more ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... the pictures on which they can no longer work, and pass judgement on them, rapt by the subject whose most recondite meaning then flashes on the inner eye of genius. He who has never stood pensive by a friend's side in such an hour of poetic dreaming can hardly understand its inexpressible soothingness. Favored by the clear-obscure, the material skill employed by art to produce illusion entirely disappears. If the work is a picture, the figures represented seem to speak and walk; the shade is shadow, the light is ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... baby; he'd be bound to name it something animal, vegetable, or mineral. Ain't it the truth? 'Little flower with bones and a voice!' What do you know about that? That's a scientist trying to be poetic. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... We have a poetic literature of marvelous richness. Only the Germans can lay claim to a lyric wealth as great as ours. The language we inherit is an extraordinarily rich one. A German authority credits it with a vocabulary three times as large as that of France, the poorest, ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... with tears, and throwing her arms around him. "Now see!" began she consolingly, "you should not distress yourself when your father speaks in a somewhat one-sided manner. You know perfectly well how infinitely good and just he is, and that if he be only once convinced of the genuineness of your poetic talent, he will be quite contented. He is only now afraid of your stopping short in mediocrity. He would be pleased and delighted if you obtained honour ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... the widespread familiarity of the Ode, we here quote certain passages from it, we do so because, like many similar things, it has fallen a victim to the intellectualism of our time in being regarded merely as a piece of poetic fantasy. We shall take the poet's words as literally as he himself ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... All take their name from the Prophets whose messages they bear. They are written largely in the poetic style and are usually divided into two divisions. (1) The major prophets which include Isaiah. Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel and Daniel. (2) The minor prophets, including the other twelve. This division is based on the bulk of material ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... and somewhat asthmatic. He was regarded in the neighbourhood as a very religious man, but was more respected than liked, because his forte was rebuke. It was from deference to him that the carpenter had assumed a mental position generating a poetic mood and utterance quite unusual with him, for he was a jolly, careless kind ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... attracted the attention of Tretherick. Several poems descriptive of the effects of California scenery upon a too sensitive soul, and of the vague yearnings for the infinite, which an enforced study of the heartlessness of California society produced in the poetic breast, impressed Mr. Tretherick, who was then driving a six-mule freight-wagon between Knight's Ferry and Stockton, to seek out the unknown poetess. Mr. Tretherick was himself dimly conscious of a certain hidden sentiment in his own nature; and it is possible that some reflections on the ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... perhaps venture to say, with an apology for recurring to a subject dealt with in another book, that this poetic visit to Edinburgh reminds me of the visit of another poet in every way very different from Burns to another city which cannot be supposed to resemble Edinburgh except in the wonderful charm and attraction for devotees which ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Eagle. I shall be very well pleased to see the new MS. of Omar. I shall one day (if I live) print the 'Birds,' and a strange experiment on old Calderon's two great Plays; and then shut up Shop in the Poetic Line. Adieu: Give my love to the Lady: and believe me yours very ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... rejoice in this creation, this poetic idyl, which arose out of the splendor of palaces like a violet in the sand, and among the variegated tropical flowers which adorn the table of a king. Closely adjoining each other were little houses like those in which peasants live, the peasant women being the proud ladies of the royal court. ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... an Oriental in reality, the brain of this wonderful child was moulded. She was pure Hindu, full of the typical qualities of her race and blood, and, as the present volume shows us for the first time, preserving to the last her appreciation of the poetic side of her ancient religion, though faith itself in Vishnu and Siva had been cast aside with childish things and been replaced by a purer faith. Her mother fed her imagination with the old songs and legends of their people, stories which it was the last labour of her ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... xxv.). Books i.-xx. and xxx. were in hexameters; xxii. in elegiacs; xxvi.-xxvii. in trochaic septenarii; and the next two in trochaic septenarii, iambic senarii, and hexameters. Books xxvi.-xxix. were published first, then Book xxx. In Book xxvi. Lucilius states his views of life, his poetic principles, what led him to write satire, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... sigh, Ethel saw Norman rise, and step forward. He began, with eyes fixed on the ground, and in a low modest tone, to speak of the islands that Harry had visited; but gradually the poetic nature, inherent in him, gained the mastery; and though his language was strikingly simple, in contrast with Dr. Spencer's ornate periods, and free from all trace of "the lamp," it rose in beauty and fervour at every sentence. The feelings that had decided his lot ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge |
