"Poetically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... method, which, as a rule, is Scott's, and, scientifically, the method is not defensible. Thus, having three ballads of rescues, in similar circumstances, with a river to ford, Scott confessedly places that incident where he thinks it most "poetically appropriate"; and in all probability, by a single touch, he gives poetry in place of rough humour. Of all this Motherwell ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... lover adores not only the girl herself but everything associated with her. This phase of love is poetically delineated in Goethe's Werther: ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... and Mr. Leaf, the Mycenaeans wore chitons and called them chitons. They also used bronze-plated shields, though of this we have no evidence. Taking the bronze-plated (?) shield to stand poetically for the chiton, the poet spoke of "the bronze-chitoned Achaeans" But, if we follow Mr. Myres, the Mycenaeans also applied the word thorex to body clothing at large, in place of the word chiton; and when a warrior was transfixed by a spear, they ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... adroitly drops the innocent nose, of which one word seems to have lost its original signification, and the other offends now by its familiarity. The dappled face is a term more picturesque, more appropriate, and more poetically expressed. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... poetically for me,' said Julia, smiling. 'If you will come down to my level for a little while, and will talk to me rationally, I will tell you my history. I will tell it you as a lesson for yourself, which I think will ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... great remodeller of myths, Stesichorus (122-201) who first in his "Destruction of Ilion" brought Aeneas to the land of the west, that he might poetically enrich the world of fable in the country of his birth and of his adoption, Sicily and Lower Italy, by the contrast of the Trojan heroes with the Hellenic. With him originated the poetical outlines of this fable as thenceforward fixed, especially the group of the hero and his ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... he poetically intimated the pleasing ceremony which had awaked him to the duties of the day. I think it needless to subjoin that the Doctor's cold did not get better as long as we remained in the neighbourhood, and that, had it not been for the daily increasing ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... the midst of a group of women, I shone. As at the university, when I used to visit whole sorority chapters at once, and, with from five to ten girls seated about me in the parlour, talk brilliantly and easily and poetically with all of them. Left alone with any one, my mouth dried like sand, my tongue clove to my palate, I shook all ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... have thought of Maria speaking poetically? But her words did indeed seem to be the truth. In spite of the embarrassment of her situation and the flutter of her feelings, she was in a state of composure unexampled. Albinia had just gratified her greatly by a few words on Captain Pringle's ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... significance till the Character itself is known and seen; 'till the Author's View of the World (Weltansicht), and how he actively and passively came by such view, are clear: in short till a Biography of him has been philosophico-poetically written, and philosophico-poetically read.' 'Nay,' adds he, 'were the speculative scientific Truth even known, you still, in this inquiring age, ask yourself, Whence came it, and Why, and How?—and rest not, till, if no better may be, Fancy have shaped-out an answer; and either ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Grecian Artists would have represented mythologically in Painting by the GRACES crowning VENUS. We find how much LELY has availed himself in his shadowy Creations of transcribing from Life this adventitious Charm into all his Portraits. I mean, when he stole upon his animated Canvas, as POPE poetically expresses it, ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... treatises, which are likely to remain among the classics of musical literature. The most important is his "Opera and Drama," written in 1851. This is a full discussion, in singularly vigorous and clear language, of the entire nature of opera as poetically conceived and as practically carried out by the previous masters, and as proposed to be carried out by Wagner himself. Many of Wagner's writings have now been translated into English. His opera texts are highly esteemed by his admirers, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... what has become most obvious to me as a result of it all? First, that I idolize you, and that it is a good thing that I do so. We two are one, and only in that way does a human being become one and a complete entity, that is, by regarding and poetically conceiving himself as the centre of everything and the spirit of the world. But why poetically conceive, since we find the germ of everything in ourselves, and yet remain forever ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of the press, as you poetically call it: but, between ourselves, confess it,—Do not the Tory writers beat your Whigs hollow? You talk about magazines. ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... common experiences of life. Both of them were really simple, brought up in old-fashioned simple ways, easily touched, responsive to all that high spiritual education which flows from the familiar incidents of the human story, approached poetically and passionately. As the young husband sat in the quiet of his wife's room, the occasional restless movements of the small brown head against her breast causing the only sound perceptible in the country silence, he felt all the deep familiar currents ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his years; that is, next to his sons, Bob and John, though he knew very well of that ploughed-ground appearance near the corners of her once handsome eyes, and that the little depression in her right cheek was not the lingering dimple it was poetically assumed to be, but a result of the abstraction of some worn-out nether millstones within the cheek by Rootle, the Budmouth man, who lived by such practices on the heads of the elderly. But what of that, when he had lost two to each one of hers, ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... their real level, maintains that these great types of his are drawn from the outside, and not made actually to live. "His Bailie Jarvies, Dinmonts, Dalgettys (for their name is legion), do look and talk like what they give themselves out for; they are, if not created and made poetically alive, yet deceptively enacted as a good player might do them. What more is wanted, then? For the reader lying on a sofa, nothing more; yet for another sort of reader much. It were a long chapter to unfold the difference in drawing a character between a Scott and ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... found the right field in which to do justice to her powers. The dry technique in music was a stumbling-block of which she was impatient. History and literature she enjoyed in whatever they offered that was romantic, heroic, or poetically suggestive. In her Nohant surroundings there was nothing to check, and much to stimulate, this dominant, imaginative faculty. Her youthful attempts at original composition she quickly discarded in disgust; but it seemed ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... took orders, married, and settled down as a country parson. In 1757 he published his most ambitious work, "The Fleece," a poem in blank verse and in four books, descriptive of English wool-growing. "The subject of 'The Fleece,' sir," pronounced Johnson, "cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and druggets?" Didactic poetry, in truth, leads too often to ludicrous descents. Such precepts as "beware the rot," "enclose, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of the plantations that soften their rugged precipices, by festooning them to the very brink. Then there are wild dells running back in the wooded parts of the hill, and walks seem to be made through them for the convenience of maids who love the moon—or more probably, and more poetically too, for the refreshment of the toiling citizens of the smoky town, who wander about among these sylvan recesses, with their wives and families, and enjoy the wondrous beauty of the landscape, without having consulted Burke or Adam Smith ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... back his head and laughed a laugh as stinging as a whip-lash. "Ashes of roses! So? It is well named. For my dear wife it is poetically fit, is it not so? For see, her roses are but withered ashes, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... might have made debts to fifty times the sum you mention; you might have robbed me of my mother's coronet and ring; and Nature might have still so far prevailed that I could have forgiven you at last. But, madam, you have taken the Rajah's Diamond - the Eye of Light, as the Orientals poetically termed it - the Pride of Kashgar! You have taken from me the Rajah's Diamond," he cried, raising his hands, "and all, madam, all is at ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... proportion to merit, we do not find. No one who thinks of Desdemona and Cordelia; or who remembers that one end awaits Richard III. and Brutus, Macbeth and Hamlet; or who asks himself which suffered most, Othello or Iago; will ever accuse Shakespeare of representing the ultimate power as 'poetically' just. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... garden paths, where she paced for two hours back and forth among the aromatic perfumes of the great yellow June lilies. There might have been a bit of poetry in it under other circumstances, but Keturah was not poetically inclined on that occasion. The events of the night had so roused her soul within her, that exercise unto exhaustion was her sole remaining hope ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... exemplary member of the Dutch Reformed Church, or, as Arthur gayly called her to her face, a Dutch Deformed Woman, was too simple and sincere in her religious faith to tolerate with equanimity the thought that any one of the name of Merlin should be domiciled in the House of Sin, as she poetically ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... state, and previous to the discipline of education, the rational element is "asleep." "Life is more of a dream than a reality." Men are utterly the slaves of sense, the sport of phantoms and illusions. We now resemble those "captives chained in a subterraneous cave," so poetically described in the seventh book of the "Republic;" their backs are turned to the light, and consequently they see but the shadows of the objects which pass behind them, and they "attribute to these shadows ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... all was, Milly thought, as they threaded their way homewards through the slovenly, garish Chicago streets, mindful of naught but themselves and their Secret. How could anything so poetically wonderful happen in workaday Chicago? And Milly thought to herself how could any woman consider for a moment sacrificing THIS—"the real, right ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... about this."—[H.] "What has the 'doubt' to do with the poem? it is, at least, poetically true. Why apply everything to that absurd woman? I have no reference to living characters."—[B.].—[Revise.] Medwin (Conversations, 1824, p. 54) attributes the "breaking open my writing-desk" to Mrs. Charlment (i.e. Mrs. Clermont) the original of "A Sketch," ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... why not teach us to help what the laws cannot help?—Why teach us to hate a Nero or an Appius, and not an underselling oppressor of workmen and betrayer of women and children? Why to love a Ladie in bower, and not a wife's fireside? Why paint or poetically depict the horrible race of Ogres and Giants, and not show Giant Despair dressed in that modern habit he walks the streets in? Why teach men what were great and good deeds in the old time, neglecting to show them any good ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... Lion of Scotland on Alnwick Castle, and the more famous affair still, the struggle between Percy and Douglas known as the battle of Otterburn, which was fought in "Chevy Chase" (Cheviot Forest). More important poetically than politically, it stands out more vividly in the records of the time than many other conflicts of larger import. The personal element in the fight, the deeds of gallantry recorded, the sounding roll ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... hang upon the thong about your neck until you choke to death," finished Neil. "That's the 'Straight Death.' If the end doesn't come by morning the sun will finish the job. It will dry out the wet rawhide until it grips your throat like a hand. Poetically we call it the hand of ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... days at Count Moltke's, at Glorup; strolling players were acting some of my dramatic works at one of the nearest provincial towns. I did not see them; country life firmly withheld me. There is something in the late autumn poetically beautiful; when the leaf is fallen from the tree, and the sun shines still upon the green grass, and the bird twitters, one may often fancy that it is a spring-day; thus certainly also has the old man moments in his autumn in which his heart dreams ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... of Thomson's friends was to breed him a minister. He lived at Edinburgh, at a school, without distinction or expectation, till at the usual time he performed a probationary exercise by explaining a psalm. His diction was so poetically splendid, that Mr. Hamilton, the professor of divinity, reproved him for speaking language unintelligible to a popular audience; and he censured one of his expressions as indecent, if not profane. This rebuke is reported to have repressed his thoughts of an ecclesiastical ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... half desperately, half reluctantly. "Dolly is the moon I am crying for,—or rather, as I might put it more poetically, 'the bright particular star.' What a good little thing you are to guess at it ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... familiar German "du"; for him she was still his little friend. But to her the moment was too poignant for speech. The terrible passages in the last writings of this greatest of autobiographers, which she had hoped poetically colored, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... All this brightness has its attendant shadow, and deep from the childish heart comes that true note of pathos, the ever memorable toast of Tiny Tim, "God bless Us, Every One!" "The Cricket on the Hearth" strikes a different note. Charmingly, poetically, the sweet chirping of the little cricket is associated with human feelings and actions, and at the crisis of the story decides the fate and fortune of the carrier and ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... definition "With broad flat nails." Even this definition is just as faulty, as it does not exclude many species of the monkey. Again it was thought that man was the only being who laughs. Says Addison, poetically: "Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above and below him are serious." But scientists refuse to accept this distinction as ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... CITY OF JERUSALEM.—The earliest name of Jerusalem appears to have been Jebus, or poetically, Salem, and its king in Abraham's time was Melchizedek. When the Hebrews took possession of Canaan, the city of Salem was burned, but the fortress remained in the hands of the Jebusites till King David took it by storm and made it the capital of his kingdom. From that time it was called ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... repulsive woman. I find it difficult to resist the conclusion that Michelangelo felt himself compelled to treat women as though they were another and less graceful sort of males. The sentiment of woman, what really distinguishes the sex, whether voluptuously or passionately or poetically apprehended, emerges in no eminent instance of his work. There is a Cartoon at Naples for a Bacchante, which Bronzino transferred to canvas and coloured. This design illustrates the point on which I am insisting. An athletic circus-rider of mature years, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Beautifully pictured and poetically told legends of Ireland's epic hero Fionn. A book for the boy or girl who loves the old romances, and a book for story-telling or reading aloud. "Stories of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France," ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... term chosen by Verdi for his "Falstaff" and Puccini for his "Manon Lescaut." In truth, "Iris" is none of these. It begins as an allegory, grows into a play, and ends again in allegory, beginning and end, indeed, being the same, poetically and musically. Signor Illica went to Sr Peladan and d'Annunzio for his sources, but placed the scene of "Iris" in Japan, the land of flowers, and so achieved the privilege of making it a dalliance with pseudo-philosophic symbols and gorgeous ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... pre-eminence in the latter faculty gave occasion to some etymologists to ring changes on his name, and to decide that it was derived from Follis Optimus, softened through an Italian medium into Folle Ottimo, contracted poetically into Folleotto, and elided Anglice into Folliott, signifying a first- rate pair of bellows. He claimed to be descended lineally from the illustrious Gilbert Folliott, the eminent theologian, who was a Bishop of London in the twelfth century, whose studies were interrupted in the dead of night ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... the difficulty. If you arrange your books according to their contents you are sure to get an untidy shelf. If you arrange your books according to their size and colour you get an effective wall, but the poetically inclined visitor may lose sight of Beattie altogether. Before, then, we decide what to do about it, we must ask ourselves that very awkward question, "Why do we have books on our shelves at all?" It is a most ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... the note that stays in the reader's mind. But the poem is psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy—except as all beginnings are so; and Browning's statement in a note in his collected poems that he "acknowledged and retained it with extreme repugnance," shows how ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Classically, Poetically, and Practically. Containing Numerous Curious Dishes and Feasts of all Times and all Countries, besides Three Hundred Modern Receipts. New York. D. Appleton & ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... be able to recognize the influences of the country in which they were born upon the great masters in music, as well as in the other arts; that we will be able to distinguish the peculiar and predominant traits of the national genius more completely developed, more poetically true, more interesting to study, in the pages of their compositions than in the crude, incorrect, uncertain, vague and tremulous sketches of the ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... evangelist finds in the name of Nazareth an echo of the ancient Messianic title Netzer (a branch). In ii. 18 we see that the tomb of Rachel near Bethlehem reminds him of the mothers of Israel weeping over the death of their children at the hands of the Babylonians; and as Jeremiah poetically conceived of Rachel weeping with the mothers of his own day, so St. Matthew conceives of her as finding her crowning sorrow in the massacre ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... common sort, in which he saw the purveyors of "adulterous lust," and with which, now as then, he would have nothing whatever {122} to do. His "Lady" alone, even without her brothers, makes that clear. What she says may not be so poetically attractive as the speech of Comus; but it has just the note of exaltation which is heard in all Milton's great ethical and spiritual outbursts, and plainly utters the other and stronger side of his convictions. The truth is that from the very beginning to ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... Inglesi, or the Protestant burial-ground, stretches calmly and beautifully below the Pyramid of Cestius. The site was admirably chosen,—nothing can be more poetically and religiously sepulchral than this most attractive spot. It is worth a thousand churches. No one can stand long there without feeling in full descent upon his spirit the very best influences of the grave. The rich, red, ruinous battlements of the city, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... arrive in Havana with a heart elated by the prospect of such kindnesses and hospitalities as are poetically supposed to be the perquisite of travellers. You count over your letters as so many treasures; you regard the unknown houses you pass as places of deposit for the new acquaintances and delightful friendships which await ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... English minds of the day. Third comes Alfred Tennyson.... By-the-bye, did you ever happen upon Browning's 'Pauline'? a strange, wild (in parts singularly magnificent) poet-biography; his own early life as it presented itself to his own soul viewed poetically; in fact, psychologically speaking, his 'Sartor Resartus'; it was written and published three years before 'Paracelsus,' when ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... has more than a touch of the divine quality. He did not attempt to compose tragedies of life, for his temperament forbade it; but in his finest music he is never commonplace, because he had a strongly marked temperament and was poetically inspired. By dint of a sincerity that was perfect he made music which, though it is shaped in outline by the classical spirit, will be for ever interesting. To listen to him immediately after Tschaikowsky is hard, sometimes impossible, ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... most beautiful songs; and on many an evening Barop or Middendorf told us of the places through which we were to pass, their history, and the legends which were associated with them. They were aided in this by one of the sub-teachers, Bagge, a poetically gifted young clergyman, who possessed great personal beauty and a heart capable of entering into the intellectual life of the boys who were ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the note sounded in the next following poem, "How it Strikes a Contemporary." Here again a typical poet is personified, not, however, by means of his own poetic way of seeing, but of the prosaic way in which he is seen by a contemporary, the whole, of course, being poetically seen and presented by the over-poet. Browning himself, and in such a manifold way that the reader is enabled to conceive as vividly of the talker and his mental atmosphere and social background—the people and habitudes ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... all-exalted," I replied, with seemly humility, "and virtue and wisdom press out your temples on either side. Certainly, since I have learned that the heart is so poetically regarded, I have been assailed by a fear lest other organs which I have hitherto despised might be used in a similar way. ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... nursed the sick, revered Rugge, told fortunes on a pack of cards which she always kept in her pocket, and acted occasionally in parts where age was no drawback and ugliness desirable,—such as a witch, or duenna, or whatever in the dialogue was poetically called "Hag." Indeed, Hag was the name she usually took from Rugge; that which she bore from her defunct husband was Gormerick. This lady, as she braided the garland, was also bent on the soothing system, saying, with great sweetness, considering that her ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... replied Donal, "—for the sake o' auld langsyne, whan I was, as I ever will be, sair obligatit till ye—but i' that ye say noo, ye're sair wrang: ye wasna speykin' poetically, though I ken weel ye think it, or ye wadna say 't; an' that's what garred me tak ye up. For the verra essence o' poetry is trowth, an' as sune's a word's no true, it's no poetry, though it may hae on the cast claes o' 't. It's nane ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... system of Schools and Universities, Milton goes on to explain what he would substitute. As he poetically expresses it, he will detain his readers no longer in the wretched survey of things as they are, but will conduct them to a hill-side where he will point out to them "the right path of a virtuous and noble education, laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... now added to the old name: the 16th of December is now changed into the 26th of June." He explained that the robe, the Bible, the sword, and the sceptre were presents to his Highness from the Parliament, and dwelt poetically on the significance of each. "What a comely and glorious sight," he concluded, "it is to behold a Lord Protector in a purple robe, with a sceptre in his hand, a sword of justice girt about him, and his eyes fixed upon ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... remark, as he rose to knock the ashes out of his pipe, that he hoped Joe would thenceforth learn to obey his father in all things; that he had found, that day, he was not one of the sort of men who were to be trifled with; and that he would recommend him, poetically speaking, to mind ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... lady, of the name of Rukminee, and the marriage is thus poetically described. Rukminee has written a letter, filled with love, and sent it by the hand of a Brahmin, to the Root of Joy, Krishna: — "The Brahmin having arrived at Duarika, perceives that the town is ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... so to speak, the inverse inspiration of the stirring lines "The Lost Leader." Browning's strong sympathies with the Liberal cause are here portrayed with an ardor which is fairly intoxicating poetically, but one feels it is scarcely just to the mild-eyed, exemplary Wordsworth, and perhaps exaggeratedly sure of Shakespeare's attitude on this point. It is only fair to Browning, to point out how he himself felt ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... only in so far as it was profitable. And in this matter Master Leigh saw a way to break faith with profit. He had no conscience, but he loved as all rogues love to turn the tables upon a superior rogue. He would play Master Lionel most finely, most poetically false; and he found a deal to chuckle over in the contemplation ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... who died in 1586, had written and circulated among his friends a more ambitious collection of a hundred and eight sonnets. Most of Sidney's sonnets were addressed by him under the name of Astrophel to a beautiful woman poetically designated Stella. Sidney had in real life courted assiduously the favour of a married lady, Penelope, Lady Rich, and a few of the sonnets are commonly held to reflect the heat of passion which the genuine intrigue developed. But Petrarch, Ronsard, and Desportes inspired the majority of Sidney's ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... brown hat, and blue spectacles, all the colours of man and boat being philosophically arranged, and as part of a complicated and secret plot upon the liberties of that unseen, mysterious, and much-considered goujon which is poetically imagined to be below. It has baffled all designs for this last week, for it is a wily monster, but this morning it is most certainly to ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... in order to supply the British Museum its crowning glory, and for this he achieved the honor of getting himself poetically damned by Lord Byron. Monarchies, like republics, are ungrateful. Lord Elgin defended himself vigorously against the charge of Paganism, just as Raphael had done three hundred years before. But Burne-Jones was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... titled courtesans I had read Boccaccio and Bandello; above all, I had read Shakespeare. I had dreamed of those beautiful triflers; of those cherubim of hell. A thousand times I had drawn those heads so poetically foolish, so enterprising in audacity, heads of harebrained mistresses who wreck a romance with a glance, and who pass through life by waves and by pulsations, like the sirens of the tides. I thought of the fairies ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... statable kind? Do the thoughts and phrases which float about in it have a meaning which bears any relation to the meaning they bear in the language of thinkers? Certainly not. Does all the patriotic talk, the talk about the United States and its future, have any significance as patriotism? Does it poetically represent the state of feeling of any class of American citizens towards their country? Or would you find the nearest equivalent to this emotion in the breast of the educated tramp of France, or Germany, or England? The speech of Whitman is English, and his ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... This mighty "two-handed engine at the door" of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, "poetically" or, "in a spiritual sense," the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean. In Biblical phrase, Zeno (who probably had a strain of Semitic blood in him) was the "father ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... lion roareth on his prey when a multitude of shepherds is called forth against him, he will not be afraid of their voice, nor abase himself for the noise of them: so shall the Lord of hosts come down to fight for Mount Zion.' The enemies of Israel are picturesquely and poetically represented as a crowd of shepherds vainly trying to scare a lion by their shouts. He stands undaunted, with his strong paw on his prey, and the boldest of them durst not venture to drag it from beneath his claws. So, says Isaiah, with singularly daring imagery, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... bright and good, but because nature had formed the lenses of a more than usually rounded shape, with the consequence that their owner was short-sighted and needed a pair of concave glasses to deal with the rays of light and lengthen the focus of the natural lenses. But, metaphorically and poetically, as somebody once wrote, every boy wore glasses of the couleur-de-rose type—those which make everything that is happily beautiful seem ten times more so, and in later days have made many a man say to himself, "Oh, if I could see life now ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... continues your friend, "he plays some parts of the second melody a little too slowly—makes it too sentimental, instead of poetically expressive. You may observe that I don't always follow the line. That's one of the great things about the instrument. You can profit by the directions just as much as you want to, but you can disregard them whenever you have a mind to. It may seem presumptuous to differ, ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... poetically that unusual events cast their shadows before them, and I am prepared to maintain the correctness of such a belief. But unless the silence of the constable who walked beside me was due to the unseen presence of such a shadow, ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... Fixlein, Schmelzle, and Fibel, (a single lay-figure to be draped at will with whimsical sentiment and reflection, and put in various attitudes,) compared with the living reality of Walter Shandy and his brother Toby, characters which we do not see merely as puppets in the author's mind, but poetically projected from it in an independent being of their own? Heine himself, the most graceful, sometimes the most touching, of modern poets, and clearly the most easy of German humorists, seems to me wanting ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... still dwelt with Browning; and they brought with them the ocean-scent, heroic life, and mythical charm of Athenian thought. It would be difficult, if one could write of them at all, not to write of them poetically; and Pheidippides, Echetlos, Pan and Luna are alive with force, imaginative joy, and the victorious sense the poet has of having conquered his material. Pheidippides is as full of fire, of careless heroism as Herve Riel, and told in as ringing verse. The versing of Echetlos, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... booksellers' watch must have been the size of an onion. Iron-gray ribbed stockings, and shoes with silver buckles completed is costume. The old man's head was bare, and ornamented with a fringe of grizzled locks, quite poetically scanty. "Old Doguereau," as Porchon styled him, was dressed half like a professor of belles-lettres as to his trousers and shoes, half like a tradesman with respect to the variegated waistcoat, the stockings, and the watch; and the same odd mixture appeared in the man himself. He united the magisterial, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the Swiss women of the mountains entitled to their reputation for beauty. If strength, proportions on a scale that is scarcely feminine, symmetry that is more anatomically than poetically perfect, enter into the estimate, one certainly sees in some of the cantons, female peasants who may be called fine women. I remember, in 1828, to have met one of these in the Grisons, near the upper end of the valley of the Rhine. ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... borders of the white cravat: but the soul of Tupman had known no change—admiration of the fair sex was still its ruling passion. On the left of his great leader sat the poetic Snodgrass, and near him again the sporting Winkle; the former poetically enveloped in a mysterious blue cloak with a canine-skin collar, and the latter communicating additional lustre to a new green shooting-coat, plaid neckerchief, and ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... reasonable, be it in warlike, politic, or private matters; where the historian in his bare WAS hath many times that which we call fortune to overrule the best wisdom. Many times he must tell events whereof he can yield no cause; or if he do, it must be poetically. ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... it passes, the Mississippi steamboat looks like a large hotel, or mansion of many windows, set adrift and moving majestically—"walking the water like a thing of life," as it has been poetically described. Some of the larger ones, taking into account their splendid interior decoration, and, along with it their sumptuous table fare, may well merit the name oft bestowed upon them, of ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... misunderstandings which may possibly arise in a reader's mind. Nothing is further from my wish than to attempt any philosophical or ontological exposition of what is hidden behind the veil of death. But one may be permitted to deal with the subject imaginatively or poetically, to translate hopes into visions, as I have ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the gorgeous flowers upon the mountain slopes, radiant rhododendron, rosebay, and laurel, and the azalea rising like flame; or the rare beauties of the water—the cataract of Linville, taking its shimmering leap into the gorge, and that romantic river poetically celebrated in ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... high-minded, if prudent, rich man; and no one, in short, plays his part like a puppet, but acts as one expects him to act, always allowing the peculiar atmosphere of these tales; and to crown all, as the story comes to its end, the high-souled and poetically conceived Illugi throws a tenderness on the dreadful story of the end of the hero, contrasted as it is with that of the ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... the end of which is not so good, poetically considered, as the magnificent beginning, but ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... their Fall, overthrew the Rebel Angels, and created the World, is now represented as descending to Paradise, and pronouncing Sentence upon the three Offenders. The Cool of the Evening, being a Circumstance with which Holy Writ introduces this great Scene, it is poetically described by our Author, who has also kept religiously to the Form of Words, in which the three several Sentences were passed upon Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. He has rather chosen to neglect the Numerousness of his Verse, than to deviate ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... how to send me out of Paris, he is as ungrateful as a king, because I have been taking his part all this time at a great cost of domestic emeutes. So you would have known, if you had received my letters. The coup d'etat was a grand thing, dramatically and poetically speaking, and the appeal to the people justified it in my eyes, considering the immense difficulty of the circumstances, the impossibility of the old constitution and the impracticability of the House of Assembly. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Kierkegaard says: "Poetry is illusion before knowledge; religion illusion after knowledge. Between poetry and religion the worldly wisdom of living plays its comedy. Every individual who does not live either poetically or religiously is a fool" (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, chap. iv., sect. 2a, Sec. 2). The same writer tells us that Christianity is a desperate sortie (salida). Even so, but it is only by the very desperateness of this sortie that we can win through to hope, to that hope whose ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... the door, and Kettle-Belly Johnson occupied the opposite chair. On the two other players, one of whom was flanking John Ringo on each side, there is no need to waste words; they belonged to the same breed as the poetically rechristened Johnson, the breed that got its name from shaking dice against Mexicans out ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... of recollections from the Old Testament, was put together in a natural way; but allowing its composition to have been perfectly natural, it cannot be ascribed to the artless Mary, but to him who poetically wrought out the tradition in circulation respecting the scene in question" ("Life of Jesus," by Strauss, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... mythology Ushas, "Dawn," is daughter of Heaven, and poetically she is represented as "a young wife awakening her children and giving them new strength for the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... or as they are more poetically called, the Riders of the Plains, watched Galbraith's Place, not from any apprehension of violent events, but because Galbraith was suspected of infringing the prevailing law of Prohibition, and because for some years it had been a tradition and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to make a statue for any square or similar situation at the metropolis," he wrote, still in his inflated style, "I should have represented Washington on horseback and in his actual dress. I would have made my subject purely a historical one. I have treated my subject poetically, and confess I would feel pain in seeing it placed in direct flagrant contrast with ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... is theatrically no less than dramatically conceived. Theatrically it is far superior to Swinburne's "Chastelard" (not to speak of his interminable musical verbiage in "Bothwell") but it is paler, colder, and poetically inferior. The voluptuous warmth and wealth of color, the exquisite levity, the debonnaire grace of the Swinburnian drama we seek in vain. Bjoernson is vigorous, but he is not subtile. Mere feline amorousness, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... in golden warmth, descending through the leaves, with a whisper, to her embrace. So the personifications of death in literature, thus far, give us no penetrative glance into what it really is, help us to no acute definition of it, but poetically fasten on some feature, or accident, or emotion, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... so close to the injured youth that they could talk together, and as he spoke freely, yet modestly, of his experiences Berrie found him more deeply interesting than she had hitherto believed him to be. True, he saw things less poetically than Wayland, but he was finely observant, and a man ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... that must be added to aspiration before it becomes poetically creative? So far as a mere layman can understand it, it is a sudden arrest, rather than a satisfaction, of the poet's longing, for genuine satisfaction would kill the aspiration, and leave the poet heavy and phlegmatic. Inspiration, on the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... examples in his two pleasant volumes of all the forms already mentioned, and even of another which can only be admitted among fables by the utmost possible leniency of construction. 'Composure,' 'Et Caetera,' and several more, are merely similes poetically elaborated. So, too, is the pathetic story of the grandfather and grandchild: the child, having treasured away an icicle and forgotten it for ten minutes, comes back to find it already nearly melted, and no longer beautiful: at the same time, the grandfather has just remembered and taken ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... subject for a picture, than by some renewed reference to fire and water, or summer and winter; nor were ever tired of hearing that summer came after spring, and that air was not earth, until these interesting pieces of information got finally and poetically expressed in that well-known piece of elegant English conversation about the weather, Thomson's "Seasons." So the Cardinal, not appearing to have any better idea than the popular one, orders the four elements; but thinking ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... here we must admit that Wordsworth is not entirely free from the weakness which generally besets thinkers of this tendency. Like Shaftesbury in the previous century, who speaks of the universal harmony as emphatically though not as poetically as Wordsworth, he is tempted to adopt a too facile optimism. He seems at times to have overlooked that dark side of nature which is recognised in theological doctrines of corruption, or in the scientific theories about the fierce struggle for existence. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Historically and poetically, Atta Troll is one of the most remarkable of Heine's works. He calls it Das letzte freie Waldlied der Romantik ("The last free forest-song of romanticism.") Having for its principal scene the most romantic spot in Europe, the valley of Roncesvaux, and for its principal character a dancing bear, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... sense of having acted injudiciously or unbecomingly; she was ready to recount to every one, in vague and veiled language, how she had been able to testify for the Lord 'in the very temple of Belial', for so she poetically described the Crystal Palace. She was, of course, in a state of unbridled hysteria, but such physical explanations were not encouraged amongst us, and the case of Susan Flood awakened a ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... strange to reflect, that hardly an evening passes in London or Paris but one of those cottages is painted for the better amusement of the fair and idle, and shaded with pasteboard pines by the scene-shifter; and that good and kind people,—poetically minded,—delight themselves in imagining the happy life led by peasants who dwell by Alpine fountains, and kneel to crosses upon peaks of rock? that nightly we lay down our gold to fashion forth simulacra of peasants, in gay ribands and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... Robert ultimately found himself travelling in company with nine other passengers, seven of whom were suffering from that infirmity once poetically described by an expert in such diagnoses as "a wee bit drappie in their een." The exception was a gentleman in the far corner, accompanied by a most lovely young lady, upon whom Robert gazed continuously with an admiration so absorbing and profound that it took him some little time to realise, ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... was thus selected, automatically and poetically, Old Hundred drew a line in the road, parallel to the curb, It put his duck on the rock, and the rest started to pitch. Suddenly one demon spotted me, a smiling by-stander. "Hi," he called, "Old ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... had not composed one of his operas when he was fifty. Haydn was an old man of sixty-five when he produced the "Creation." Murillo became Murillo only at forty years of age. Poussin was seventy when he painted "The Deluge," which is the most poetically great of all his noble pictures. Michael Angelo counted more than sixty years when he encrusted his incomparable fresco, "The Last Judgment," upon the walls of the Sistine Chapel; and he was eighty-seven when he raised the cupola of ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... the assailants, at whose fall the whole army fled in dismay. One of the trophies of their defeat was the kettle which they had brought for the purpose of cooking the missionaries, and holding a cannibal feast. The battle-field is poetically termed the bed of honor: but the bravest man might be excused for shrinking from a burial in his enemy's stomach! Poetry can make nothing of such ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... built on seven hills, viz. the Palatine, Capitoline, Quirinal, Esquiline, Viminal, Caelian, and Aventine; hence it was poetically styled "Urbs ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... run abeam of a cape or object. To cut through a sea, the surface of which is poetically termed breast.—To breast the sea, to meet it by the bow on a wind.—To breast the surf, to brave it, and overcome it swimming.—To breast a bar, to heave at the capstan.—To breast to, the act of giving a ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... appeared to be blemishes, but in a general estimate of Shakespeare's all-embracing genius he conceived his faults to be "of just as much consequence as his bad spelling."[89] He saw in him a genius who comprehended all humanity, who represented it poetically in all its shades and varieties. He examined all the fine distinctions of character, he studied Shakespeare's manner of combining and contrasting them so as to produce a unity of tone above even the art of the classic unities. From the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... transition. Mr Moddle, living in the atmosphere of Miss Pecksniff's love, dwelt (if he had but known it) in a terrestrial Paradise. The thriving city of Eden was also a terrestrial Paradise, upon the showing of its proprietors. The beautiful Miss Pecksniff might have been poetically described as a something too good for man in his fallen and degraded state. That was exactly the character of the thriving city of Eden, as poetically heightened by Zephaniah Scadder, General Choke, and other worthies; part and parcel of the talons of ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... wealth waited, kings uncovered, laurel bloomed and blossomed, and love crowned all. His popularity was greater than that of any other man of his time. He had no enemies, no detractors, no rivals—his pathway was literally and poetically strewn with roses. What more can any man desire? Lasting fame and a name that never dies? Avaunt! but first know this, that immortality is reserved alone for those who have been despised and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... unromantic an unenthusiastic, harmonized entirely with his own. It was refreshing for him to hear her chatter about people and things with the calm good sense of a Philistine, especially in a society where the bombastic and exaggerated talk of original, poetically minded young ladies had repelled and bored him. At his first meeting with Malvine Marker he had thought that she was the wife for him, and since he had become friendly with her and her circle, he said to himself, "This ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... truth, That breeding heroes once was England's boast, And now we brag of making millionaires. Your 'practical' means shortest cut to wealth: But far too frequently purse robs the heart; One growing heavy drains the other dry. His style, poetically pregnant, oft By note of admiration merely, hints More than crammed Pro Con of your favourite's page." At this he shouts a scornful roaring laugh, The table shaking, and the vessels chinked As fell his weighty arm: with massive gaze In hurly-burly ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... ancestors and believed to possess an efficacy, though their actual meaning is forgotten. He says they are used at any time as defence from evil, when a person is startled, sneezes, or stumbles. Among these I think I ought to class that peculiar form of friendly farewell or greeting which the Doctor poetically calls a "blown blessing" and the natives Ibata. I thought the three times it was given to me that it was just spitting on the hand. Practically it is so, but the Doctor says the spitting is accidental, a by-product I suppose. The method consists in taking the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... them and they would be compelled to follow him. We think of wind as air in motion; they thought of it as the breath and sound of some living creature. When we say that the wind "whistled in the keyhole," or "kissed the flowers," or "drove the clouds" before it, we are using poetically the language our forefathers ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... the plains of Thebes;—and passing Mount Ida to the left, above whose hoary crest broke a storm of thunder and lightning, they arrived at the golden Scamander, whose waters failed the invading thousands. Here it is poetically told of Xerxes, that he ascended the citadel of Priam, and anxiously and carefully surveyed the place, while the magi of the barbarian monarch directed libations to the manes of the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of fighting, we have, poetically speaking, lost something in one respect, but we have gained much in another. Our battles indeed admit but few single combats, or trials of individual prowess. They do admit them however; and it is not ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... children learn the most of Schiller's ballads by heart. Fontane always remained grateful for this, probably because it was as a writer of ballads that he first won recognition. If we look upon the ballad as a poetically heightened form of anecdote we discover an element of unity in his early education, and that will help us to understand why the technique of his novels shows such a ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... with love for her, he carried her off to his grotto. Plato, by the mouth of Socrates, rejects a rationalist interpretation of this myth. According to this explanation, an outward, natural fact is poetically symbolised by the narrative. A hurricane seized the king's daughter and hurled her over the rocks. "Interpretations of this sort," says Socrates, "are learned sophistries, however popular and usual they may be.... For one who has pulled to pieces ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... who contend that scientific truths cannot be stated poetically; but here, I am sure, science and sentiment are at one. ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... made a round to reach me—hence the delay in replying to it—which you will therefore pardon. I have been asked the question you put to me—tho' never asked so poetically and so pleasantly—I suppose a score of times: and I can only answer, with something of shame and contrition, that I undoubtedly had Wordsworth in my mind—but simply as 'a model'; you know, an artist ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr |
