"Spenser" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... persons to add to their more solid acquirements the easy learning of this little volume, much of the poetry of Milton which has appeared to them "harsh and crabbed" would be found "musical as is Apollo's lute." Our citations, taken from more than twenty-five poets, from Spenser to Longfellow, will show how general has been the practice ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... presidency of that same college, I asked to be permitted to take from the library three books (replacing them with fresher copies): the chapel Bible—from which I had been read to by my president and professors and from which I in turn had read to succeeding students—a copy of Spenser's "Faerie Queene"—which my college's only poet, Eugene Field, had read through—and a volume of Parkman's on ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... early boyhood he had Spenser (it is said that the first book which he bought with his own money was "The Faery Queen," for which he kept a fondness all his life), Froissart's "Chronicles," and Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion." The incident of Dr. Johnson's penance in Uttoxeter Market ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... painting, we find instances in which the element of setting is used for a decorative purpose, and is brought into an artistic relation with the elements of action and character. Such a use is made of landscape, for example, in the "Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto and the "Faerie Queene" of Spenser. The settings depicted by these narrative poets are essentially pictorial, and are used as a decorative background to the action rather than as part and parcel of it. If we seek an example in prose rather than in poetry, we need only turn to the "Arcadia" ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... on the battle of Ramilles is necessarily tedious by the form of the stanza: an uniform mass of ten lines, thirty-five times repeated, inconsequential and slightly connected, must weary both the ear and the understanding. His imitation of Spenser, which consists principally in I ween and I weet, without exclusion of later modes of speech, makes his poem neither ancient nor modern. His mention of Mars and Bellona, and his comparison of Marlborough to the eagle that bears the thunder ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... purpose in Elizabethan days. Up to the sixteenth century the tales were either told in verse, in the epic form of Beowulf or in the shrunken epic of a thirteenth century ballad like "King Horn"; in the verse narratives of Chaucer or the poetic musings of Spenser. Or else they were a portion of that prose romance of chivalry which was vastly cultivated in the middle ages, especially in France and Spain, and of which we have a doughty exemplar in the Morte D'Arthur, which dates nearly a century before Shakspere's day. Loose ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... boasting serves him with some profit, but being found out, he is stripped of his borrowed plumes. His shield is claimed by Marinel; his horse by Guyon; Talus shaves off his beard; and his lady is shown to be a sham Florimel.—Spenser, Faery Queen, iii. 8 and 10, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... la Rose," was in some ways the most extraordinary of all. In France, this work remained the dominant work of poetic literature, and "the source whence every rhymer drew for his needs" down to the period of the classical revival led by Ronsard (when it was edited by Clement Marot, Spenser's early model). In England, it exercised an influence only inferior to that which belonged to it at home upon both the matter and the form of poetry down to the renascence begun by Surrey and Wyatt. This extraordinary literary influence admits of a double explanation. But ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... or at all events had kept him at a distance. But a feeling of common loyalty, and the anger which a true man of letters feels when a genuine poet is traduced by a pedant, led Nash to take up a very strong position as a defender of the reputation of Greene. Gabriel Harvey, although the friend of Spenser, is a personage who fills an odious place in the literary history of the last years of Elizabeth. He was a scholar and a university man of considerable attainments, but he was wholly without taste, and he concentrated into vinegar a temper which ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... seemed, the Sorority of the Camellia Buds had turned itself from a society instituted for mutual protection and fun into a Crusaders' Union, pledged, like Spenser's Red Cross Knight, to avenge the wrongs of distressed damsels in the junior forms. The ring of battle certainly added a spice of excitement to their secret. It was much more interesting to interfere personally on behalf of their protegees than to place debatable ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... sirname, "either of his trade and faculty, or of some quality of his body or mind, or of the place where he dwelt, so that every one should be distinguished from the other." But this statute did not effect the object proposed, and Spenser, in his "View of Ireland," mentions it as having become obsolete, and strongly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various
... of Dryden's Juvenal and Persius Rymer prefixed to his translation of Rene Rapin's Reflections on Aristotle's Poesie some Reflections of his own on Epic Poets. Herein he speaks under the head Epic Poetry of Chaucer, in whose time language was not capable of heroic character; or Spenser, who "wanted a true Idea, and lost himself by following an unfaithful guide, besides using a stanza which is in no wise proper for our language;" of Sir William Davenant, who, in Gondibert, "has some strokes of an extraordinary judgment," but "is for unbeaten tracks and ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... nothing to her that numerous poets and authors, from Edmund Spenser to many humbler craftsmen of the pen, were busy translating from the Italian the tales of Boccaccio, or the ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... our notice. He commences the work with "Love," and a quotation from Spenser. As an etching, it is powerful, but we doubt if quite true: there should be something to account, in such a twilight scene, for the strong light upon the "Ladye-love!" Nor are we quite satisfied with the love of the lover, or the reception it meets with. The man or his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... has the despair of a beard; be a stateswoman, know all the news, what was done at Salisbury, what at the Bath, what at court, what in progress; or, so she may censure poets, and authors, and styles, and compare them, Daniel with Spenser, Jonson with the t'other youth, and so forth: or be thought cunning in controversies, or the very knots of divinity; and have often in her mouth the state of the question: and then skip to the mathematics, and demonstration: ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... Dryden, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe and Jonson infected literature with a species of eloquent vulgarity, and Shakspere, willing to please, readily infused into his various plays sensuous phrases to catch the rabble cheers and purpled applause. While he worshiped nature, he never failed ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Spenser, was at the source of the Dee: Vortigern's castle was near by on the head-waters of the Conway; and "under the foot of Rauran's mossy base" was the dwelling of old Timon, where Merlin came and gave to his care the wonderful infant who was to become the Christian Hercules of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... people. A professed laugher is as contemptible and tiresome a character as a professed wit: the one is always contriving something to laugh at, the other is always laughing at nothing. An excess of levity is as impertinent as an excess of gravity. A character of this sort is well personified by Spenser, in the "Damsel of the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... scholars and literary men. I fear, that it is far greater than the world is willing to acknowledge; or, perhaps I should say, than the world has thought of acknowledging. Blot out from England's history the names of Chaucer, Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton only, and how much of her glory would you blot out with them! Take from Italy such names as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Michel Angelo, and Raphael, and how much would still be wanting to the completeness of her glory! How would the history of Spain ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... easily can it be discerned in the middle classes. Take for instance the pleasures of the table. I do not speak of great entertainments or life in palaces or great houses, which do not so much vary from one age to another, but of the ordinary life of people like ourselves. Spenser says:— ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... difference in form. The canzoni of Petrarch are composed in stanzas of varying, but in each case uniform, length, and every stanza corresponds precisely in metrical arrangement with every other stanza in the same canzone. In English the Epithalamion and the Prothalamion of Spenser (except for their refrain) do exactly what Petrarch had done in Italian; and whatever further analogy there may be between the spirit of Patmore's writing and that of Spenser in these two poems, the form is essentially ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... matter of sin; that virtue therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her virtue is but an excremental virtue, which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the form of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon and the tower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... whom other contemporary writers may be grouped. In Great Britain the several and successive periods might thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John Wiclif, Thomas More or Henry Howard, Edmund Spenser or Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakspere or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler, Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper or John Wesley, Walter Scott or Samuel Taylor ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... did harm, And his heart might be warm, For his doublet most certainly was so; And now has Torn Flooke A quieter nook Than ever had Spenser or Tasso. ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... wisdom and knowledge of the human soul, appear to us almost to be dictated by the voice of inspiration. The prince of philosophers too, the great miner and sapper of the false systems of the middle ages, Francis Bacon, then commenced his career, and Spenser dedicated to Elizabeth his "Fairy Queen," one of the most truly poetical compositions that genius ever produced. The age produced also great divines; but these did not occupy so prominent a place in the nation's eye ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... tablets all over the floor, under our feet! Look, I'm standing on Dickens' grave this very minute! And there's 'Oh, Rare Ben Jonson,' right there on the wall; I've always heard of that. And here's Spenser, and Chaucer, and Browning, and Tennyson, very close together. Oh! It's dreadful! I don't want to step on them! Why, everybody who ever was anybody seems to be here!" gasped John, forgetting ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... his disgust at the intrigues of the court and the corruptions of Italian life, mingled with homesickness for the pleasant sights and quiet air of his native Anjou, inspired the two collections of sonnets which are his best, the Antiquits romaines, translated by Spenser in 1591, ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... hit the slide, Not to mention Pope or Milton; Some of Southey's stuff is snide. Some of Spenser's ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... young lady; which, when the regiment, individually and collectively, happened to see it, left no doubt in its mind as to their comrade's taste. It was evident even from that badly-coloured photograph that Miss Madeline Spenser had the makings of a lovely figure and a pair of wonderful eyes. It was said, however, that she had not a sixpence; and as our hero had but very few, the married ladies of the battalion used frequently to speculate how Mr. Peritt would "manage" ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... she ran .... and fatally did vow To wreake her on the mayden messenger Whom she had caused be kept as prisonere. SPENSER. ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... takes place after the consequences of the cause were thought at an end; a principal application being when a ship, supposed to have struck, opens her fire again. This is a very old English word, alluding to unexpected events happening after the seeming end of an affair; thus Spenser, in ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... alone is privileged to wear The ancient wreath o'er hyacinthine hair; These lips alone may quaff the sparkling wine, And make its mortal juice once more divine. Back, ye profane! And thou, fair Queen, rejoice: A nation's praise shall consecrate thy choice. Thus, then, I kneel where Spenser knelt before, On the same spot, perchance, of Windsor's floor; And take, while awe-struck millions round me stand, The hallowed wreath ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... England than the death of any other forgotten theatre-actor would have made. Nobody came down from London; there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears—there was merely silence, and nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh and the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare's time passed from life! No praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited seven ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... to compel uniformity of belief. He petitioned the king and Parliament in "The Continued Cry of the Oppressed." "William Brazier," he said, "shoemaker at Cambridge, was fined by John Hunt, mayor, and John Spenser, vice-chancellor, twenty pounds for holding a peaceable religious meeting in his own house. The officer who distrained for this sum took his leather last, the seat he worked upon, wearing clothes, ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... Yet of the best of all tributes to greatness, the praise of great men, it had received singularly little. There is Milton's noble burst of eloquence in the Areopagitica, but that is the praise not so much of London as of the religion and politics of London at a particular moment. Spenser's beautiful allusion in the Prothalamion to "mery London my most kyndly nurse" and to the "sweet Thames" whom he invites to "run softely till I end my song" is among the few tributes of personal affection ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... uncanny land, whose savage recesses were filled with demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana this evil character is attributed to that portion of India lying south of the Vindhyas. The forest of Spenser's Fairy Queen, in which wandering knights meet with manifold beasts and maleficent giants, and do valorous battles against them in the rescue of damsels and the like—such seem to have been the Gondwana woods to the ancient Hindu imagination. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... matins and vespers of every bird. There the lyric joyousness, characteristic of the Scottish people when allowed freely to develop, expanded itself to the utmost of its power and fervour. Fleurs was like the "Ida Vale" of Spenser:— ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... stanza in which are written Spenser's 'Faerie Queen,' Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence,' and Byron's 'Childe Harold,' and it is the highest flight of poetry: after which comes the heroic verse, in which we lap the heavy poems we call epic—their Latin appellation; of these the Iliads of Homer and the AEneids of Virgil are ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... (with respectful heartiness). What! Sweet-voiced SPENSER! Chivalrous-souled SIDNEY!! This is a joy! For heroes of your kidney PUNCH hath a heartier homage, as he hopes, Than the most thundering Swinburnian tropes Could ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... ship named the Gallienge, whose captaine hight [Footnote: The participle of the Anglo-Saxon verb Hatan, to call: "Full carefully he kept them day and night; In fairest fields, and Astrophel he hight." SPENSER Astrophel i., 6.] Brambois, otherwise called Wolfe, of the Almaine nation, an expert man of the sea, the which made so good diligence, that within a moneth he performed his voiage, and brought good store of wheat from Naples and Romania, [Footnote: The territory around Rome, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... also Southwell, Notts, Lord Byron's residence at Southwood, on the Divine Government SPEECHES IN PARLIAMENT, Lord Byron's Spence's Anecdotes (Singer's edition) Spencer, Dowager Lady ——, William, esq. ——, Countess Spenser, Edmund, his measure Staeel, Madame de, her essay against suicide Her 'De l'Allemagne' Her personal appearance Her death Notes written by Lord Byron in her 'Corinne' See also Stafford, Marquis of (now Duke of Sutherland) Stafford, Marchioness of (now Duchess of Sutherland) Stanhope, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... presented the aspect of a street in which a fair is held. Pipers came forth to play before him in a style which was not exactly that of the French opera; and the villagers danced wildly to the music. Long frieze mantles, resembling those which Spenser had, a century before, described as meet beds for rebels, and apt cloaks for thieves, were spread along the path which the cavalcade was to tread; and garlands, in which cabbage stalks supplied the place of laurels, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at thirty-two is described by Mark Antony after the battle of Actium as the 'boy Caesar' who 'wears the rose of youth' (Antony and Cleopatra, III., ii., 17 seq.). Spenser in his Astrophel apostrophizes Sir Philip Sidney on his death near the close of his thirty-second year as 'oh wretched boy' (l. 133) ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... June 13.-Change of ministry. Bon-mot on Lord North's Wedding. Spenser, with Kent's designs. Bentley's ray. Warburton's Pope. Edwards's Canons ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... prejudice against another called out a terrific diatribe against a foe. In either case, there might be "thoughts that breathe and words that burn"; still, there was but little of true criticism. The matchless papers on Spenser and Homer represent one class, and the articles on Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt the other. While the former exhibit the tender sympathy of a poet and the enthusiasm of a scholar, the latter reveal the uncompromising ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... So Spenser of Shamefacedness, an exquisite piece of glowing color—and sweetly of Belphoebe—(so the roses and lilies of all poets.) Compare the making of the ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... service at Court, including the time that she had been a lady-in-waiting, had lasted over twelve years. Thenceforth her bright sympathetic accounts of striking events in the life at Windsor and Osborne cease. The daughter of the second Earl of Spenser married, at twenty-six years of age, the third Lord Lyttelton. She was forty-two when she became a lady-in-waiting, and fifty-four when she resigned the office of governess to the Queen's children. She desired to quit the Court because, as she said, she was old ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... facility. The idea therefore of writing dramas which should be, from beginning to end, nothing but an ingenious compliment to his royal mistress would not be in the least distasteful to him. But we must not attribute too much to motives of personal ambition. Spenser's Faery Queen was not published until 1590; but Lyly had known Spenser before the latter's departure for Ireland, and, even if the scheme of that poet's masterpiece had not been confided to him, the ideas which it contained were in the air. The cult of Elizabeth, which was far from being a piece ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... either Clay by name or Clay by blood." Another chivalry is coming into the world besides that felt by a strong man for a beautiful woman. It is that felt by strong women for their weaker and less fortunate sisters. It is the chivalry foreshadowed by Spenser in The Faerie Queene, in Britomart, the noble knight, herself a woman, who rescued Amoretta and devoted herself to the help of all weak and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... noble hart that harbours vertuous thought And is with childe of glorious great intent, Can never rest, until it forth have brought Th' eternall brood of glorie excellent." SPENSER, The Faerie Queene. ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... Maro's strain, And Spenser's verse prolongs Eliza's reign; Great George's acts let tuneful Gibber sing; For nature formed the ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... in the reprinting. We see reason for doubting whether Mr. Halliwell ever read the proof-sheets. In his own notes we have found several mistakes. For instance, he refers to p. 159 when he means p. 153; he cites "I, but her life," instead of "lip"; and he makes Spenser speak of "old Pithonus." Marston is not an author of enough importance to make it desirable that we should be put in possession of all the corrupted readings of his text, were such a thing possible even with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... against them, and indeed Above th' ill fortune of them, or the need. I, therefore will begin. Soule of the Age ! The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our Stage ! My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye A little further, to make thee a roome : Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe, And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give. That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses ; I meane with great, but disproportion'd Muses : For, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... compelled to live in those great times; by the strong hold which they had of the ideas of family and national life, of law and personal faith. And I cannot but believe it to have been a mighty gain to such men as Sidney, Raleigh, and Spenser, that they had drunk, however slightly, of the wells of Proclus and Plotinus. One cannot read Spenser's "Fairy Queen," above all his Garden of Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability, without feeling that his Neoplatonism must have kept him safe from ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Ariminius; with all of whom exist some token of his having communicated, without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he saw,—Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman, and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society;—yet their genius failed them to find out the ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... our globe; scan its motley races, learn its diverse customs, and hear the groaning of lonely ice-fields and the sigh of Indian palms? When, with Bacon, I can explore the laboratory of nature, or with Locke, consult the mysteries of the soul? When Spenser can lead me into golden visions, or Shakespeare smite me with magic inspiration, or Milton bathe me in immortal song? When History opens for me all the gates of the past,—Thebes and Palmyra, Corinth and Carthage, Athens with its peerless ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... each shelf, and knots and tassels here and there—the taste of a woman, or rather of a girl, who seeks to give a grace to the commonest things around her. With the mechanical habit of a student, Leonard took down one or two of the volumes still left on the shelves. He found SPENSER'S Fairy Queen, RACINE in French, TASSO in Italian; and on the fly-leaf of each volume, in the exquisite hand-writing familiar to his memory, the name "Leonora." He kissed the books, and replaced them with a feeling akin both ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... of abbeys and convents in Spenser's Faery Queen, i. 3. She is the paramour of Kirkrapine, who used to rob churches and poor-boxes, and bring his plunder to Abessa, daughter of Corceca ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... gracious lady, yet no paines did spare To doe him ease, or doe him remedy: Many restoratives of vertues rare And costly cordialles she did apply, To mitigate his stubborne malady. Spenser's Faerie Queens. ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... blepon].—Plato's epithets in first book of the Laws.) Still more does this Dantesque type differ from the resplendent Plutus of Goethe in the second part of Faust, who is the personified power of wealth for good or evil—not the passion for wealth; and again from the Plutus of Spenser, who is the passion of mere aggregation. Dante's Plutus is specially and definitely the Spirit of Contention and Competition, or Evil Commerce; because, as I showed before, this kind of commerce "makes all men strangers;" ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... fairy every morning in his bread and milk at breakfast, it would not very much surprise him; while yet his appetite for the substantial food remains the same. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland seem nowhere very strange to him, while Chaucer and Spenser need only to be simply told, while Dana's Two Years Before the Mast and Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days at Rugby hold their own as well as Jack and the Bean-Stalk. Grown up people have their prejudices, but children have few or none. A pound of feathers and a pound of lead will usually be ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... never been more happily impersonated than by dear old Spenser. We meant to close with his portrait of Winter, but, on second thoughts, we give, as more seasonable, his description of January. The fourth line can hardly fail to remind the reader of the second line of Shakspeare's song, and to suggest the query—whether ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... Louis's principle of selection in each case. It jarred upon her when, as the gentlemen loitered about, waiting for the evening meal, they came and looked at the titles, with careless remarks that the superintendent was a youth of taste, and a laugh at the odd medley—Spenser, Shakspeare, 'Don Quixote,' Calderon, Fouque, and selections from ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Spenser. Thomas Watson. Henry Constable. Michael Drayton. Thomas Lodge. John Davis. Samuel Daniel. John ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... Osborne; but oh, how changed! The rather full face had grown delicate and thin, and the fine pure complexion if possible finer and purer, but certainly more ethereal and evanescent. It was as if suffering had removed some substance unapt, [Footnote: Spenser's 'Hymne in Honour of Beautie.'] and rendered her body a better-fitting garment for her soul. Her face, which had before required the softening influences of sleep and dreams to give it the plasticity necessary for complete expression, was now full of a repressed expression, if I may be allowed ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... weather, went into the fields to gather wild flowers for a garland, when she was attacked by the Blatant Beast, who carried her off in its mouth. Her cries attracted to the spot Sir Calidore, who compelled the beast to drop its prey.—Spenser, Fa[:e]ry Queen, vi. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... gods of the senator, afterwards the emperor, Vitellius. Another of them might often have been observed parading the streets between two consuls. Imagine an Edward II. endowed with absolute and unquestioned powers of tyranny,—imagine some pestilent Piers Gaveston, or Hugh de le Spenser exercising over nobles and people a hideous despotism of the back stairs,—and you have some faint picture of the government of Rome under some of the twelve Caesars. What the barber Olivier le Diable ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... helping of salt beef along with much cogitation concerning her mistress's singular ways. Still, she could not restrain a supposition that the latter must have supposed the priest to speak to her, when she heard the Earl say, "I hear from Geoffrey Spenser, [Note 2], that our stock of salt ling is beyond what is like to be wanted. Methinks the villeins might have a cade or ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... my work in the library, although it did not advance with the same steadiness as before. One day, in listless mood, I took up a volume, without knowing what it was, or what I sought. It opened at the Amoretti of Edmund Spenser. I was on the point of closing it again, when a line caught my eye. I read the sonnet; read another; found I could understand them perfectly; and that hour the poetry of the sixteenth century, hitherto a sealed fountain, became an open well ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... place, we deny it; for there is not an English classic of value to an artist, who was not, to his very heart's core, embued with a knowledge and love of the ancient literature. We might instance but two, Spenser and Milton—the statute-books of the better English art—authors whom, we do not hesitate to say, no one can thoroughly understand or enjoy, who has not far advanced in classical education. We shall never cease to throw out remarks of this kind, with the hope that our universities will yet find room ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... The gentle Spenser, did he not love woman's virtue, and weep for her wrongs? You, Eusebius, were wont ever to quote his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Transcendentalist, and he did not fail to discover in me the seeds of the same plant. He declared that I had a marvellous imagination, and encouraged my passion for reading anything and everything to the very utmost. It is a fact that at nine years of age his disquisitions on and readings from Spenser's "Faerie Queen" actually induced me to read the entire work, of which he was very proud, reminding me of it in 1881, when I went to Harvard to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem. He also read thoroughly into us the "Pilgrim's Progress," Quarles's "Emblems," Northcote's "Fables," much Shakespeare, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... a melancholy song?' It is heard by night, 'whilst our spirits are attentive,' and the solemn gloom of the hour influences the judgment of the ear; for another false impression, which like the monster Error of Spenser, has bred a thousand young ones as ill-favoured as herself, ascribes melancholy to night. There is no good reason why we should think thus of the night, still less that the impression should influence ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... countryman, Cobbett, she spilled more blood during her occupancy of the throne, than any other single agency in the world for a commensurate period; while her treatment of Ireland, under the "humane guidance" and advice of such cruel wretches as Spenser, was neither more nor less than absolutely satanic. For fifteen long years she never ceased to subject that unhappy land to famine, fire and sword. Every device that her hellish nature or that of her agents could concoct for the ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... people, the great masterpieces of our national song made little or no appeal to them. They were bidden to a feast of rarest quality and profusion, but it consisted of food that they could not assimilate. Spenser, Milton, Pope, Keats, Tennyson, all spoke to them in a language which they could not understand, and presented to them a world of thought and life in which they had no inheritance. But the Yorkshire dialect verse which circulated through the dales in chap-book or Christmas almanac ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... the Renaissance came, to benefit by the great intellectual movement set on foot by southern neo-classic nations; and while Italy produced Ariosto and Tasso, while Spain possessed Cervantes, and France Montaigne, Ronsard and Rabelais, they were ready to give birth to the unparalleled trio of Spenser, Bacon ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... not he would be a rash man who should say, but certainly for almost, if not quite, the first) the famous "Christabel" metre—iambic dimeter, rhymed with a wide licence of trisyllabic equivalence. This was to be twice revived by great poets, with immense consequences to English poetry—first by Spenser in the Kalendar, and then by Coleridge himself—and was to become one of the most powerful, varied, and charming of English rhythms. That this metre, the chief battle-ground of fighting between the accent-men and the quantity-men, never arose till after rhymed ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... too, by pretending that Shakespeare "out-tops knowledge." He did not fill the world even in his own time: there was room beside him in the days of Elizabeth for Marlowe and Spenser, Ben Jonson and Bacon, and since then the spiritual outlook, like the material outlook, has widened to infinity. There is space in life now for a dozen ideals undreamed-of in the sixteenth century. Let us have done ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the forms of law. ...But was it not the practice of the times, for other makers, like the bees tolling from every flower the virtuous sweets, to gather from the thistles of the law the sweetest honey? Does not Spenser gather many a metaphor from these weeds, that are most apt to grow in fattest soil? Has not Spenser his law-terms: his capias, defeasance, and duresse; his emparlance; his enure, essoyn, and escheat; his folkmote, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... letters and elsewhere, and now was frightened to perceive that they did not point so definitely to Shakespeare's tomb as she had heretofore supposed. There was an unmistakably distinct reference to a tomb, but it might be Bacon's, or Raleigh's, or Spenser's; and instead of the "Old Player," as she profanely called him, it might be either of those three illustrious dead, poet, warrior, or statesman, whose ashes, in Westminster Abbey, or the Tower burial-ground, or wherever they sleep, it was her mission to disturb. It is very possible, moreover, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hath the gentle Calidore And toyle endured... There on a day,—He chaunst to spy a sort of shepheard groomes, Playing on pipes and caroling apace. ...He, there besyde Saw a faire damzell. —Spenser, "Faerie ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of the Saxon, Norman, and scholarly elements of English was brought about. Already, Puttenham, in his "Arte of English Poesy," declares that the practice of the capital and the country within sixty miles of it was the standard of correct diction, the jus et norma loquendi. Already Spenser had almost recreated English poetry,—and it is interesting to observe, that, scholar as he was, the archaic words which he was at first over-fond of introducing are often provincialisms of purely English original. Already Marlowe had brought the English ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... were changed into poplars. We may, too, compare the story of Daphne and Syrinx, who, when they could no longer elude the pursuit of Apollo and Pan, change themselves into a laurel and a reed. In modern times, Tasso and Spenser have given us graphic pictures based on this primitive phase of belief; and it may be remembered how Dante passed through that leafless wood, in the bark of every tree of which was imprisoned a suicide. In German folk-lore[30] the soul is supposed to take the form of a flower, ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... conversion of England in the very process of its accomplishment. We see the beauties of Paganism and those of Christianity blending with each other, much as the Medieval and the Renaissance are blended in Spenser. In the one aspect Andrew is the valiant hero, like Beowulf, crossing the sea to accomplish a mighty deed of deliverance; in the other he is the saintly confessor, the patient sufferer, whose whole trust ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... venial fault, indeed, yet—something beneath the gravity of a wise man,—when the professed poets were so poor, that the very expenses of the press demanded the liberality of some wealthy individual, so that two-thirds of Spenser's poetic works, and those most highly praised by his learned admirers and friends, remained for many years in manuscript, and in manuscript perished,—when the amateurs of the stage were comparatively few, and therefore for the greater part more or less known to each other,—when we know ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... sense of filial awe, which prevented my noting and recording what it is probable the personage before me might most desire to have concealed. Indeed, his figure was so closely veiled and wimpled, either with a mantle, morning-gown, or some such loose garb, that the verses of Spenser might well have ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... always practising it if they are ever to succeed in it. Wordsworth, for instance, was a professed enemy of professionalism in poetry; yet he, too, was for ever writing verses. It was a hobby with him as well as an art; and his professionalism was merely less accomplished than that of Milton or Spenser:— ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... LOVE the old melodious lays Which softly melt the ages through, The songs of Spenser's golden days, Arcadian Sidney's silvery phrase, Sprinkling our noon of time ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... own country, formerly, the ladies appear to have been equally sensible to poetical or elegant names, such as Alicia, Celicia, Diana, Helena, &c. Spenser, the poet, gave to his two sons two names of this kind; he called one Silvanus, from the woody Kilcolman, his estate; and the other Peregrine, from his having been born in a strange place, and his mother then travelling. The fair Eloisa gave ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... nature is unbeautiful" [Tennyson]; "silently as a dream the fabric rose" [Cowper]; "some touch of nature's genial glow" [Scott]; "this majestical roof fretted with golden fire" [Hamlet]; "through knowledge we behold the World's creation" [Spenser]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... there comes to me the picture of the spotless dove in the tempest, as she battles with the storm, seeking for some place to rest her foot. She reminds me of innocence personified in Spenser's poem. In her girlhood, alone, heart-led, she comforts the slave in his quarters, mentally struggling with the problems his position wakes her to. Alone, not confused, but seeking something to lean on, she grasps the Church, which proves ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... attempting to solicit them from him. Let the event guide itself which way it will, I shall deserve of the age by bringing into the light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spenser wrote; whose poems in these English ones are as rarely imitated as sweetly excelled. Reader, if thou art eagle-eyed to censure their worth, I am not fearful to expose them ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... idea has been beautifully worked out by Spenser, in whom, and in Milton, the influence of Horace's poetry is perhaps more frequently traceable than in any ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... that he appeared in the second generation following Spenser and Shakespeare—he was born in Shakespeare's lifetime—and carried off the palm, which he still keeps, for the greatest English poem. In spiritual kinship he is much nearer to Spenser than to Shakespeare. Shakespeare hides behind ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... entitled "The Principles of Mountain Warfare." This may seem to be going a long way back, but Bourcet's volume and that of the young Comte de Guilbert on general tactics have historical interest and importance because, according to Spenser Wilkinson, they show where some of Napoleon's strategic "miracles" were born. Bourcet's observations are as vital as if they had been written in 1910, but, as will be seen, many of them ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... last passage, perhaps, meaning, knowledge, best expresses the sense. Ledden may have been one of the words which led Ben Jonson to charge Spenser with "affecting the ancients." However, I find it employed by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... the corporation, composed his "Amhra," or Praise of Columbkill, as a mark of gratitude from the whole order. That the works of Celtic poets possessed real literary merit, we have the authority of Spenser for believing. The author of the "Faerie Queene" was not the friend of the Irish, whom he assisted in plundering and destroying under Elizabeth. He could only judge of their books from English translations, not being sufficiently acquainted with the language to understand its niceties. Yet he ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... and earthly love, of voluptuous enjoyment of the present, blended and shadowed with a sense of the night that cometh, which delights us in the prose of the Heptameron, and in the verse not only of all the Pleiade poets in France, but of Spenser, Donne, and some of their followers in England. The scale of the stories, which are sometimes mere anecdotes, is so small, the room for miscellaneous discourse in them is so scanty, and the absence of any connecting links, such as those of Margaret's ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... the treasures of classic lore in music and literature. Homer, Herodotus, Plato, she has read, with Tasso and his chivalrous lays, and Spenser and his stately verse. In music, Glueck and Gretry, Beethoven and Boieldieu's dulcet tones have helped to ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... one of the books which I should like to see, either in a translation or its own exquisite Greek, in the hands of every young man. It is not all fact. It is but a historic romance. But it is better than history. It is an ideal book, like Sidney's "Arcadia" or Spenser's "Fairy Queen"—the ideal self-education of an ideal hero. And the moral of the book—ponder it well, all young men who have the chance or the hope of exercising authority among your follow-men—the noble and most Christian moral of that heathen book is this: ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... side. Like all things else, they give us according to what we have. To him that hath shall be given. The fine lady may see in her fine diamonds only victory over a rival; the philosopher may read embodied in them law inexorably beautiful; and the Christian poet—oh, I have read my Spenser, Mr. Warlock!—will choose the diamond for its many qualities, as the best and only substance wherein to represent the shield of the faith that overcometh the world. Like the gospel itself, diamonds are a savour of life unto life, or a savour of death unto death, according to the ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... a preacher in England as he (the devil) is. Who is able to tel his dylygent preaching? which every daye and every houre laboreth to sowe Cockel and Darnel" (Latimer's Fourth Sermon). And to the same effect Spenser— ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... he won the world for her domain, Her loins brought forth, her fostering bosom fed Souls that have swept the spiritual seas From heaven to hell, and justified her crown. For round the throne of great Elizabeth Spenser and Burleigh, Sidney and Verulam, Clustered like stars, rare Jonson like the crown Of Cassiopeia, Marlowe ruddy as Mars, And over all those mighty hearts arose The soul of Shakespeare brooding far and wide Beyond our small horizons, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... he, Landor, failed to appreciate Chaucer, the old man, much vexed, refuted such a falsehood, saying: "On the contrary, I am a great admirer of his. I am extremely fond of the 'Canterbury Tales.' I much prefer Chaucer to Spenser; for allegory, when spun out, is unendurable." It is strange that a man apparently so well read as Mr. Pycroft should have so unjustly interpreted Landor, when it needed but a passing reference to the Conversations to disprove his statement. By ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Welsh. And in 1588 there had appeared, by the help of Archbishop Whitgift, the Welsh Bible of William Morgan. It was the appearance of this Bible that aroused the first real welcome to the Reformation. But the Reformation that gave England a Spenser and a Shakespeare aroused no new life in Wales, not a single hymn or a ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... Spenser is wrapt in a similar obscurity to that which hides from us his great predecessor Chaucer, and his still greater contemporary Shakspere. As in the case of Chaucer, our principal external authorities are a few meagre entries in certain official documents, and such facts as may ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... single taste in common. The wife loved balls, masques, hawking, and all sorts of gaiety; she delighted in admiration and loved to be surrounded by young gallants who had served in the wars under Sydney and Essex, and who could flatter her with apt quotations from the verses of Spenser and Surrey. The husband, on the contrary, detested everything in the form of fun and frolic, loved nothing but law and money, loathed extravagance and cared for no society, except that of middle-aged barristers and old judges. As might be expected, the ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... are far greater than and of a different kind from those of history. Edmund Spenser wrote three centuries ago "by these old customs the descent of nations can only be proved where other monuments of writings are not remayning,"[3] and yet the descent of nations is still being proved without the aid of folklore. It is certain that the appeal will not be made to its fullest extent ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... enter, where they found The accursed man low sitting on the ground, Musing full sadly in his sullen mind. SPENSER. ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Littleton, was a lovely girl. Her name, which, from the ugly abbreviation of Dolly, has gone out of vogue, was popular with our fathers. It was borne by the brides of Patrick Henry, of James Madison, and of Henry Tazewell. It was honored in the strains of Spenser, in the sparkling prose of Sir Philip Sidney, and in the flowing verse of Waller; and finely shadows forth what a true woman ought to be and is—the gift of God. It was a favorite name in England, and evoked the sweetest measures of the poet Waller; and has ever been, probably from this ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... law-books. He might have assisted a young man by the name of Blackstone in compiling his "Commentaries," as their lodgings were not far apart, but he did not. They met occasionally, and when they did they always discussed Spenser or Milton, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... to dazzle her with my own erudition, and launched into a harangue that would have done honor to an institute. Pope, Spenser, Chaucer, and the old dramatic writers were all dipped into, with the excursive flight of a swallow. I did not confine myself to English poets, but gave a glance at the French and Italian schools; ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... and prayer-book, Shakespeare, Spenser, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Lowell's Fable for Critics, Walton's Complete Angler, and ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... streaming o'er the leaves, And down the symbol-carved sides. Behold! Unbidden, yet most welcome, who be these? The high-priests of this altar, poet-kings;— Chaucer, still young with silvery beard that seems Worthy the adoration of a child; And Spenser, perfect master, to whom all Sweet graces ministered. The shut eye weaves A picture;—the immortals pass along Into the heaven, and others follow still, Each on his own ray-path, till all the field Is threaded with the ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... you Spenser; perhaps you had better begin with the Hymn to Beauty, page 39, and then go on to the Tears; but you'll see how you like it. It's better than Longfellow; ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin |
