"Homer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... life—the life story of the spider, the fly, the bee, the wasp, and other insects—told by one who was at once a lover of nature, a great scientist, and a most entertaining writer. Maeterlinck calls Fabre the "insects' Homer," and declares that his work is as much a classic as the famous Greek epic, and deserves to be known and ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... his mother's, and attended the school kept by the Rev. James Marye, in Fredericksburg. It has been universally asserted by his biographers that he studied no foreign language, but direct proof to the contrary exists in a copy of Patrick's Latin translation of Homer, printed in 1742, the fly-leaf of a copy of which bears, in a school-boy ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) to Corfu. Yet such a course taken now would land the traveller in Africa. Odysseus is said in his voyage in springtime to have seen the Pleiades and Arcturus setting late, which seemed to early commentators a proof of Homer's inaccuracy. Likewise Homer, both in the Odyssey [2] (v. 272-5) and in the Iliad (xviii. 489), asserts that the Great Bear never set in those latitudes. Now it has been found that the precession of the equinoxes explains ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... four short words his epitaph, Sublimely simple, nobly plain; Who adds to them but addeth chaff, Obscures with husks the golden grain. Not all the bards of other days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could bring to that one simple phrase What were not rather loss than gain; That elegy so briefly fine, That epic writ in half a line, That little which so much conveys, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Idea? Could we believe that, in achieving this task, not one, but several, were intellectual magicians enough to solve that great problem of producing compositions in a form independent of language,—of laying on colors which do not fade by time; so that while Homer, Shakspeare, Milton, suffer grievous wrong the moment their thoughts are transferred into another tongue, these men should have written so that their wonderful narrative naturally adapts itself to every dialect ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Samothracia, in which last she founded an asylum. After these transactions, Myrina, accompanied with Mopsus the diviner, made an expedition into Thrace, which was the ultimate of her progress; for she was supposed to have been here slain. According to Homer she died in Phrygia: for he takes notice of her tomb in the plains of Troas; and represents it as ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... though he said little save to guide Beatrice and warn her of unusual difficulties, felt the somber magic of the place. No poet, he; only a man of hard and practical details. Yet he realized that, were he dowered with the faculty, here lay matter for an Epic of Death such as no Homer ever dreamed, no Virgil ever could ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... marque from the Presidents. He is the most interesting and the most original personage of the South African War: and when its history is mellowed by time, and its epic is written by some Walter Scott or Homer of the future, De Wet will be the central figure, and his exploits ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... being their great sea-port, whence their ships put forth to trade with Cyprus and Rhodes, Greece, Sardinia, Sicily, Gaul, and Spain. Little is known of the state of trade in those days, or of the form or size of ancient vessels. Homer tells us, in his account of the Trojan War, that the Phoenicians supplied the combatants with many articles of luxury; and from Scripture we learn that the same enterprising navigators brought gold to Solomon from Ophir in ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... 2. Mrs. Homer A. Payne invites Miss Eva Milton to dine with her next week Thursday at eight o'clock. ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... will remain. An Englishman who never saw the frescoes in the Vatican may yet, from engravings, form some notion of the exquisite grace of Raphael, and of the sublimity and energy of Michael Angelo. And so the genius of Homer is seen in the poorest version of the Iliad; the genius of Cervantes is seen in the poorest version of Don Quixote. Let it not be supposed that I wish to dissuade any person from studying either the ancient languages or the languages of modern Europe. Far from ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... letters which the editors let us see was written at the age of fifteen. "I have," she says, "been busily engaged reading Paradise Lost. Homer hurried me along with rapid impetuosity; every passion that he portrayed I felt; I loved, hated, and resented just as he inspired me. But when I read Milton I felt elevated 'above this visible, diurnal sphere.' I could not but admire such astonishing grandeur of description, such heavenly sublimity ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... I was born on de twentieth of July, 1879. Count up—dat makes me 79 (born 1859), don't it? My daddy's name was Sam, same as mine, and mammy's was Mollie. Dey was slaves on de plantation of Capt. Scott—yes suh, Capt. John R. Homer Scott—at Dover. My name is Sam, same as my father's, of course. Everybody in de old days knowed Sam Scott. My father died in slavery times, but mother lived several ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... offending the sensibility of scholars, I have adopted the old English spelling of Michael Angelo's name, feeling that no orthographical accuracy can outweigh the associations implied in that familiar title. Michael Angelo has a place among the highest with Homer and Titian, with Virgil and Petrarch, with Raphael and Paul; nor do I imagine that any alteration for the better would be effected by substituting for these time-honoured names Homeros and Tiziano, Vergilius and Petrarca, Raffaello ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... frankness with you so far as I may. Our reason for advertising for information regarding Miss Mona Forester was this: I received recently a communication from a lawyer in London, desiring me to look up a person so named, and stating that a certain Homer Forester—a wool merchant of Australia—had just died in London while on his way home to America, and had left in his lawyer's hands a will bequeathing all that he possessed to a niece, Miss Mona Forester, or her heirs, ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... "Poor Uncle Homer!" exclaimed the lieutenant. "He has been very unfortunate. The last time I saw him, I conducted him to my father's place at Bonnydale, after he had been a prisoner on board of the Chateaugay. He was on parole then, and I suppose he and ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... mountaineers, not addicted to the sea. The one tribe were to be eventually the founders of Athens; the other, of Sparta. Besides these two main tribes, the Aeolians occupied Thessaly, Boeotia, Aetolia, and other districts. To them the Achaeans, who were supreme in Peloponnesus in the days of Homer, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... fatigue or illness has sharpened the nerves, hoardings covered with advertisements, the fronts of big theatres, big London hotels, and all architecture which has been made to impress the crowd. What blindness did for Homer, lameness for Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint you will, bad health did for him by making him ask no more of life than that it should keep him living, and above all perhaps by concentrating his imagination upon one thought, health itself. I think that all noble things ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... is in Homer) the word always means "helper," and Stein translates it so here, "thou shalt be protector and patron of Tegea" (in the place of Orestes). Mr. Woods explains it by the parallel of such phrases as {Danaoisi makhes epitarrothoi}, to mean "thou shalt be a helper ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... for a moment to say good-bye to their dusky Homer. But the call was very brief. All her thoughts were filled with the folks at the Terrace, and dawn in the morning had been decided on for the ten-mile row home, so anxious was she to greet her mother, and so lively was her interest in the wonderful foreigner whom ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... not here to describe the effects which gunpowder and grape- shot had had on the walls of Antwerp. Let the curious in these matters read the horrors of the siege of Troy, or the history of Jerusalem taken by Titus. The one may be found in Homer, and the other in Josephus. Or if they prefer doings of a later date there is the taking of Sebastopol, as narrated in the columns of the "Times" newspaper. The accounts are equally true, instructive, and intelligible. In the mean time allow the Rev. Augustus Horne and myself to enter ...
— The Relics of General Chasse • Anthony Trollope
... the Iowa State University despatched to Laysan a scientific expedition in charge of Prof. Homer R. Dill. The party landed on the island on April 24 and remained until June 5, and the report of Professor Dill (U.S. Department of Agriculture) is consumedly interesting to the friends of birds. Here is what he has said regarding the ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... for it! There, my hair will do!" said Angelique, giving a glance in the great Venetian mirror before her. Her freshly donned robe of blue silk, edged with a foam of snowy laces and furbelows, set off her tall figure. Her arms, bare to the elbows, would have excited Juno's jealousy or Homer's verse to gather efforts in praise of them. Her dainty feet, shapely, aspiring, and full of character as her face, were carelessly thrust forward, and upon one of them lay a flossy spaniel, a privileged pet of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Ambrose would gladly have given up taking pupils. He was growing old and his sight was beginning to trouble him; he was very weary of Thucydides, of Homer, of the works of Mr. Todhunter of which the green bindings expressed a hope still unrealised, of conic sections—even of his beloved Horace. He was tired of the stupidities of the dull young men who were sent to him because they could not ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... Signor Segretario, if thou hast found no least trace of the great philosopher Zeno in the ancient city of Cition that was his birthplace; nor of Homer, that maker of literature, who hath, perchance, won space enough in the estimate of mankind to be worthy the brief thought of a child—even of thine—a scholar seeking for truth—he being the ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... question remains unanswered: Who wrote Shakspeare? a question, we humbly think, which might be made the theme for as much critical sagacity, pertinacity, and pugnacity, as the almost equally interesting question, who wrote Homer? In the former case, the question is certainly in one respect more simple, for the recognised plays and poems that go by Shakspeare's name are—at least by far the larger portion—unquestionably from one and the same ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... amplifiyng called reasonynge, when of those thinges that eyther folowe or go before, the hearer doth gather how great that thynge is that we wolde to be amplified. By thynges that go before, as when Homer armeth Achylles, or Hector to batayle, by the greate preparacion, we gather how sore y^e sight shal be. Of thinges y^t folowe: How much wyne Antony dranke, when y^t hauyng such a strong body he was not able to digeste it, ...
— A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes • Richard Sherry
... Homer, whom he venerated as the prince of poets, Johnson remarked that the advice given to Diomed[384] by his father, when he sent him to the Trojan war, was the noblest exhortation that could be instanced in any heathen writer, and comprised in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... fruit, the consequence of digging? Now, I want you to dig Sophy; a Sanscrit, or a Hindostanee, or a Persian treasure will do equally well as a pretext. If she had announced a taste for the differential calculus, I should have said the same. Only dig her, as Maurice dug me apropos to Homer. I wouldn't bother you, only you see no one else could either do it, or be the same ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the mere pleasure which it affords; it soon becomes a kind of task-reading, and it requires some effort and resolution to carry us on to the end of his long performance. This effect, of which every one is conscious, is usually ascribed to the change of manners: but manners have more changed since Homer's age; and yet that poet remains still the favorite of every reader of taste and judgment. Homer copied true natural manners, which, however rough or uncultivated, will always form an agreeable and interesting picture; but the pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... banner until it almost covered the floor and then he muttered gloomily: "Men are like leaves in the wind; the wind blows the leaves to the ground, [Footnote: Homer] and—but no," he interrupted himself, "I shall write my name on every rock and every mountain in Europe, and fasten it there with iron-clasps in such a manner that no winds shall blow it away! Oh, footmen! come in, roll up the banner again, and put it ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... about the rules in Pope's Preface. That Pope respected them cannot be doubted, else he would not have spoken so well of Rymer, and in the critical notes added to his Homer we should not hear so much of Le Bossu's treatise on the Epic.(11) But Pope was a discreet man, who knew when to be silent. He regarded it as a misfortune that Shakespeare was not so circumstanced as to be able to write on the model of the ancients, but, unlike the pedant theorists, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... cheerfulness that has no effort about it. She laughed tenderly at my fears, and sent me out for a walk with Maggie. I fear I was a gloomy companion. In the evening I went to sit with Alec a little. He was wakeful, large-eyed, and restless. He lay with a book of stories from Homer, of which he is very fond, in one hand, the other clasping his black kitten, which slept peacefully on the counterpane. He wanted to talk, but to keep him quiet I told him a long trivial story, full of unexciting ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... be the last, the very last, to reflect upon my mother's sister in general conversation; but Doctor Stedman being our family physician as well as our lifelong friend, and Cousin Homer one of the family, I may without impropriety, I trust, dwell on a point which distresses me in our venerable relation. Aunt Marcia is—I grieve ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... From that very moment President Barbicane and the influential members of the Gun Club were besieged day and night by formidable claims. If seven cities of Greece contended for the honor of having given birth to a Homer, here were two entire States threatening to come to blows about the ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... air, the most extravagant proposals were made. "People," said one of these orators, mounting on a chair, "it will be unfortunate, should this perfidious king be brought back to us,—what should we do with him? He would come to us like Thersites to pour forth those big tears, of which Homer tells us; and we should be moved with pity. If he returns, I propose that he be exposed for three days to public derision, with the red handkerchief on his head, and that he be then conducted from stage to stage to the frontier, and that he be then kicked ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... to the public for the only consolation left him on this side of the grave. It was not sufficient to write, for it is he as the Homer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... which raged between Richard Bentley and his opponents concerning the authenticity of the "Epistles of Phalaris," nor how literary Germany was divided into two hostile camps by Wolf's attack on the personality of Homer. It is no less fresh in the minds of critics how that modern Jupiter, Lessing, waged a long and bitter battle with the Titans of the French classical drama, and finally crushed them with the thunderbolt ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... youngsters have written as good, or better, Odes to the Moon, Stanzas on a Favourite Canary, Lines on a Butterfly. What is much more to the point is, that at the age of eight he was able not only to read, but to take delight in Pope's translation of Homer. He used to go about declaiming certain couplets with an air of intense earnestness highly diverting to ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... to doing this. He is more elastic, less devoted to system. Without being as free, as sensitive to impressions as we like to see an artist of his powers, he escapes pedantry. His subject is not "The Rape of the Sabines," but "The Apotheosis of Homer," academic but not academically fatuitous. To follow the inspiration of the Vatican Stanze in the selection and treatment of ideal subjects is to be far more closely in touch with contemporary feeling as to what is legitimate and proper in imaginative painting, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... men did anything, it was after they had left the academy, and began thinking for themselves. There is only one picture among the many hundreds that has, to my idea, much merit (a charming composition of Homer singing, signed Jourdy); and the only good that the Academy has done by its pupils was to send them to Rome, where they might learn better things. At home, the intolerable, stupid classicalities, taught by men who, belonging to the least erudite country ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which had wakened the whole household, he had been unable to go to sleep again and he had gone from his sleeping chamber into an adjoining room, and, lighting a lamp, had taken down and read out of the "Iliad" of Homer. After he had been reading for about half an hour he heard a voice calling him very distinctly by his name, but as soon as the sound had ceased he was not quite certain whether he had heard it or not. At that moment one of his slaves, who had been born in ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... and gentleman watched the pair with interest and amusement; for both liked young people, and were anxious to know these two better, since they were to be their guides and guardians for six months. Professor Homer was going abroad to look up certain important facts for his great historical work, and as usual took his wife with him; for they had no family, and the good lady was ready to march to any quarter of the globe at short notice. Fearing to be lonely while her husband pored over old papers ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... sixth, and, if I mistake not, he had no opportunity of attending the most difficult and the most honorable of school business, when the Greek plays were taught—and it was the custom at Harrow to teach these at least every year. He went through his lessons in Horace, and Virgil, and Homer well enough for a time. But, in the absence of the upper master, Doctor Sumner, it once fell in my way to instruct the two upper forms, and upon calling up Dick Sheridan, I found him not only slovenly in construing, but unusually defective in his Greek grammar. Knowing him to be a clever fellow, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... of completing the transfer of souls. The fact that he hurried along was not due to a fear of being late (seeing that the President of the Local Council was an intimate acquaintance of his, as well as a functionary who could shorten or prolong an interview at will, even as Homer's Zeus was able to shorten or to prolong a night or a day, whenever it became necessary to put an end to the fighting of his favourite heroes, or to enable them to join battle), but rather to a feeling that he would like to have the affair concluded as ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... received a piece of gold for every good verse he wrote in celebration of the glorious deeds of his master. The quality of his verses may be estimated from the remark attributed to Alexander, that he would rather be the Thersites of Homer than the Achilles of Choerilus. The epitaph on Sardanapalus, said to have been translated from the Chaldean (quoted in Athenaeus, viii. p. 336), is generally supposed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... real value of the book consists in the graphic and accurate picture which it gives of the world as it was a thousand years before the Christian Era. King David, King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, and even Homer are among the characters Captain Mago meets in his journeys ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... branches over a little green, surrounded by barns and cottages. I have seen few places more retired and peaceful. I send for a chair and table from the old woman's, and there I drink my coffee and read Homer. It was by accident that I discovered this place one fine afternoon: all was perfect stillness; everybody was in the fields, except a little boy about four years old, who was sitting on the ground, and holding between his knees a child of about six months; ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... not often dwelt on parallels to be found in the works of earlier poets. In many cases Tennyson deliberately reproduced passages from Greek, Latin, and old Italian writers, just as Virgil did in the case of Homer, Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and others. There are, doubtless, instances in which a phrase is unconsciously reproduced by automatic memory, from an English poet. But I am less inclined than Mr Bradley to think that unconscious reminiscence is more common ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... the text "of Tor": see vol. ii. 242. The pear is mentioned by Homer and grows wild in South Europe. Dr. Victor Hehn (The Wanderings of Plants, etc.) comparing the Gr. {Greek letters} with the Lat. Pyrus, suggests that the latter passed over to the Kelts and Germans amongst whom the fruit ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... rude To eat so much—all is so good." But as he spoke, bounce from the hall Rushed chaplain, butler, dogs, and all. Oh! for the heart of Homer's mice Or gods, to save them in a trice; It was by miracle they think, For ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... with the best models: Pheedrus, Virgil, Horace and Terence amongst the Latins; Plutarch, Homer and Plato, amongst the Greeks; Rabelais, Marot and d'Urfe, amongst the French; Tasso, Ariosto and Boccaccio, amongst ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... of Homer, not elect in vain, Deep trumpets blow before thee, shawms behind Mix music with the rolling wheels that wind Slow through the labouring triumph of thy train: Fierce history, molten in thy forging brain, Takes form and fire and fashion from thy mind, Tormented and transmuted out of kind: But howsoe'er ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... whole army, moved by this presage, determined to pursue the project of their general; and Xenophon orders sacrifices to Jupiter, the preserver. This religious reverence for sneezing, so ancient and so universal even in the time of Homer, always excited the curiosity of the Greek philosophers and the rabbins. These last spread a tradition, that, after the creation of the world, God made a law to this purport, that every man should sneeze but once ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... many men are weighted for the race of life is depression of spirits. I wonder whether this used to be as common in former days as it is now. There was, indeed, the man in Homer who walked by the seashore in a very gloomy mood; but his case seems to have been thought remarkable. What is it in our modern mode of life and our infinity of cares, what little thing is it about the matter of the brain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... merits was the unexpected spontaneity of their humour—the faculty that is distinctive of some of the best of his mots, such as that when looking at Edmund Yates's book-shelves which caused him to pause before one of the volumes and read off "Homer's Iliad," and murmur, "Homer's—Yes—that is the best." On one occasion he, with Mr. George Chester (my informant), was on a visit to Mark Lemon at Crawley, and at the breakfast-table a discussion arose between the two men upon ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... roused up Warren Smith, the prosecutor, the missing editor's most intimate friend in Carlow, and Homer, the sheriff, and Jared Wiley, the deputy. William Todd had rung the alarm. The first thing to do was to find him. After that there would be trouble—if not before. It looked as if there would be trouble before. The men tramping up to the muddy Square in their shirt-sleeves were ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... stages in the history of scholarship during the Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire; Petrarch poring over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... that, all these extraordinary circumstances considered, the task of determining to what government he naturally owed allegiance, would be at least as difficult as that of ascertaining the so much contested birthplace of Homer. ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... is sweetened which is extended to the sick child, so may he, by beauties not quite Christian, attract mankind to read his whole poem to their health." Such is the stately soaring of the epical Muse, the Muse of ideal history. Scholars find Greece completely prefigured in Homer, and the time may come when Dante and Tasso shall be the leading authorities for the history of the Middle Ages, and Milton for that of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... heading Leonardo appears to mean Cyprus, which was always considered by the ancients to be the home and birth place of Aphrodite (Kirpic in Homer).] ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... easy, practised by a great poet because at the moment he had nothing to express. But art is always difficult and cannot be made easy by this means. We need not take a malicious pleasure in such lapses of the great poet; but it is well to know when Homer nods, even though he uses all his craft to pretend that he is wide awake. Criticism may have a negative as well as a positive value. It may set us on our guard against professionalism even in the greatest artists, and most of all in ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... turn for astonishment came to Petronius, for he had not expected to hear verses of Homer from the lips of a maiden of whose barbarian extraction he had heard previously from Vinicius. Hence he looked with an inquiring glance at Pomponia; but she could not give him an answer, for she was looking at that moment, with a smile, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... stories, for they show that the Greeks were so deeply moved by music that they could readily imagine it to have a similar effect on animals, and even on inanimate objects. Almost three thousand years ago, Homer represented Achilles as "comforting his heart with the sound of the lyre," after losing his sweet Briseis; "stimulating his courage and singing the deeds of the heroes." And, as Emil Naumann fancies, there is a moral underlying ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... engravings on the wall. This study-chair was made out of the twisted roots of a banyan. A dog, sleek-skinned, lies on the mat, and gets up as you come in. There stand in vermilion all the poets from Homer to Tennyson. Here and there are chamois heads and pressed seaweed. He writes on gilt-edged paper with a gold pen and handle twisted with a serpent. His inkstand is a mystery of beauty which unskilled hands dare not touch, lest the ink spring at him from ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... forgot most of it. But when progress took place, what did it mean? First it meant Caesar, with the foreknowledge that to master Caesar meant only being set at Virgil, with the culminating horror of Greek and Homer in reserve at the end of that. I preferred Caesar, because his statement that Gaul is divided into three parts, though neither interesting nor true, was the only Latin sentence I could translate at sight: therefore the longer we stuck at Caesar the better I was pleased. Just so do ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... represent the parties to it talking as the occasion requires; and this produces that mixed species of poetry, composed of narrative and dialogue, which is very universal in all languages, and of which Homer is the noblest example in any. This mixed kind of poetry seems also to be most perfect, as it takes in a variety of situations, circumstances, reflections, and descriptions, which must be rejected ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... faster when he knows that he hath old and tried friends on either side of him. Many of these country places I came to know afterwards from the talk of the men, and many others I have travelled through, so that the names upon the banners have come to have a real meaning with me. Homer hath, I remember, a chapter or book wherein he records the names of all the Grecian chiefs and whence they came, and how many men they brought to the common muster. It is pity that there is not some Western Homer who could record the names of these brave peasants and artisans, and recount what each ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... old man, When you cannot preserve your own position." This adventure in itself, without going further, Might serve as a lesson, to most of mankind, For of us mortals, a certain part inclines, To the belief, that, with the help of mind, The book of Destiny may easily be read, But this book, by Homer and his disciples sung, What is it called but Chance, by ancients, And by us Christians named Providence instead. Now in Chance there can no science be, Or why should it be called by them Chance— And things uncertain, who knows ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... religion, by many a fanciful skeptic, has been called barren and gloomy; but setting aside all the legends of the Jews, and confining ourselves entirely to the generally received Scriptures, there will be found sufficient food for an imagination warm as that of Homer, Apelles, Phidias, or Praxiteles. It is astonishing that such rich materials for poetry should for so many centuries have been so little ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... bards, the masters of song. First, Orpheus taught you religious rites, and from bloody murder to stay your hands: Musaeus healing and oracle lore; and Hesiod all the culture of lands, The time to gather, the time to plough. And gat not Homer his glory divine By singing of valour, and honour, and right, and the sheen of the battle-extended line, The ranging of troops and the arming ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... tasted—operated soothingly upon his thought and fancy, and plunged him into those reveries, so dear alike to poet and mathematician. To the thinker the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which, like Homer's chain, extend, link after link; from earth to heaven. The sunny motes, that in a glancing column came through the lattice, called Warner from the real day,—the day of strife and blood, with thousands hard by driving each other to the Hades,—and ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thinker's art, they spoke of Sophia or wisdom; when they heard the first preacher who told them of their innermost selves, they called him the Prophetes or prophet, the man that speaketh forth as from an illimitable deep; and when they listened to the soul of music coming from the lips of a Homer or a Sappho, they called it by the most expressive name of all, "making" or "creation". The poet was a creator. And so he is if we come to think of it. Out of the materials supplied to him by the thinking of other intelligences, he weaves his song of joy and beauty which holds our senses ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... cities claim great Homer dead, Through which the living Homer begged his bread." So sang, as if the thought had been his own, An unknown bard, improving on a known. "Neglected genius!"—that is sad indeed, But malice better would ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... appetite of an ostrich. Well, in one way, that will be fortunate, since we are living, as you may see, in a somewhat Homeric fashion. Carrambo! you will be deeming my manners quite as rude as the roughest of Homer's heroes. I am forgetting to introduce you to one of whom you've heard me speak. Though it don't so much signify, since the lady has made your acquaintance already. Permit me ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... any knowledge. The reading of Virgil was a daring innovation of the eighteenth century. The only Greek required was that of the New Testament and the Greek Catechism. The whole rich domain of ancient Greek literature, from Homer to Theokritos, was as much an unexplored territory as the Baghavad-Gita or the Mababharata. Logic and metaphysic and scholastic disputations occupied a prominent place. As late as 1726, the books most conspicuous in Tutor Flynt's official report of the College exercises, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... remain 195 Where still it works, though hidden from all search Among the depths of time. Yet is it just That here, in memory of all books which lay Their sure foundations in the heart of man, Whether by native prose, or numerous verse, [E] 200 That in the name of all inspired souls— From Homer the great Thunderer, from the voice That roars along the bed of Jewish song, And that more varied and elaborate, Those trumpet-tones of harmony that shake 205 Our shores in England,—from those loftiest notes Down to the low and wren-like warblings, made For cottagers and spinners ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... a knowledge of Goethe, of Kant, or Shakespeare; it is not a knowledge of the poets, the scientists, the philosophers, all whom the world holds greatest in the realm of thought; it is a knowledge of Thee, my God, to know whom is life eternal! Men think they can know Homer, Plato, Confucius—and so they can. But they think they can not know Thee! And yet Thou art nearer to us than the air we breathe, for Thou art Life! What is there out in the world among the multifold interests of mankind that can equal in importance a demonstrable knowledge of Thee? ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... wickedness, and have become incurable through such crimes, are made an example to others, and suffer forever ([Greek: paschontas ton aei chronon]) the greatest, most agonizing, and most dreadful punishment." And Socrates adds that "Homer (Odyssey xi. 575) also bears witness to this; for he represents kings and potentates, Tantalus, Sysiphus, and Tityus, as being tormented forever in Hades" ([Greek: en adon ton aei chronon timoronmenos]).-In the Aztec or Mexican theology, "the wicked, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... The heroines of Homer's tales were all of noble birth—they were goddesses, princesses, hereditary gentlewomen. In early historic times, also, it was only royal or gentle blood that secured for woman political power. Athena was, in gentle Athens, patroness of household arts; ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... return it in thunder. As truly say that storms can exhaust the sky, as that poems can exhaust the blue dome of poesy. We doubt, too, the dictum that the earliest poets are uniformly the best. Who knows not that many prefer Eschylus to Homer; and many, Virgil to Lucretius; and many, Milton to Shakspeare; and that a nation sets Goethe above all men, save Shakspeare; and has not the toast been actually given, "To the two greatest of poets—Shakspeare and Byron?" To settle the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... gates. Although in the last three or four weeks he had endured more actual hardships than in all his life before, he had enjoyed them thoroughly and felt that they were hardening him into a man. He understood now why the tales he had read at school in his Homer and Ovid—tales of Ulysses, of Hercules and Perseus—were never sorrowful, however severe the heroes' labours. For were they not undergone in just such a shining ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... country, and next to religion is patriotism. No praise goes beyond its deserts. It is sublime in its heroic oblation upon the field of battle. "Oh glorious is he," exclaims in Homer the Trojan warrior, "who for his country falls!" It is sublime in the oft-repeated toil of dutiful citizenship. "Of all human doings," writes Cicero, "none is more honorable and more estimable than to merit well ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... though classic, is by no means an elegant or ingenious fiction, but which we are astonished to find in an obscure district, and in the Celtic tongue, seeming to argue some connexion or communication between these remote Highlands of Scotland and the readers of Homer in former days, which we cannot account for. After all, perhaps, some Churchman more learned than his brethren may have transferred the legend from Sicily to Duncrune, from the shores of the Mediterranean to those of Loch Lomond. I have heard ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... elegant and pleasing mould, of a just height, well-proportioned, and with due regard to symmetry.... His countenance was handsome and prepossessing.... His manners were captivating, noble, and dignified, yet unaffectedly condescending.... Homer, as well as Virgil, was familiar to the Prince of Wales; and his memory, which was very tenacious, enabled him to cite with graceful readiness the favourite passages of either poet."—The Historical ... Memoirs of Sir N.W. Wraxall, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... to honour and obey a primate or bishop, to whom the nickname of Golias was given at the period in which they flourished most. Viewed in his literary capacity, this chief was further designated as the Archpoet. Of his personality we know as little as we do of that of Homer. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... from heaven, but kindled with brands, borrowed from Greek and Hebrew altars, the inspiration which sent up the incense-poetry of a Lost Paradise. And all the while that Maro sang 'Arms and the Man,' a refrain from the harp of Homer was sounding in his ears, unto whose tones so piously he keyed and measured his own notes, that oftentimes we fancy we can hear the strains of 'rocky Scio's blind old bard' mingling in the Mantuan's melody. If thus it has been ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... in prance the village selectmen followed by the deacons of the church. When they came into view I knew the bell had rung on Sabrina, the souse. They all came in looking like the first act of a funeral, and Homer Jenkins, the head deaconorine, looked real solemn, and said, 'We regret to inform you that we have found it our painful duty to dismiss your daughter from the church.' I spoke up real gay like and said, 'Go as far as you like, I never was ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... the State Suffrage Association, Mrs. Homer M. Hill, said in her official report: "The People's Party was composed of Silver Republicans, Populists and Democrats. At the State convention these met in separate sessions. The Democrats voted down a resolution demanding that the Committee on Platform bring in a report favoring the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... PAPER, of the same size as the preceding. This was the sale catalogue of the library of Caillard, who died in 1807, in his sixty-ninth year, and of whose bibliomaniacal spirit we have a most unequivocal proof in his purchasing De Cotte's celebrated uncut copy of the first printed Homer, at an enormous sum! [vide COTTE, post.] "Sa riche bibliotheque est a-la-fois un monument de son amour pour l'art typographique, et de la vaste etendue de ses connoissances," p. xiv. Some excellent indexes close this volume; of which Mr. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... banks of the Meles was shown the spot where Critheis, the mother of Homer, brought him into the world, and the cavern to which he retired to compose his immortal verses. A monument erected to his memory and inscribed with his name stood in the middle of the city—it was adorned with spacious porticos under which the ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... Greece, Lacedaemon, considering that Lycurgus their lawgiver was so addicted to elegant learning, as to have been the first that brought out of Ionia the scattered works of Homer, and sent the poet Thales from Crete to prepare and mollify the Spartan surliness with his smooth songs and odes, the better to plant among them law and civility, it is to be wondered how museless and unbookish they were, minding nought but the feats of war. ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... Strassburg to complete his law course. There Herder happened to be, even then a famed critic and scholar, and he aroused in Goethe a love and understanding of what was really great and genuine in literature: especially Homer, the Bible, Shakspere, and the Volkslied i.e., the simple folksong. In the fall of the year Goethe met Friederike Brion in the parsonage at Sesenheim, a village near Strassburg. Now Herder's teaching bore fruit in an outburst of real song (1, 2 and 4). The influence of the Volkslied ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... humanity, folded, saved, freighted to us here! Some of these tiny ships we call Old and New Testaments, Homer, Aeschylus, Plato, Juvenal, etc. Precious Minims! ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... sometimes in The Times or The Guardian, and hoped fervently that King's School would remain true to its old traditions. The dead languages were taught with such thoroughness that an old boy seldom thought of Homer or Virgil in after life without a qualm of boredom; and though in the common room at dinner one or two bolder spirits suggested that mathematics were of increasing importance, the general feeling was that they were a less noble study than ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the sound, than I beheld Four mighty spirits toward us bend their steps, Of semblance neither sorrowful nor glad. When thus my master kind began: "Mark him, Who in his right hand bears that falchion keen, The other three preceding, as their lord. This is that Homer, of all bards supreme: Flaccus the next in satire's vein excelling; The third is Naso; Lucan is the last. Because they all that appellation own, With which the voice singly accosted me, Honouring they greet me thus, and well they judge." So I beheld ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici Notes on Junius Notes on Barclay's 'Argenis' Note in Casaubon's 'Persius' Notes on Chapman's Homer Note in Baxter's 'Life of Himself' Fragment of an Essay on Taste Fragment ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... have I travelled in the realms of gold." He must have set out early enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on Cowden Clarke's table by breakfast time. And by the way, did you know that the copy of Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to the financial editor of the Times? Never did financial editor ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the best chamber in his house. Up to the 29th day of the month, the Colonel was cared for as a friend, and exhibited as a phenomenon. Seven photographers disputed the possession of so precious a sitter. The cities of Greece did no more for our poor old Homer. His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, wished to see him in propria persona, and begged Herr Hirtz to bring him to the palace. Fougas scratched his ear a little, and intimated that a soldier ought not to associate with the enemy, seeming to ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... concentrated shorthand which saved labour. They had no journals, since news which arrived telepathically or by some form of wireless was proclaimed to those who cared to listen, and on it all formed their own judgments. In the same way poems and even romances were repeated, as in Homer's day or in the time of the Norse sagas, by word of mouth. None of their secret knowledge was written down. Like the ritual of Freemasonry ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... of a fair woman Ilion suffered unspeakable tortures. But to us a single song of Homer is worth more than all these Hebrew writings. And yet a Trojan war of the intellect has been kindled concerning them. Here freedom of investigation, yonder with Hoogstraten and Tungern, fettering of the mind. Among us, the ardent yearning to hold aloft the new ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... will, there is a dignity about these Latin races, even in their trivial everyday movements. They suggest to me, as those lines of Homer suggested to Mr. Pater's Marius, thoughts which almost seem to be memories of a time when all the world ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... know whether those sweet visions which they had on faith's pillow are any more than illusions. Nor will they be satisfied and cease to think, by having a creed of three hundred or fifteen hundred year's antiquity recited to them. The modern intellects that have taken Homer to pieces, and excavated Agamemnon's tomb, and unwound the mummy wrappings of the Pharaohs, that have weighed the stars and chained the lightnings, are not to be awed by any old-time sheepskin or any council of bishops. They demand ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... The works of Homer are supposed to have done great injury to mankind by inspiring the love of military glory. Alexander was said to sleep with them always on his pillow. How like a mad butcher amid a flock of sheep appears the hero of the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... another way of saying that a mind orients itself by the widest contact with other minds. There are other ways of assuring this contact, and these should not be neglected; but only thru books can it approach universality both in space and in time. How else could we know exactly what Homer and St. Augustine and Descartes thought and what Tolstoi and Lord Kelvin and William James, we will say, are even ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... grand oracle of Homer's: "Thus vanished the dark war-clouds and we offered a sacrifice to new-born Peace. When the flame had consumed the thighs of the victim and its inwards had appeased our hunger, we poured out the libations of wine." 'Twas I who ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... preamble, judged it safe to inform her of the predicament in which they were placed. Mary turned pale, and crossed herself again and again, when she heard the imminent danger in which she had stood. But, like the Ulysses of Homer, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... is happily imagined."—Blair's Rhet., p. 452. "And the news came to my son, of his and the bride being in Dublin."—Castle Rackrent, p. 44. "There is no room for the mind's exerting any great effort."—Blair's Rhet., p. 32. "One would imagine, that these criticks never so much as heard of Homer's having written first."—Pope's Preface to Homer. "Condemn the book, for its not being a geography."—O. B. Peirce's Gram., p. 317. "There will be in many words a transition from their being the figurative to their being the proper signs ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... [Greek word]; but the intelligent writer Parthey doubts this Hellenic origin on etymological grounds, and also because etna was by no means regarded as a luminous beacon for ships or wanderers, in the same manner as the ever-travailing Stromboli (Strongyle), to which Homer seems to refer in the Odyssey (xii., 68, 202, and 219), and its geographical position was not so well determined. I suspect that tna would be found to be a Sicilian word, if we had any fragmentary materials to refer to. According to Diodorus (v., 6), the Sicani, or aborigines preceding the Sicilians, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... time to weaken the notion of ecclesiastical control. It was the triumphant return of an exile, with an uproarious popularity and a claim to compensation for arrears. The enthusiasm of those who were the first to read Homer, and Sophocles, and Plato grew into complaint against those by whose neglect such treasures had been lost. Centuries of ignorance and barbarism had been the consequence. There was not only a world ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... of my journey and of the lateness of the hour. In my sleep, I suppose in consequence of our conversation (for generally our thoughts and utterances by day have in our sleep an effect like that which Ennius describes in his own case as to Homer, [Footnote: The first verse of ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... reform. I earnestly hope that the people of Alabama will take the lead of southern States east of the Mississippi and follow the wise leadership of Texas and Missouri and other progressive commonwealths. There is no doubt of its ratification. Let Alabama lead and not follow." Homer S. Cummings, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and other prominent Democrats added their earnest appeals to the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... literatures". Under this head we have such glowing sentences as these: "Think of the many elements of thought a boy comes in contact with when he reads Caesar and Tacitus in succession, Herodotus and Homer, Thucydides and Aristotle". "See what is implied in having read Homer intelligently through, or Thucydides or Demosthenes; what light will have been shed on the essence and laws of human existence, on political society, on the relations ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... it to the gods; guests wore it at banquets; architectural forms were modelled upon it; it was employed in the ornamentation of thrones. Whether its root had the effect on men ascribed to it by Homer may be doubted; but no one ever saw it without recognizing it instantly as "a thing of beauty," and therefore ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... masters—that sight is for the few; but the chromo-maker can lift them all one step upward toward appreciation of art; they cannot have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and the singing-class lift them a little way toward that far height; they will never know Homer, but the passing rhymester of their day leaves them higher than he found them; they may never even hear of the Latin classics, but they will strike step with Kipling's drum-beat and they will march; ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... some contemporary folly or frivolity, does a man take up some piece of work hopelessly unremunerative, foredoomed to failure as far as money or fame go, some dealing with the classics of the world, Homer or Aristotle, Lucian or Moliere. It is like a bath after a day's toil, it is tonic and clean; and such studies, if not necessary to success, are, at least, conducive to mental health and self-respect ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... in the great market-place Rosa at once stopped, a sudden thought had struck her, just as Homer's Minerva seizes Achilles by the hair at the moment when he is about to be ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... truth-of-nature in Turner against the truth-of-art in Botticelli, or in the fine thinking of Ruskin against the fine soundings of Kipling, or in the wide expanse of Titian against the narrow-expanse of Carpaccio, or in some such distinction that Pope sees between what he calls Homer's "invention" and Virgil's "judgment"—apparently an inspired imagination against an artistic care, a sense of the difference, perhaps, between Dr. Bushnell's Knowing God and knowing about God. A more vivid explanation or illustration ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Forgetfulness, whelming the pride Of man, his shattered and forsaken bowers, His noiseless cities, and his prostrate towers. Some columns, eminent and awful, stand, Like Egypt's pillars on the lonely sand; We read upon their base, inscribed by Fame, A HOMER'S here, or here a SHAKESPEARE'S name; Yet think not of the surge, that soon may sweep Ourselves unnumbered to the oblivious deep. Yet time has been, as mouldering legends say,[56] When all yon western tract, and this ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... mile from a dentist, young feller? you're too used to settin' in the middle of creation and jerkin' the reins for the hoss to go. Jonas E. Homer had the teethache ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... sent emissaries to England. Thus, while the one insensibly imbibed new knowledge as well as devotion from the great centre, the other brought with them to our shores importations of books, including copies of such religious classics as Josephus and Chrysostom, and of such literary classics as Homer. About 680, died Caedmon, a monk of Whitby, one of the first who composed in Anglo-Saxon, and some of whose compositions are preserved. Strange and myth-like stories are told by Bede about this remarkable natural genius. He was originally a cow-herd. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... not had time to read it. It is a pity that we have no poets now in France, for the deeds of the last few years would have given a subject for a Homer or a Virgil. It seems that I can create kingdoms but not poets. Whom do you consider to be the ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... multitude of those who advanced towards THE GREAT CITY, let it be enough to say that they were as the stars in the heaven, or as the sand upon the sea-shore. They were, in the words of Homer, as many as the leaves and flowers of spring. But for the names of the leaders, though they are present in my memory, I will not relate them. The numbers of these would alone deter me, even if my language furnished the means of ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... justice (proceeds the letter-writer,) as some gentlemen insist upon, were to be observed in this art, there is no manner of reason why it should not be so little observed in Homer, that his Achilles is placed in the greatest point of glory and success, though his character is morally vicious, and only poetically good, if I may use the phrase of our modern critics. The AEnead is filled with innocent unhappy persons. Nisus and Euryalus, ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... the same day overtakes and passes by him, he ordered that day to be called "the old and the new," and that the part of it before their conjunction should belong to the old month, while the rest of the day after it belonged to the new one, being, it seems, the first to rightly interpret the verse of Homer— ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... a very old, a very beautiful art. Merely to think of it carries one's imaginary vision to scenes of glorious and touching antiquity. The tellers of the stories of which Homer's Iliad was compounded; the transmitters of the legend and history which make up the Gesta Romanorum; the travelling raconteurs whose brief heroic tales are woven into our own national epic; the grannies ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... you laugh, although you could not make the public laugh, by the narrative of nascent odes, epics, and didactics crying aloud on obsolete muses from childish lips. The Greeks were my demi-gods, and haunted me out of Pope's Homer, until I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of Moses the black pony. And thus my great "epic" of eleven or twelve years old, in four books, and called "The Battle of Marathon," and of which fifty copies were printed because papa was bent upon spoiling me—is Pope's Homer done over again, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... shedding tears contrasts strongly with the external stoicism of modern civilization; but it is true to Arab character, and Easterns, like the heroes of Homer and Italians of Boccacio, are not ashamed of what we look upon as the result of feminine ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... In ancient times Croesus lived here after he had made his pile, and at the present day great numbers of wealthy men make it their home, and there is a good deal of luxury seen in the suburbs. It has the trade from Asia Minor. Homer was born here, and wrote and sang his immortal poetry along its rocky shores. It was conquered by Alexander the Great, and after he had destroyed it he ordered it rebuilt a few miles farther off so as not to forget it, and it became very prosperous. The Knights of Malta and the Arabs ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... he had enough for the life of a secluded literary man without his salary, he rather thought he would give up his office altogether. He had a mutton chop at home that evening, and spent his time in endeavouring to read out aloud to himself certain passages from the Iliad;—for he had bought a Homer as he returned from his office. At nine o'clock he went, half-price, to the Strand Theatre. How he met there his old friend Boulger and went afterwards to "The Cock" and had a supper need not here be told with ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... the same athletic sports, the same martial exercise, as their men, were not ashamed to care for them, to win their friendship, even on emergency to consult their judgment; and used their rank, not to differ from their men, but to outvie them; not merely to command and be obeyed, but like Homer's heroes, or the old Norse vikings, to lead and be followed. Drake touched the true mainspring of English success when he once (in his voyage round the world) indignantly rebuked some coxcomb gentleman-adventurers with, "I should like to see ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... which are ill fed, beaten, and contemned. You feel that they think as much of themselves as other animals do, and that they are not the whole day long a butt for stupid jokes. Perhaps they are aware that Homer compared Ajax to an ass, a comparison which is ridiculous in the West; and they also remember that one of their ancestors bore Miriam, the Virgin Mother of Issa, under the sycamore of Matarieh. Their coat varies from dark-brown to white, through all the shades of ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... published Pope's "Homer," lived in a shop between the two Temple gates (No. 16). In an inimitable letter to the Earl of Burlington, Pope has described how Lintot (Tonson's rival) overtook him once in Windsor Forest, as he was riding down to Oxford. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... minds of the world from Homer to Humboldt, Shakspere never had an equal or superior, standing on the pinnacle of the pyramid of human renown, and lifting his mammoth mental form above the other philosophers of the earth as Mount St. Elias soars ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... superstitions: and everywhere by those even who reject them they are entertained with some degree of affectionate respect. That the ass, which in its very degradation still retains an under-power of sublimity, [Footnote: 'An under-power of sublimity.'— Everybody knows that Homer compared the Telamonian Ajax, in a moment of heroic endurance, to an ass. This, however, was only under a momentary glance from a peculiar angle of the case. But the Mahometan, too solemn, and also perhaps too stupid to catch the fanciful colors ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... sir." He waved his hand towards the encircling moors. "We have feasted more Homerico, and in Homer, you remember the host allowed his guest fourteen days before asking that question. Permit me to delay the answer only till I have poured libation on the turf here. Ah! I perceive the whisky is exhausted: but water shall suffice. May I trouble you—my joints are stiff—to fill your ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fortune can change, nor the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, nor age abolish." And next I should point them to those pages in Mr. Gladstone's 'Juventus Mundi,' where he describes the ideal training of a Greek youth in Homer's days; and say,—There: that is an education fit for a really civilised man, even though he never saw a book in his life; the full, proportionate, harmonious educing—that is, bringing out and developing—of all the faculties of his body, mind, and ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... can be found. I smile to myself when I contemplate the ridiculous insignificance into which literature and all the sciences would sink, were they made hereditary; and I carry the same idea into governments. An hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary author. I know not whether Homer or Euclid had sons; but I will venture an opinion that if they had, and had left their works unfinished, those sons could not ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of note that Simonides, whose inflammatory writings had led to the withdrawal of our missionary brother from Athens, pretended about this time to have discovered certain Greek manuscripts of Homer, Hesiod, etc., which he claimed to be more ancient than any others, and some men of learning thought them to be genuine; but when they were discovered to be forgeries, the people regarded him ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... Queen was as familiar as the Latin Primer ought to have been. I had much of Mallory by heart—a book full of magic. Forth of his pages stepped men-at-arms and damsels the moment I was alone, and held me company for as long as I would. The persons of Homer's music came next to them. I was Hector and held Andromache to my heart. I kissed her farewell when I went forth to school, and hurried home at night from the station, impatient for her arms. I was never Paris, and had only awe of Helen. Even then I ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... Arnold about the Old Testament:—I thought I must have meant, "But who is to answer for Arnold?" It was at Rome too that we began the Lyra Apostolica which appeared monthly in the British Magazine. The motto shows the feeling of both Froude and myself at the time: we borrowed from M. Bunsen a Homer, and Froude chose the words in which Achilles, on returning to the battle, says, "You shall know the difference, now that I ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... by my black brother in the same prayer! What humiliation! * * * Tom, perhaps, understands these spiritual things better than I. * * * But a poor negro slave reads with his back and understands better than we do. But I, who used to make citations from Homer, now begin to quote the Bible as Uncle Tom does. Poor Tom, indeed, seems to have seen deeper things in the Holy Book ...
— American Missionary, August, 1888, (Vol. XLII, No. 8) • Various
... sound the rascal swore he Existence would not make a curse, Knew not an iamb from a choree, Although we read him heaps of verse. Homer, Theocritus, he jeered, But Adam Smith to read appeared, And at economy was great; That is, he could elucidate How empires store of wealth unfold, How flourish, why and wherefore less If the raw product they possess The medium is required of gold. The ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the Standish home on Captain's Hill, Duxbury. A goodly estate was left at the death of Captain Miles, including a well-equipped house, cattle, mault mill, swords (as one would expect), sixteen pewter pieces and several books of classic literature,—Homer, Caesar's Commentaries, histories of Queen Elizabeth's reign, military histories, and three Bibles with commentaries upon religious matters. There were also medical books, for Standish was reputed to have been a student ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble
... Roman writings no mention is made of either the coffee plant or the beverage made from the berries. Pierre (Pietro) Delia Valle[28] (1586-1652), however, maintains that the nepenthe, which Homer says Helen brought with her out of Egypt, and which she employed as surcease for sorrow, was nothing else but coffee mixed with wine.[29] This is disputed by M. Petit, a well known physician of Paris, who died in 1687. Several later British authors, among them, Sandys, the poet; Burton; ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... in the sphere of poetic, suggestive landscape, and ideal sculpture? The answer is self-evident. It is no utterly prosaic age, and people that founded our superb orchestras, that produced and supported Winslow Homer, Tryon, and Woodbury, French, Barnard, and Saint Gaudens. A more poetic hand than Wall Street's built St. Thomas's and the cathedral, terminals and towers of New York, Trinity Church in Boston, the Minnesota State Capitol, ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... the pot-boiled, round and tight young dumpling of our primitive boyhood, which smokes on the dish from the pot? And what of another, hitherto unnoticed, whose nose is of the hooked vulturine, whose name transpires as Pisistratus Mytharete? He hears Dr. Bouthoin declaim some lines of Homer, and beseeches him for the designation of that language. Greek, is it? Greek of the Asiatic ancient days of the beginning of the poetic chants? Dr. Gannius crashes cachinnation. Dr. Bouthoin caps himself with the offended Don. Mr. Semhians opens ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mounted a generous steed, cannot detect a good point in Pegasus himself; like a certain philologist, who, though acquainted with the exact value of every word in the Greek and Latin languages, could observe no particular beauty in one of the most glorious of Homer's rhapsodies. What knew he of Pegasus? he had never mounted a generous steed; the merest jockey, had the strain been interpreted to him, would have called it a brave song!—I return ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... experience, touch, and vision of the thing to be done; no machine, witless, and of necessary motion; yet not cunning only, but having perfect habitual skill of hand also; the confirmed reward of truthful doing. Recollect, in connection with this passage of Pindar, Homer's three verses about getting the lines of ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Milton, and Dryden, employ the words "car" and "engine" and "train" in their writings; but living before the age of steam and railways they knew nothing of the meaning which these terms convey to us. And it is possible that Homer and Plato knew as little of the meaning of such words as aion and parakletos, as found in the revelation of Jesus Christ, by whom "the ages were framed" ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... six grown sons—Jonathan, George, William, Increase, Homer, and Lemuel—the eldest eight-and-twenty, the youngest sixteen. All were strapping fellows, and each as a matter of course had fallen over head and ears ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... [5] Hakim Firdausi, the Homer of Persia, who wrote the history of that country, in his celebrated epic entitled the "Shah-nama," or ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... moments of existence, as if the most momentous issues depended upon each separate throb. But this very reflux of sensibility will produce great effects at the surface, which are purely negative. This latter class of effects Homer has indicated with considerable accuracy, in the ninth Odyssey, (82-105,) where he notices specifically an air of carelessness regarding external things,—carelessness as to the mutual interchange of conversation by question and answer, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Quixote, Gil Blas de Santillane, and Robinson Crusoe, do we without some reflection realise that between the first and the last in order of production thousands of years intervened? Most of the romances of chivalry and the Faery Queen strike us as more antiquated than Homer, assuredly more so than Chaucer. The secret and the charm seems to lie in the fact that all great books are pictures of human nature, which is and has been always the same; and we are able to account in a similar manner for the stupendous ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... clear, cold analytical light which the "Juventui Mundi" pours upon the nebulous realm of Hellenic lore and Heroic legend, we learn that Homer knew "no destiny fighting with the gods, or unless in the shape of death, defying them,"—and that the "Nemesis often inaccurately rendered as revenge, was after all but self-judgment, or sense of moral law." Even in the dim Homeric dawn, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... project I began to collect scions from all of the original trees. Mr. Homer Jacobs, of Kent, Ohio, supplied me with scions from the Tritten tree. The next year Mr. Jacobs asked me to send him scions from the Brown tree as he intended to bench-graft some. I have planted nuts along a road 80 rods long, so that I could have many stocks ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... were the aroma, And I were simply smoke, We'd skyward fly together, As light as any feather; And flying high as Homer, His gray old ghost we'd choke; If you were the aroma, And ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... consists of high pointed hills, at one time appearing in the form of pyramids, at others of a globular or conical form, and seeming as it were under the protection of some neighbouring mountain, such as Peak Homer, or another lying north-by-west of it, and even a third farther inland. Liberal as nature has been in the adornment of these parts, the industry of the Japanese seems not a little to have contributed to their beauty; for nothing indeed can ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... West Cambridge, who outwatched the rest so long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards, that it almost seemed as if he meant to sit up until the morning of the resurrection; and bringing up the rear, attenuated but vivacious little Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated, reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in wickedness or wit. The good-humored junior member of our family always loved to make him happy by setting him chirruping about Miles ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... spring's pink cheeks were sheltered by soft, gray fur. We look up at these fleecy clusters, freed from the brownish budscales, with a far background of bluest sky, and think that it must have been such a grove as this to which the Princess Nausicca sent Ulysses to wait for her, described by Homer as "a beautiful grove of aspen poplars, a fountain ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... discouraged by forgetting, by the study of the morning, what I had learned the evening before. I recollected that after the defeat of Nicias at Syracuse the captive Athenians obtained a livelihood by reciting the poems of Homer. The use I made of this erudition to ward off misery was to exercise my happy memory by learning all ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... of helping me with my review. I could not possibly think of using your eyes, precious and perilled as they are, instead of my own. I dare say I shall manage with my own translated acquaintance with AEschylus and Homer. However, and at any rate, if I find it necessary to cram, I will not do ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... is only applicable to descriptions is concealed by the use of what are grammatically proper names in a way which really transforms them into descriptions. It is, for example, a legitimate question whether Homer existed; but here "Homer" means "the author of the Homeric poems," and is a description. Similarly we may ask whether God exists; but then "God" means "the Supreme Being" or "the ens realissimum" or whatever other ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... ketch somethin' with this. I never see sech silk. It's much handsomer than the one Homer Bisbee's bride hed when she come here from the city. It's orful the way she wastes. Would you b'lieve it, David, the fust batch of pies she made, she never pricked, and they all puffed up and bust. David, look here! What's in this envylope? ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Aug. 4.—Lieut. Homer Locklear, famous stunt flyer, killed in a fall at Los Angeles, Monday evening, had a premonition several weeks ago that he would meet his death this summer, according to Shirley Short, Goldfield Iowa, original Locklear pilot. ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... his enthusiasm. To this was added the more stirring, and, perhaps, the more genuine order of poets who make you feel and glow, rather than doubt and ponder. He knew at least enough of Greek to enjoy old Homer; and if he could have come but ill through a college examination into Aeschylus and Sophocles, he had dwelt with fresh delight on the rushing storm of spears in the "Seven before Thebes," and wept over the heroic calamities of ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
