"Idyl" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him greater leisure as well as better opportunities of culture, he has published but two poems in the last five years,—an Ode for the ter-centenary anniversary of Shakspeare's birth, and the sacred idyl of "Jephthah's Daughter." The former is a production the spirit of which is worthy of its occasion, although, in execution, it is weakened, by an overplus of imagery and epithet. It contains between ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Desert is no desert to her: no square foot of it is barren. Even the sage-brush has a charm, if only from its dim likeness to a miniature olive tree, both being glaucous and hoary. An oasis of irrigated clover on Humboldt River is made a theme for an idyl. The vast rocks, when bare even of moss, are at least rich and various in tint and form, and have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... and through, with a strong leaning toward the French school. Among the best of his tales are 'Araminta May,' 'Skaellnora Quarn' (Skaellnora's Mill), and 'Grimstahamns Nybygge' (Grimstahamn's Settlement). His idyl 'Kapellet' (The Chapel) is wonderfully true to nature, and his novel 'Palatset' (The Palace) is rich in humor and true poesy. His literary fame will probably rest on his romances, which are the best of their kind in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Beneath an idyl of Moschus, of all places in the world, Macaulay notes the fact of Peel being First Lord of the Treasury; and he finds space, between two quotations in Athenaeus, to commemorate a Ministerial majority of 29 on the Second Reading of the Irish ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... when with Chopin—this being her way of chatting—spoke of the peacefulness of the country and unfolded a picture of the rural harmonies that had all the charming and negligent grace of a village idyl, bringing, in fact, her beloved Berry to the fireside of the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... queen might well rejoice in this creation, this poetic idyl, which arose out of the splendor of palaces like a violet in the sand, and among the variegated tropical flowers which adorn the table of a king. Closely adjoining each other were little houses like those in which peasants live, the peasant women being the proud ladies of the royal ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... I sat late before the dying fire. Thinking over the evening, the idea came to me that perhaps, after all, he did admire my protegee, and, being a romantic old woman, I did not repel the fancy; it might go a certain distance without harm, and an idyl is always charming, doubly so to people cast away on a desert island. One falls into the habit of studying persons very closely in the limited circle ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... daughter. In a general way this was understood by all parties, and everyone seemed inclined to sympathize with the happy feeling which led the lovers to deprecate during these enchanted days any allusion which tended to dispel the exquisite charm of their young lives' idyl. ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees—"flat-nosed bees," as he calls them in the Seventh Idyl—and comparisons in which comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this world's goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with honeycombs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis and fed on the combs of bees; and among the delectables with ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... talent for sarcastic epigram is hereditary with the people. The pointed style of Martial was handed down through successive generations. The epigram in his hands was no longer a mere inscription, an idyl, or an elegy; it had lost its ancient grace, but it took on a new energy, and it set the model, which the later Romans knew well how to copy, of satire condensed into wit, in lines each of whose words ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... touched her tender skin she rather enjoyed the sensation. He, in his turn, was fully aware of the happiness she felt in being there, and he reserved the work which required skill for the time when she could look on in wonder and admiration. It was an idyl that they were unconsciously enacting all that spring, and when Gervaise returned to her home it was in ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... or a violet that retains its fragrance. He seems to have taken Shirley as his master; but desire in the pupil's case outran performance. It is, indeed, a pitiful fall from the Grateful Servant, a honey-sweet old play, fresh as an idyl of Theocritus, to the paltry faded graces ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... my dear duke, a most charming idyl; in true Watteau style, I will be the sweet shepherdess, and lead your highness by a little ribbon. But where ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... curious and simple race, painted, not from within, but from the outside or Russian point of view. But here is no refining, no affectation of pastoral simplicity. The Cossacks is distinctly a primitive poem, one which can scarcely be classed either as idyl or epic, though, in spite of its scenes being mainly rural, it perhaps approaches more nearly to the epic. There is an Homeric simplicity in its descriptions of half-drunken warriors with their superb physique, their bravado, their native dignity and singleness of character. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... to being advised either by the Chaplain or his wife; so the latter spoke to the Englishman, and told him how matters stood in Lispeth's heart. He laughed a good deal, and said it was very pretty and romantic, a perfect idyl of the Himalayas; but, as he was engaged to a girl at Home, he fancied that nothing would happen. Certainly he would behave with discretion. He did that. Still he found it very pleasant to talk to Lispeth, and walk with Lispeth, and say nice things ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... manifold splendors, their hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to some degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony, for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried," although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed and rose-lit woodland, Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... new appearances of nature, and consequently of art. But my present excursion into the sky has afforded me more entertaining prospects, and newer phenomena. If I was as good a poet, as you are, I would immediately compose an idyl, or an elegy, the scene of which should be laid in Saturn or Jupiter: and then, instead of a niggardly soliloquy by the light of a single moon, I would describe a night illuminated by four or five moons at least, and they should be all in a perpendicular ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and woodland with tenderest sunset, Made her beautiful face like the luminous face of an angel, Smote through the pained gloom of his heart like a hurt to the sense, there. Languidly clung about by the half-fallen shawl, and with folded Hands, that held a few sad asters: "I sigh for this idyl Lived at last to an end; and, looking on to my prose-life," With a smile, she said, and a subtle derision of manner, "Better and better I seem, when I recollect all that has happened Since I came here in June: the walks we have taken together ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... not at first undeceived;—the disillusion is long delayed. Doubtless you have read the delicious idyl of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (this is not Mauritius, but the old life of Mauritius was wellnigh the same); and you look for idyllic personages among the beautiful humanity about you,—for idyllic scenes among the mornes shadowed by primeval forest, and the valleys threaded by a hundred ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... followed, Becky's gay lover came and rode away, and came again. He sparkled and shone and worshipped, but not a word did he say about the future. He seemed content with this idyl of old gardens, scented twilights, starlight nights, with Beauty's eyes for him alone radiant eyes ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... and left me to my dreams. But visions did not return. My idyl was spoiled. Old-fashioned ideas emerged, and took form in the plain light of every-day common-sense. I knew the wonderfully gorgeous spectacle these two young people were going to see at the play that night, with its lights, its music, its splendidly ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... quality of the book is given by the word Idyl, which was to be so closely connected with Tennyson's fame. Here he is working in a small compass, but he breaks fresh ground in describing scenes of English village life, and shows that he has used his gifts of observation to good purpose. Better than ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... is worthy of notice, as forming a transition towards the new comedy,) one of which was called the Flower, and was probably therefore neither seriously affecting nor terrible, but in the style of the idyl, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the love-idyl of the period, when Laura and Charles Henry, after unheard-of obstacles, are finally united, all cares and tribulations and responsibilities slip from their sleek backs like Christian's burden. The idea is a pretty one, ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... now occurred in the continuation of "Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances." The first contributions that Julie sent from her new home were, "An Idyl of the Wood," and "The Three Christmas Trees."[11] In these tales the experiences of her voyage and fresh surroundings became apparent; but in June 1868, "Mrs. Overtheway" was continued by ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... scene of this idyl, is a valley deep and broad which the elements have scooped out in the windward exposure of Hawaii, and scarce needs mention to Hawaiian [Page 121] tourists. Hi'i-lawe is one of several high waterfalls that leap from the world ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... leave these older memories, to tell, so far as it is possible in words, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of the imagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter. Yet here I find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it. Once before I ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... extent, at least in some proportion, its moral and its meaning. The wood-cutter did not cut down so many trees a day, that the Hamadryads had not time to make their plaints heard; the shepherd tended his sheep, and did no jobs or chores the while; the idyl had a chance to grow up, and modulate his oaten pipe. But now the poet must be at the whole expense of the poetry in describing one of these positions; the worker is a true Midas to the gold he makes. The poet must describe, as the painter sketches Irish peasant-girls ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... alliance of peace between a pioneer's daughter in the depths of the ancient wood and the wild beasts who felt her spell and became her friends. It is not fanciful, with talking beasts; nor is it merely an exquisite idyl of the beasts themselves. It is an actual romance, in which the animal characters play their parts as naturally as do the human. The atmosphere of the book is enchanting. The reader feels the undulating, whimpering music of the forest, the power of the shady silences, the dignity ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... weeping over me,—me, who had so often called up her tears by my ill conduct, filled me with confusion. At the remembrance of my injustice and of her love, even the tears came into my eyes; I hastened to implore pardon of her, doubly and trebly: and I turned this incident into an idyl, [Footnote: Die Laune des Verliebten, translated as The Lover's Caprice, see p. 241.] which I never could read to myself without affection, or ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Hong-kong harbor—an event that to the men who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily remote as the dark ages of history. But Captain Whalley could in a half hour of solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its sorrow. He had to close her eyes himself. She went away from under the ensign like a sailor's wife, a sailor herself at heart. He had read the service over her, out of her own prayer-book, without a break in his voice. ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... of "real dictionary poetry" to the poor fellow, who was at last prevailed on to read some of his dialect pieces in the presence of Katy. He read her one on "What the Sunflower said to the Hollyhock," and a love-poem, called "Polly in the Spring-house." The first strophe of this inartistic idyl will doubtless be all the reader ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... another side to their idyl, and Marianne mentioned it to her husband. She had chatted with Madame Angelin, and it appeared that the latter wished to enjoy life, at all events for the present, and did not desire to be burdened with children. Then Mathieu's worrying thoughts once ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... went on, alas, it came more and more to seem that the Dorothea idyl had not been meant to be taken as a work of realism. The "treffliches Maedchen" was perhaps too kind-hearted; her emotions were too voluminous for so small a house, her personality seemed to spread all over it. She would sing Hungarian love-ditties ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Allen is at his best, representing young love springing up fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter moments to fall flat from a lack of ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... counselor sent to Janina a bouquet, a box of candy, and a letter inviting her to supper at the "Idyl," mentioning that Topolski and Majkowska were ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... in the thought that I had given up all for you. You know, I think, that I would willingly work my fingers to the bone just that I might possess you always. So I had dreamed of love in a cottage—an idyl of blissful poverty, where Cupid contents himself with crusts and kisses, and mocks at the proverbial wolf on the doorstep. And I give you my word that until to-day I had not suspected how blindly selfish I have been! For poor old ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... painting is equally true with respect to poetry. It is only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... ventured beyond dates, and quinces, and syrups, which may be thought easy to be brought in by a poet. In his idyl of "Audley Court" he gives a most appetizing description of a ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... replied the Prince; "it is a charming and poetic idyl which you present to me. We should flee far from the world, eh? We should go to an unknown spot and try to regain paradise lost. How long would that happiness last? A season during the springtime of our youth. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of his marriages that the first was an idyl, the second a romance and the third a fairy-tale. Others said harsher things. But Asta Grundtvig paid no attention to the scandal mongers. A very earnest Christian woman herself, she devoted all her energy to create a ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... fiction, and has been nearly always splendidly successful. In analytic studies of high, middle, and low life he has not his superior. In the novel of intrigue and sensation he is easily a master, while he succeeds at least fairly in a form of fiction at just the opposite pole from this, to wit, the idyl ('Le Lys dans la vallee'). In character sketches of extreme types, like 'Gobseck,' his supremacy has long been recognized, and he is almost as powerful when he enters the world of mysticism, whither so few of us can follow him. As a writer of novelettes ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... loveliness set at defiance—been less so since. Forty years I think I have known you well. Thirty years we have been friends; and that word needs no epithet nor superlative to make it precious. This morning I called my wife to come and sit down by me, saying, "I will read you an old man's Idyl." And I read that in the March number of the "Atlantic." I believe Holmes wrote it; but whoever did, it is beautiful, and more than that it was to us—for it ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... poudree, du dix-huitieme siecle, cette literature a paniers, a pompons et a falbalas."[7] The costumes of Watteau contrast with the simple folds of Greek drapery very much as the "Rape of the Lock," contrasts with the Iliad, or one of Pope's pastorals with an idyl of Theocritus. The times were artificial in poetry as ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Gesner's beautiful Idyl of "The First Navigator," supplied Sestini with the Story, in all its details; but he versified it with surprizing facility: and, as far as I could judge, with great spirit and elegance. He added, too, some trifling circumstances, and several little traits, the naivete of ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... superb physical prowess, the kind that measures peaks for the fun of it, was disturbing, and without defining his feeling he was plunged into melancholy musing. And when later Ward entered, and, stooping over the couch, kissed Alice, the end of his idyl seemed ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... a good service, and done it well, in translating this famous idyl, which has been justly called 'one of the most faultless poems of modern times.' Nothing can surpass the simplicity, tenderness, and grace of the original, and these have been well preserved in Miss Frothingham's version. Her success ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... take wing, the face of nature change, but Hans, Gargantuan Hans, appeared but a figure in an eternal present! Gazing at that substantial landmark, the soldier was carried back in thought over the long period of separation to a forest idyl; a face in the firelight; the song of the katydid; the drumming of the woodpecker. Dreams; vain dreams! They had assailed him before, but seldom so sharply as now in a place consecrated ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... tragic idyl, and of flight and hot pursuit, And the jingle of the bridle, and cuirass, and spur on boot, As our horses's hooves struck showers from the flinty bowlders set In freshet ways with writhing reed and ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... I to myself, And strove some vain regrets to bridle, 'Though now laid dusty on the shelf, Was hero once of such an idyl! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... its cream-cheese. Then they all romped in the grass, went boating on the stream, and, intoxicated with the fresh country air, the indwellers of the city, coming from the close Paris streets, pushed to its fullest extreme this idyl in the fashion ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... is rather an idyl than a novel, and would have done better still if it had been cast in the form of a comedy. The still anonymous author who followed up Zit and Zoe by Lady Bluebeard possesses the gift, rare among novelists, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... that there has ever been an idyl like that through which we lived during those fifteen months, first on the heights of the Atlas range and then in the infernal plains of the Sahara: an idyl of heroism, of privation, of superhuman torture and superhuman joy; an idyl of ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... Liszt drew inspiration from the harmonies of water notes blended with the chiming of distant bells, and Watteau showed in the many studies which he made in the garden how potent was its influence in investing his fetes champetres with the grace of the idyl. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... But I loved you then, Hermia, I love you now, and I've told you so. I hadn't meant to, but I'm not sorry. I'm glad that you know it—even though your smiles deride me; even though I know I've spoiled your idyl here and made a mockery of my own ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... of modern literature have proved as epoch-making as the modest little volume called "Synnoeve Solbakken," which appeared in the book shops of Christiania and Copenhagen in 1857. It was a simple tale of peasant life, an idyl of the love of a boy and a girl, but it was absolutely new in its style, and in its intimate revelation of the Norwegian character. It must be remembered that until the year 1814, Norway had for ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... his "Snow-Bound," no doubt; and the latter only recalls the former on account of that genuine home-atmosphere which surrounds both these exquisite productions. After a perusal of this new American idyl, no competent critic will contend that we lack proper themes for poetry in our own land. The "Snow-Bound" will be a sufficient reminder to all cavillers, at home or abroad, that the American Muse need not travel far ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... others, all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals and Shephera's Pipe (1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, {95} The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, which Shakspere quoted in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's Romeo and Juliet (the source of Shakspere's ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... "This idyl becomes true," Kautsky says, "only if we grant that but one side of the opposed forces [the proletariat] is growing and increasing in strength, while the other side [the capitalists] remains immovably fixed to the same spot." But ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... love were wrong there could not be within us such peace. That Aniela does not call it by its proper name means nothing; it is there all the same. The whole day passed for us like an idyl. Formerly I disliked Sundays; now I find that a Sunday, from morning until night, may be like a poem, especially in the country. Soon after breakfast, we went to church in time for the early mass. My aunt followed in our rear; ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... refought there, and so again to the Higher House, with two interludes of appeals to the country. The clerical party described the position of the clergy in a florid style. They declaimed that poets and painters had represented the life of a Danish priest as a beautiful idyl, each scene in relative harmony with surrounding nature, whose heart is not touched as wandering in the path-fields he hears the bells of the country church ringing in the morning of the sabbath. How lovely is the little white church, with its red roof and quaint gables, amidst its woods and meadows! ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... swingin' 'round the range, I finds Falstaff an' Pistol in Long's Canyon; Prince Hal is on the Caliente; while Hotspur—an' his air is both wise an' sad- -is tamely where he belongs on the Upper Red. An' now recallin' how I comes to plunge into this yere idyl, I desires to ask you-all, however Prince Hal brings Faistaff to the wars that time, ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... flower so common that the people call it—as, indeed, they did when first it blossomed—a weed. It may be for the reason here indicated that he has chosen for his later poems a form—that of the Idyl—the versification, construction, and use of which he has made his own by a delicate and yet indisputable stamp of sovereignty: whatever may be the reason, let us be thankful for the choice. He has worked in no field of whose resources he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the Greek epos, a saying or oracle, the term "epic" is generally given to some form of heroic narrative wherein tragedy, comedy, lyric, dirge, and idyl are skilfully blended to ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... very page de Contes is the life of the wedded poets, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that it is difficult to realize that this immortal idyl of Poetry, Genius, and Love was less than fifteen years in duration, out of his seventy-seven, and her fifty-five years of life. It is a story that has touched the ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... creations, because the all-pervading monotheistic principle of the nation paralyzed the free and easy marshalling of gods and heroes of the Greek drama. Nevertheless, traces of dramatic poetry appear in the oldest literature. The "Song of Songs" by many is regarded as a dramatic idyl in seven scenes, with Shulammith as the heroine, and the king, the ostensible author, as the hero. But this and similar efforts are only faint approaches to dramatic ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... "This bucolic idyl," says Stedman, "is without a counterpart; no richer juice can be pressed from the wild grape of the Yankee soil." Greenslet thinks that this poem is "perhaps the most nearly perfect of ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... North British Review. In 1855 he published 'Horae Subsceivae,' which contained, among medical biography and medico-literary papers, the immortal Scotch idyl, 'Rab and his Friends.' Up to this time the unique personality of the doctor, with its delightful mixture of humor and sympathy, was known only to his own circle. The appearance of 'Rab and his Friends' revealed it to the world. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... first pages of this little idyl were quietly turned. The book might have been closed or laid aside even then. But it so chanced that Cherry was an unconscious prophet; and presently it actually became a prudential necessity for her to have a masculine escort when she walked ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... sod, with the fresh spring grass and buds bursting into life beneath my feet, with the murmur of the glad young river in my ears, I stood and gazed upon the faces of those lovers of five hundred years ago, whose love was as a spring-time idyl. For they met in the spring, they parted in the spring, their intercourse was like the mingling of young winds with woodland violets; and, dust and ashes though they have been for centuries, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... genuine an idyl of love, of mutual trust and happiness, of but a single united aim in life as one can desire. American to the core; picturesque, wholesome, romantic, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... song, which begins so innocently, like a sweet old idyl of mediaeval France—"un echo du temps passe"—seems to have been a somewhat Rabelaisian ditty; by no means proper singing for a Sunday morning in a boys' school. But boys will be boys, even in France; and the famous "esprit Gaulois" was somewhat precocious ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... no theory, and the practice varied as much in the relation of master and servant as it varied in other family relations. Too much tragedy and too much idyl have been imported into the home life of the Southern people; but this is not the place to reduce ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... stupid, ignorant, vulgar, with his sham education and plebeian tastes, whose only relaxations were to eat, to drink steam beer, and to play upon his concertina, was living through his first romance, his first idyl. It was delightful. The long hours he passed alone with Trina in the "Dental Parlors," silent, only for the scraping of the instruments and the pouring of bud-burrs in the engine, in the foul atmosphere, overheated by the little stove and heavy with the smell of ether, creosote, and ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... qualities of this angelic woman, whose gentle, unselfish character left on me an impression that can never fade... Her life, like her nature, was calm and uniform. Her character fascinated the Emperor and bound him down to her." This loving idyl, a sort of interlude in the tragedy of war, may have suited Constant's taste, but it was hardly of a nature to please Josephine, who, like most jealous people, knew almost always what she wanted to know, and from the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... not tell in detail how the next few days passed. The little idyl concerns no one but myself—and one other—and there is no reason to desecrate them by bawling its delicate folds abroad. Suffice it to say that we went on through Deya to Soller, and then taking mules, climbed the mountain passes to the convent of ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... purpose to produce an Aeneid, the imaginative enthusiasm needed for a Faery Queen. What they possessed was delicacy, refinement, and wit; what they created, while perfecting the epigram and stereotyping the hymn, was a form intermediate between epic and lyric, namely the idyl as we find it in the works ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... were not wanting; and a young girl, with light plaited hair, light-yellow leather jacket, black thickly-plaited petticoat, and a red kerchief tied round her neck, with a face as pretty and innocent as ever an idyl bestowed upon its shepherdess, waited upon the guests, and entertained them with her ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... end of the idyl?" Hildebrand asked, quietly, when the King had run to the end of his rhapsody. Again Robert ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... give up and put away from me? It's easy enough for you to draw your skirts around you, but what can a woman bred as you have been bred know of what I've had to fight against and keep under and cut away? It was an easy, beautiful idyl to you; your love came to you only when it should have come, and for a man who was good and worthy, and distinctly eligible—I don't mean that; forgive me, Ellen, but you drive me beside myself. But he is good and he believes himself worthy, ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... did," she broke in again. "It may be beautiful here—inside these walls—an unbroken idyl of peace and contentment, but it isn't life. It's just existence, that's all. If I were a man, I'd want to do a man's work in the world. I wouldn't want to miss an hour of it, childhood, boyhood or manhood. I'd want to meet my temptations ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... Germinal told of mining and the misery of the proletariat. L'Oeuvre pictured the life of artists and authors. La Terre portrayed, with startling realism, the lowest peasant life. Le Reve, which followed, was a reaction. It was a graceful idyl. Le Reve was termed "a symphony in white," and was considered as a concession to the views of the majority of the French Academy. La Bete Humaine exhausted the details of railway life. L'Argent treats of financial scandals and panics. ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... poems. But his finest contribution to the national idea was the apostrophe to the Union which crowns "The Building of the Ship." It was written in 1849, in the stress of the struggle over California, and it may well last as long as the nation lasts. The poem is an idyl of the ship-building folk and the sea; the consummation is the bridal of the captain and the builder's daughter, and the launching of the ship, christened "The Union"—emblem of the wife's and husband's voyage begun together on the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Lady Orlay kindly. She was noting, with her quick and clever eyes, that Netty seemed happy and was exquisitely dressed. She was quite ready to be really interested in this idyl. ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... the recollection of the exquisite little prose idyl of "Moss-Side," from "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life." From the few short words with which it began—"Gilbert Ainslee was a poor man, and he had been a poor man all the days of his life"—to the happy waking of his little daughter Margaret ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... 6. 1862] This poetic effusion of Mr. Hosea Biglow was preceded by the "Idyl of the Bridge and the Monument," which set forth another side of American feeling at the British words and deeds consequent on the unauthorized capture, by Commodore Wilkes, of the "Trent," conveying to ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... thing to spoil an idyl, isn't it? But that is the way with all the little playtime heroics we leave behind in childhood. You could have ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... The following idyl, extemporized by one of Stanley's black soldiers, on the occasion of reaching Lake Nyanza, possesses more energy of movement, perspicuity of style, and warm, glowing imagery, than any song of its character we have yet met with from the lips of unlettered Negroes. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... exclaimed the emperor, with troubled mien. "I had forgotten that I had a home." This question had awakened him from his idyl. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... self-restrained and severely controlled as it is, shows no doubtful traces of the conflicts and sorrows out of which he believed himself to have emerged to a calmer and surer light. But M. Renan's story is an idyl, not a tragedy. It is sunny, placid, contented. He calls his life the "charmante promenade" which the "cause of all good," whatever that may be, has granted him through the realities of existence. There are in it no storms of passion, no ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... said, with a little lip-curl of disappointment. "He thinks he ought to remember, and he is trying—trying because Grantham said something that made him think he ought to try. But it's no use. It was only a little summer idyl, and ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... a fragrant bunch of flowers, or to delight Tiny Tim with a trinket, or to let little Jacob "know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket, as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those of the trunk of travel; and yet out of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... contemplation, intent upon objects of peaceful beauty, and undisturbed by rude anxieties and vehement passions, suggested only kindred reproductions to the creative faculty by which it was vivified; so that the whole man was not only a poet, but, as it were, a poem,—a living idyl, calling into pastoral music every reed that sighed and trembled along the stream of life. And Helen was so suited to a nature of this kind, she so guarded the ideal existence in which it breathes! All the little cares and troubles of the common practical life she appropriated so quietly ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "An Invocation." Before quoting from it I must explain somewhat; otherwise you might not be able to imagine what it means, because it was written to be read by those only who are acquainted with Theocritus and the Greek idylists. Perhaps I had better say something too, about the word idyl, for the use of the word by Tennyson is not the Greek use at all, except in the mere fact that the word signifies a picturing, a shadowing or an imagining of things. Tennyson's pictures are of a purely imaginative kind in the "Idyls of the King." But the Greek poets who first ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... backed against the gray wall. He is an oldish man, with a long, gray beard and a quizzical face,—a sort of Hans Sachs, who turns all his life into verse and song. When he comes out in the morning, he chants a domestic idyl, in which he narrates in verse the events of his household, and the differences and agreements of himself and his wife, whom I take to be a pure invention. This over, he changes into song everything and every person that passes before him. Nothing that is odd, fantastic, or absurd ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... have it in me, I believe I have sufficient devotion and ability, not only to keep alive the flame of his love in our solitary life, far from the world, but even to make it burn stronger and brighter. If I am mistaken, if this splendid idyl of love in hiding must come to an end—an end! what am I saying?—if I find Gaston's love less intense any day than it was the evening before, be sure of this, Renee, I should visit my failure only on myself; no blame should attach to ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... a month after this, simultaneously with the announcements by cable of the instant success in London of "A Western Idyl," that Miss Cuyler retired from the world she knew, and disappeared into darkest New York by the way of Rivington Street. She had discovered one morning that she was not ill nor run down nor overtaxed, but just mentally tired ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... came back to me of three friends of my own childhood—'Robinson Crusoe,' 'The Swiss Family Robinson,' and 'Masterman Ready'—and I would be glad to know that all, old and young, who have enjoyed those immortal tales would take to their hearts this last idyl of an island."—Sara Andrew Shafer, in the N.Y. Times ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... that story, Mr. Pater has deliberately omitted this episode, which is indeed like a spot of blood-stained mud upon some perfect tissue of silver flowers on silver ground. It is a piece of cruellest realism, because quite quiet and unforced, in the midst of a kind of fairy-land idyl of almost childish love, the love of the beautiful son of the lord of Beaucaire for a beautiful Saracen slave girl. For, although Aucassin and Nicolette are often separated, and always disconsolate—she in her wonderfully frescoed vaulted room, he in his town prison—there is always surrounding ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... acts, founded upon a Breton idyl, words by Barbiere and Carre, was first produced at the Opera Comique, Paris, April 4, 1859, under the title of "Le Pardon de Ploermel." It contains but three principal characters, and these were cast as follows: ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... have a new one." And then we can hear, or think we hear, the young man begin in a low and modest tone the story of "Edward Fane's Rosebud," or "The Seven Vagabonds," or perchance (O tearful, happy evening!) that tender idyl of "The Gentle Boy!" What a privilege to hear for the first time a "Twice-Told Tale," before it was even once told to the public! And I know with what rapture the delighted little audience must have hailed the advent ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... is full of mother-wit and observation of men and things, especially of every changing mood of the nature he regards as his true mother. He is brave and resourceful, and rescues Lorna and himself from numberless difficulties by his native shrewdness. And his love is a poem, an idyl that crowns him a shepherd king in his own green pastures. Nothing that he does in his plodding, sturdy way wearies us. His size, his strength, his good farming, the way he digs his sheep out of the snow, entertain us as well as his rescue of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... vigorously, and wrote, with great rapidity, says Mrs Orr, his poem of Russia, Ivan Ivanovitch. When a boy he had read in Bunyan's "Life and Death of Mr Badman" the story of "Old Tod", and with this still vivid in his memory, he added to his Russian tale the highly unidyllic "idyl" of English life, Ned Bratts. It was thus that subjects for poems suddenly presented themselves to Browning, often rising up as it were spontaneously out of the remote past. "There comes up unexpectedly," he wrote in a letter ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... devised a thousand means by which he might catch a glimpse of one without whom he felt it impossible to exist. Numberless are the stratagems he contrived, and incredible the ingenuity with which they were executed; the freshness of his romance was itself an exquisite idyl. . . . Victor never despaired; but in the midst of his anticipations he was ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold |
