"Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... these, but all true fetiches, are either actual petrifactions of the animals they represent, or were such originally. Upon this supposition is founded the following tradition, taken, as are others to follow, from a remarkable mythologic epic, which I have ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... the cruelty, and the horror of it for all time within the shuddering comprehension of English-speaking people. One is a history that is more than a history; the other a tale that is more than a tale. Dickens, no doubt, owed much of his inspiration to Carlyle's tremendous prose epic. But the genius that depicted a moving and tragic story upon the red background of the Terror was Dickens's own, and the "Tale of Two Cities" was final proof that its author could handle a great theme in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the Symphony depends largely upon the attitude of the hearer. In this work we are not to look for the sublimity and emotional depth of a Bach or Beethoven any more than we expect a whimsical comedy of Aristophanes to resemble an epic poem of Milton. But for daring imagination, for rhythmic vitality and certainty of orchestral effect, it was and remains a work[234] ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... with whom a careless observer would be disposed to ally him, takes his seat on the bench of the historians of his time and country." He once expressed the opinion that the historical romance approaches, in some measure, when it is nobly executed, to the epic in poetry.[456] When a medal of Scott, engraved from the bust by Chantrey, was struck off, he suggested the motto ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... no great works in philosophy, in legislation, or in the fine arts, except only that, as to one of these arts, viz. poetry, a single god vaunted himself greatly in simple ages. But he attempted neither a tragedy nor an epic poem. Even in what he did attempt, it is worth while to follow his career. His literary fate was what might have been expected. After the Persian war, the reputation of his verses rapidly decayed. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... beings. Of course there are good reasons for this. Defoe was more interested in dramatizing proletarian utopian ideals than in developing the inner workings of Misson's mind. The novelette is unified by its epic theme, not by its study of character ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... ways cannot be determined beforehand. By the study of painting and etching and drawing merely, we could not foresee that there is also possible an art like sculpture, and by studying epic and lyric poetry we could not construct beforehand the forms of the drama. The genius of mankind had to discover ever new forms in which the interest in reality is conserved and yet the things and events are so completely changed that they are separated from all possible reality, ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... read. "He asked me how I liked it, and what I thought of it, which I modestly but freely told him; and after some further discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say about Paradise found?" Whereupon the poet wrote his second epic. ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... It continued its development through the early centuries of the Christian era, and down even to the Middle Ages. Since then there has been disintegration instead of growth. The Brahmans have not only retained the Aryan deities, and extended Vishnu's incarnate nature over the epic heroes, but in the Puranas they have woven into the alleged lives of the incarnate gods the most grotesque ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... the first and the prince of poets; he celebrated the siege of Troy in the Iliad and Odyssey, two epic poems which have never been surpassed. In the same kind of composition he was followed, nine hundred years after, by Virgil, in the Eneid; by Tasso, after another fifteen hundred years, in the 'Jerusalem Delivered.' The Greeks also boasted of their Pindar and Anacreon in lyric poetry; and ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen friend, the poet Vernede, yet ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... exercise so powerful an influence upon the progress of our own, was at last opened to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain undecided. Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio—both his epic poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which Petrarch praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were mingled with others of undeniable jocoseness—the immortal "Decamerone." He could examine the refined gold of Petrarch's own verse with its exquisite ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... has seen many minor passions in the Garden. It sees and passes on, embodying none of them in deathless epic as His passion was embodied.... Men and women have cried out to listening Heaven that the cup might pass from their lips, and it has not been permitted to pass, as His was not permitted to pass. In the ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... writing in French and are far closer to their Northern brethren than to the French whose language they use. Charles de Coster, who may be considered as the father of this particular branch of the school, published in 1868 the Legend of Ulenspiegel, which is nothing but a prose epic in which the legendary character of Owliglass is identified with one of the heroes of the sixteenth century revolution against Spain. Camille Lemonnier (1844-1913), in his best novels, deals with the manners and customs of the ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... as thoroughly with his sword as afterwards with his pen, Don Carlos Coloma, captain of cavalry, afterwards financier, envoy, and historian. For it was thus that those writers prepared themselves for their work. They were all actors in the great epic, the episodes of which they have preserved. They lived and fought, and wrought and suffered and wrote. Rude in tongue; aflame with passion, twisted all awry by prejudice, violent in love and hate, they have left ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... speaks of Aldrian as being at Etzel's court. He is probably confused here with his son, for Hagen's stay with Etzel in various legends, as also in our poem a few lines further down. (6) "Walther of Spain" is Walther of Aquitania, a legendary personage of whom the O.E. fragment "Waldere", the Latin epic "Waltharius", a M.H.G. epic, and the "Thidreksaga" tell. He flees with Hildegund, the daughter of the Burgundian King Herrich, from Etzel's court, as related here, but has to fight for his life against overpowering ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... four months later he was pointed out to strangers by the people of Sweetwater Springs. "That is Richard Clement, the sole owner of 'The Witch,' a mine valued at three millions of dollars." This in itself was truly an epic. ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... wild buffalo is morose and uncertain, and such is its strength and courage that in the Hindu epic of the Ramayana its onslaught is compared to that of the tiger.[1] It is never quite safe to approach them, if disturbed in their pasture or alarmed from their repose in the shallow lakes. On such occasions ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... name of chaturanga, that is, the four angas, or members of an army, which are said in the Amarakosha to be elephants, horses, chariots and foot soldiers. As applicable to real armies, the term chaturanga is frequently used by the epic poets of India. Sir William Jones's essay is substantially a translation of the Bhawishya Purana, in which is given a description of a four-handed game of chess played with dice. A pundit named Rhadhakant informed him that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... years, to say nothing of the benumbing and desiccating effect of that old system of education! Chalk and chalk-dust! The Mediterranean a tinted portion of the map, Italy a man's boot which I drew painfully, with many yawns; history no glorious epic revealing as it unrolls the Meaning of Things, no revelation of that wondrous distillation of the Spirit of man, but an endless marching and counter-marching up and down the map, weary columns of figures to be learned by rote instantly to be forgotten again. "On June the 7th General So-and-so ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... are shocked at these things, and make a noise about them, while you take them quietly. Vice is our episode—your epic." ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... two Babylonian epics, fragments of which were found on clay tablets in a royal library at Nineveh. The epic of the Creation tells how the god Marduk overcame a terrible dragon, the symbol of primeval chaos, and thus established order in the universe. Then with half the body of the dead dragon he made a covering for the heavens ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... poem occurs as an episode of the Mahabharata, in the sixth—or "Bhishma"—Parva of the great Hindoo epic. It enjoys immense popularity and authority in India, where it is reckoned as one of the "Five Jewels,"—pancharatnani—of Devanagiri literature. In plain but noble language it unfolds a philosophical system ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... there with his ancient comrades, and how he was now wedded to Helen of Troy. Yet the local tradition of Lacedaemon showed the sepulchre of Helen in Therapnae. According to a Rhodian legend (adopted by the author of the "Epic of Hades"), Helen was banished from Sparta by the sons of Menelaus, came wandering to Rhodes, and was there strangled by the servants of the queen Polyxo, who thus avenged the death of her husband at Troy. It is certain, as we learn both from ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... the board representatives interrupted testily, "What is the point of this lengthy narrative? You can give the story to the newsmen without our official sanction, if you want to make it a heroic epic, young Steele. We have heard sufficient to prove your guilt, and that of Raynor, in the ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... at variance with the received opinion, that Milton, from his early youth, had meditated the composition of an epic poem, I would inquire whether there is any evidence to support Mr. Darley's view? Milton has been charged with having borrowed the design of Paradise Lost from some Italian author; and this allegation, coupled with that made by Mr. Darley, would, if founded, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... which all things proceed, is the Immanent Will. The Will is unconscious and omnipotent. It is superhuman only in power, lacking intelligence, foresight, and any sense of ethical values. In The Dynasts, Mr. Hardy has written an epic illustration ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... son of Thevetat, before he became the grandson of the Etruscan Jupiter-Tinia. Have the Western Orientalists tried to find out the connection between all these Dragons and Serpents; between the "powers of Evil" in the cycles of epic legends, the Persian and the Indian, the Greek and the Jewish; between the contests of Indra and the giant; the Aryan Nagas and the Iranian Aji Dahaka; the Guatemalian Dragon and the Serpent of Genesis—&c. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... glory, Mr. Hayley, that is you!" "Ma'am, you carry all before you, Lichfield swan, indeed you do!" "In epic, elegy, or sonnet, Mr. Hayley, you're divine!" "Madam, take my word upon it, You yourself are ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... due investigation), to put my reader in possession of the facts so unfamiliar to the modern oracles of classical mythology! Briefly, it appears that in the best period of ancient Greece nine Muses were recognised, namely, Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry; Euterpe, of lyric poetry; Erato, of erotic poetry; Melpomene, of tragedy; Thalia, of comedy; Polyhymnia, of sacred hymns; Terpsichore, of choral song and dance; Clio, of history; and Urania, of astronomy. The last ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... of our Nobodies (about whom a great epic will get written when a poet is born good enough and big enough to receive the inspiration), it is because any average Nobody has a cool impregnability to the worst bad luck can do which is supernal. That gives the affair something ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... of course, however, in Hawthorne and his descriptions in the "Blithedale Romance" of the life at Brook Farm that the principal interest of most readers centres. This work has come to be regarded as the epic of the community, and it is now generally conceded that Hawthorne was in this novel far more of a realist than was at first admitted. He did not avoid the impulse to tell the happenings of life at the farm pretty nearly as he found them, and substantial as the characters may or may ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... of Epic, Lyric, Elegiac, and Sententious Writings. The Talmud, Book of Ordinances. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... reason can be confounded with poetic genius and make one with it in a moral epistle, it cannot be the same thing as the genius, so varied and so diversely creative in its expression of the passions, of the drama or the epic. Where will you find reason in the fourth book of the AEneid and the transports of Dido? Be that as it may, the spirit which prompted the theory, caused writers who ruled their inspiration, rather than those who abandoned ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... without the aid of words. Vainly decried by a later age of shallower perception, it achieved this Promethean stroke by the very magic of the design. At one bound thus arose in the youngest art a form higher than any other of human device,—higher than the epic, the drama, or ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... the harp of Pindar, and the impassioned song of the dark-eyed Sappho. I thought I heard the lofty epic of the blind Homer, rushing on in the red tide of battle, and the divine Plato discoursing like an oracle in ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... experience, the story of a pregnant and passionate hour, during which passion quickened the intellect; and the head, while resisting all illusions of the heart, was roused to that resistance by the heart itself. Such an hour is full of events; it may be almost epic in its plenitude of action; but the events are ideas. The frame and setting of the discussion also are more than frame and setting; they co-operate with the thoughts; they form part of the experience. The poet is alone among the mountains, with dawn and ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Revolution:—Vol. I., The Bastile; Vol. II, The Constitution; Vol. III., The Guillotine." The publication of this book produced a profound impression on the public mind. A history abounding in vivid and graphic descriptions, it was at the same time a gorgeous "prose epic." It is perhaps the most readable of all Carlyle's works, and indeed is one of the most remarkable books of the age. There is no other account of the French Revolution that can be compared with it for intensity of feeling and ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... laurel'd bust, The trophy'd arch had crumbled into dust; The sacred symbol, and the epic song, 110 (Unknown the character, forgot the tongue,) With each unconquer'd chief, or fainted maid, Sunk undistinguish'd in Oblivion's shade. Sad o'er the scatter'd ruins Genius sigh'd, And infant Arts but learn'd to lisp and died. 115 Till to astonish'd realms ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... stanzas and a couplet, are no more Sonnets than they are Epic Poems. The Sonnet is of a particular and arbitrary construction; it partakes of the nature of Blank Verse, by the lines running into each other at proper intervals. Each line of the first eight, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... Sanskrit epic, King Santanu is said to have walked by the side of the river one day, where "he met and fell in love with a beautiful girl, who told him that she was the river Ganges, and could only marry him on ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... and descriptive poem of "The Siller Gun," which, in the opinion of Sir Walter Scott, surpasses the efforts of Ferguson, and comes near to those of Burns,[21] Mayne published another epic production, entitled "Glasgow," which appeared in 1803, and has passed through several editions. In the same year he published "English, Scots, and Irishmen," a chivalrous address to the population of the three kingdoms. To the literary ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... other epic souvenirs which awakened Georges Guynemer's curiosity in childhood. He was shown the sword and snuffbox of General Count de Songis, brother of his paternal grandmother. This sword of honor had been presented to the general by the Convention ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... decoration finds its opportunity and its snare. To keep the most elaborate comparison in harmony with its occasion, so that when it is completed it shall fall back easily into the emotional key of the narrative, has been the study of the great epic poets. Milton's description of the rebel legions adrift on the flaming sea is a fine instance of the ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... suggested to him that a mock heroic treatment of the resulting quarrel might restore peace, and Pope wrote a poem in two cantos, which was published in a Miscellany in 1712, Pope's age then being twenty-four. But as epic poems required supernatural machinery, Pope added afterwards to his mock epic the machinery of sylphs and gnomes, suggested to him by the reading of a French story, "Le Comte de Gabalis," by the Abbe ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... earlier days, I spread the King's or Hero's praise, And struck the martial Chords with epic fire: But farewell, Hero! farewell, King! Your deeds my lips no more shall sing, For Love alone shall be the subject of ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... not, as I suspect, stand unbrothered like the humped Richard in the play). Or maybe some swirl of fancy blew upon him as he was spooning up his breakfast, which he must set down in an essay before the matter cool. Or an epic may have thumped within him. Let us hope that his thoughts this cool spring morning have not been heated to such bloody purpose that he has killed a score of men upon his page, and that it is with the black gore of the ink-pot on him that he has called for his boots to face ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... world, and consequently, it displays the qualities of both. But the future lay with the small men rather than with the great. Shakespeare and Milton were no innovators. With their names the epoch of primitive literature, which finds expression in the drama and the epic, ends, while it reaches its highest flights. The dawn of the modern epoch, the age of prose and of the novel, is, on the other hand, connected with the names of Lyly, Sidney, and Nash. Thus, as in the 18th ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... Lyrics of joy, of sorrow, of passion, of emotion natural and spiritual, are to be sung. The sense of beauty is to grow. The drama is to arise from beginnings to be but faintly traced in early days. Epic poetry is to take a great place. Character modified, enriched by foreign strains, is to mould a noble literature—noble through many and many a gift and grace. A great poet is to arise with sympathies large and wide, to show us, in verse most musical, in words full meaning, with ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... received no less attention than Greek politics. The Homeric problem continues to exert an irresistible attraction. Every expert from Wilamowitz to Gilbert Murray and Walter Leaf adds to our comprehension of the epic; but no positive results have been established, and Holm uttered the gloomy prophecy that we shall never know whether Homer existed, who he was, or what he wrote. On the other hand we have gained a deeper insight into the ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... and perhaps Amelia also. Fielding had high notions of the dignity of an art which he may be considered as having founded. He challenges a comparison between the Novel and the Epic. Smollett, Le Sage, and others, emancipating themselves from the strictness of the rules he has laid down, have written rather a history of the miscellaneous adventures which befall an individual in the course of life, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... course of the commentator is clear. He should treat the Jewish record as reliable, except where it frankly accepts the miracle as a demonstrated fact, and even then regard the miracle as an important and most suggestive part of the great Jewish epic, which always has had, and always must have, a ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... transmitted in a modified form to all successive generations, denotes dominion and valour; the Brahmanic cosmogony, and the epithet of apes, given to all other races in the epic of Valmiki, bear witness to the same fact; it is shown in the slavery imposed on conquered peoples, in the hatred of foreigners felt by all the Hellenic tribes; in the omnipotence of Rome, the haughtiness of the Germanic orders; in the feudal system, in the Crusades; ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... episode of the ingenuous troutling which, having apparently conceived a violent passion for the Colonel, literally forced itself upon the hook seven times within a short afternoon. Captains on the Sultanitza Planina rehearse the epic incidents of how the Colonel snatched victory from defeat after pursuing for three miles an infuriated pike which had wrenched the very rod from his grasp. Subalterns in the chill wilds of Cologne, adding picturesque details to an already artistic story, relate how he hooked a mighty ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... Ville Marie—chansons of two hundred years ago mark the strokes of labour as of the evening hour when the professional village story-teller cries "cric-crac" and begins his tale of the loup-garou, or rouses the spirit of a pure patriotism by a crude epic of some valiant atavar; when the parish fiddler brings them to their feet with shining eyes by the strains of O Carillon. They are not less respectful to the British flag, nor less faithful in allegiance because they love that language ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... the publication, in 1855, of the Poems, in two volumes, entitled "Men and Women," Browning reviewed his work and made an interesting reclassification of it. He separated the simpler pieces of a lyric or epic cast—such rhymed presentations of an emotional moment, for example, as "Mesmerism" and "A Woman's Last Word," or the picturesque rhymed verse telling a story of an experience, such as "Childe Roland" and "The Statue and the Bust"—from their more complex companions, which were almost altogether ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... manner, there is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in history as one consistent epic.[7] Yet every student ought to know that mastery is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term to things unlike, insist that freedom ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... dramatic, not didactic, or epic, or pastoral. Pope was not so deep in the drama as in other matters, and Cibber was one of its luminaries; he wrote some of the best comedies of his day. He also succeeded where Dryden, for lack of true dramatic taste, failed. He tampered successfully with Shakespeare. Colley Cibber's ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... "hoo-hoo-ed," and a far-off wolf uttered a drawn-out, soft, melancholy cry, as Rolf finished his dried meat, tightened his belt, and set out on a long, hard run that, in the days of Greece, would have furnished the theme of many a noble epic poem. ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... is meant, I suppose, the struggle between Caesar and Pompey. Posterity will think the horrors of civil war compensated by the pleasure of reading Lucan's epic! ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... among them (in the preface), praising it to the stars, saying that some of the [298] passages are superior to Homer and Virgil! However, it is really better than I expected, and I read on, partly from curiosity and partly for the history. The French would have been very glad to find it an epic worthy of the name, for they have n't one. Voltaire frankly confesses that the French have not a genius for great poetry,—too much in love, he ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... purposes, when the agreeable is blended with the useful, then is the writer said to have succeeded in every point. Pleasantry (as the ingenious author of Clarissa says of a story) should be made only the vehicle of instruction; and thus romances themselves, as well as epic poems, may become worthy the perusal of the greatest of men: but when no moral, no lesson, no instruction, is conveyed to the reader, where the whole design of the composition is no more than to make us laugh, the writer comes very near to the character of a buffoon; and ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... result of the incident described in the last chapter was to strengthen the bond between John and Desmond. Desmond had the epic from Fluff, from the Caterpillar, and finally ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... and whilst he was driving in a cab towards the Via Venti Settembre, he recalled to mind the heroic story of old Orlando's life which had been told him in Paris. It was like an epic poem, full of faith, bravery, and the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... legends of Ireland's epic hero Fionn. A book for the boy or girl who loves the old romances, and a book for story-telling or reading aloud. "Stories of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France," by ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... Ch. CXCIX; Baruch, Ch. VI, p. 43. Modern scholars confirm the statements of Herodotus from the study of Babylonian literature, though inclined to deny that religious prostitution occupied so large a place as he gives it. A tablet of the Gilgamash epic, according to Morris Jastrow, refers to prostitutes as attendants of the goddess Ishtar in the city Uruk (or Erech), which was thus a centre, and perhaps the chief centre, of the rites described by Herodotus (Morris Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898, p. 475). Ishtar was the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... with the spirit of the Odyssey, that glorious primitive epic, fresh with the dew of the morning of time. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read his recital of the adventures of the wily Odysseus, slightly expurgated though it be, and adapted for the intelligence of youthful minds. Howard Pyle's illustrations render the spirit of the Homeric age with ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was epic in its possibilities, to two of the men present. Cobbens might interpret an expression of approval on her part as a sign that she forgave him for humiliating her protege and had outgrown her fancy, but to Leigh such an expression would mean infinitely more. Thus they waited, each hoping for the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... "the hyp." Entire poems like William Somervile's The Hyp: a Burlesque Poem in Five Canto's (1731) and Tim Scrubb's A Rod for the Hyp-Doctor (1731) were devoted to this strain; others, like Malcom Flemyng's epic poem, Neuropathia: sive de morbis hypochondriacis et hystericis, libri tres, poema medicum (1740), were more technical and scientific. Professor Donald Davie has written that he has often "heard old fashioned and provincial persons [in England and Scotland] even in [my] own lifetime ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... that great sea-fight which was to determine whether Popery and despotism, or Protestantism and freedom, were the law which God had appointed for the half of Europe, and the whole of future America. It is a twelve days' epic, worthy, as I said in the beginning of this book, not of dull prose, but of the thunder-roll of Homer's verse: but having to tell it, I must do my best, rather using, where I can, the words of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... of the Cosmos, evoked when the "Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters"—an epic printed in stars on blue abysses of illimitable space; in illuminated type of rose leaf, primrose petal, scarlet berry on the great greenery of field and forest; in the rainbows that glow on tropical humming birds, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... rhyme is omitted, we have blank verse. This is the most dignified of all kinds of verse, and is, therefore, appropriate for epic and dramatic poetry, where it is chiefly found. Most blank verse makes use of the iambic pentameter measure, but we find many exceptions. Read the following examples of blank verse so as to show ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the world has written, and then worshipped, are documents of character. The ages have exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of Brahm" means only the statement of the alternating periods of Activity and Inactivity in some one particular Universe, amidst the Infinite Universality. You will find a mention of these periods of Activity and Inactivity in the "Bhagavad Gita," the great Hindu epic. The following quotations, and page references, relate to the edition published by the Yogi Publication Society, which was compiled and adapted by the writer of these lessons. In that edition of the "Bhagavad Gita," on page 77, you will find these words ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... perhaps typical: "'And the most noble, of course, are hymns and paeans. In the second place are songs and odes and scolia, which are concerned with the praises of brave men. In the third place the epic, in which there are heroes and other lesser personages. Tragedy together with comedy follows this order; nevertheless comedy will hold the fourth place apart by itself. After these, satires, then exodia, lusus, nuptial songs, elegies, monodia, songs, epigrams.'"[9] Similar rankings of satire frequently ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... since Sir W. Jones, has united a poetical genius with deep Sanscrit scholarship; but he has in general preferred the later and more polished period—that of Kalidasa and the dramatists—to the ruder, yet in my opinion, not less curious and poetical strains of the older epic bards. ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... interconnection of events did not exist. Yet history in its simple forms is one of the most spontaneous of human achievements. Stories of mighty deeds, of the prowess and death of heroes, are among the earliest productions of even semi-civilised man—the earliest subjects of epic and lyric verse. But this rudimentary form is never more than biographical. With increasing complexity of social evolution it dies away, and history proper, as distinct from annals and chronicle, does not arise till circumstances allow of general and synthetic ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... assumed that sooner or later there must come a general Armageddon, in which the central feature would be a duel of the Teuton with the Slav; and in German military circles there was undoubtedly a conviction that the epic conflict had best come sooner and not later. How long this idea has influenced German policy we do not pretend to say. But it has certainly contributed to her unenviable prominence in the 'race of armaments' which all ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... compare the Egyptian hymns with those of the Hebrews, the difference is very striking. On the walls of the great temples of Luxor and the Ramesseum at Thebes, as well as on the wall of the temple of Abydos and in the main hall of the great rock-hewn temple of Abu-Simbel, in Nubia, is carved the "Epic of Pentaur," the royal Egyptian scribe ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... [1068-1156]). The somewhat obscure Finn episode in Beowulf appears to be part of a Finn epic, of which only the merest fragment, called the Fight at Finnsburg, is extant. The following conjectured outline of the whole story is based on this fragment and on the Beowulf episode; Finn, king of the Frisians, had carried ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... poets, who represent the three vices of Dutch literature—of losing themselves in the clouds, of creeping on the ground, of entangling themselves in the meshes of mysticism—are grouped a number of epic, comic, satiric, and lyric poets, most of whom flourished in the seventeenth and a few in the eighteenth century. Many of them are renowned in Holland, but none possesses sufficient originality to attract the ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... is an epic poem, an allegory, to show the grand elements in human nature, enabling mortals to rise superior to all trials and temptations, to the humiliations of the spirit, and to prolonged suffering in the flesh. Though illustrated in the personality of a man, ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... friends with a certain Dutch captain whom he heard playing the violin in his cabin, and on the whole, notwithstanding the wretched prospect before him, contrived to spend the week with considerable enjoyment. Nor does an occasional episode of lounging hurt a life with any true claims to the epic form. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Christo non e mai esistito, and similar authors in Holland, Poland, and other countries, including W. Benjamin Smith, the American author of The Pre-christian Jesus (1906), and P. Jensen in Das Gilgamesch Epos in den Welt-literatur (1906), who makes the Jesus-story a variant of the Babylonian epic, 2000 B.C. A pretty strong list! (2) "But," continues Drews, "ordinary historians still ignore all this." Finally, he dismisses Jesus as "a figure swimming obscurely in the mists of tradition." Nevertheless I need hardly remark ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... it he did over and over again, with unflagging vehemence, with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers and thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; she calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in this tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is tortured to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. La recherche du terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en saveur, la surabondance des ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... speaker, or contemporary writer, are to be preserved. Unity of style and expression is as indispensable in a history which is to move the heart, or fascinate the imagination, as in a tragedy, a painting, or an epic poem. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... the ideal book-lover: knowing Dante, Boccaccio, and in some degree "Franceys Petrark, the laureat poete," who "enlumined al Itaille of poetry," Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Ovid—his favourite author—and Boethius; as well as Guido delle Colonne's prose epic of the story of Troy, the poems of Guillaume de Machaut, the Roman de la Rose, and a work on the astrolabe by Messahala.[1] We have some excellent pictures of Chaucer's habit of reading. When his day's work is done he goes home and buries himself ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... comparison with analogous passages of the poets that stand highest in the renown of natural and pathetic delineation. The dying words of the hero are as proper as if either great classical master of epic propriety—the Chian or the Mantuan—had left them to us. They are thoroughly sad, thoroughly loving, and supremely magnanimous. They have a perfect simplicity of purpose. They take the last leave of his Emelie; and they find for her, if ever ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... epic poems in the sacred language of India, which were not known to Europe, even by name, till Sir William Jones announced their existence; and which, since his time, have been made public only by fragments—by mere specimens—bearing to those vast treasures of Sanskrit literature ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... have viewed in the light of sacrilege every attempt to bring down the sublime language in which they praised Jehovah and recorded his mighty works, to the more common and less hallowed purposes of fictitious narrative, or of amatory, dramatic, and lyrical composition. The Jews have no epic poem to throw a lustre on the early annals of their literature. Even the Song of Songs is allowed to have a spiritual import, pointing to much higher themes than Solomon and his Egyptian bride. A solemn gravity pervades all their writings, ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... little. That, or something else, started us off, making rhymes. After great efforts, amidst much laughter and profound knitting of brows, we produced what, in the innocence of youth, we called a poem!—an epic, on our adventure. I still preserve the old scrawl of it, in several different youthful hands, on crumpled sheets of yellowed paper. It has little value as poesy, but I would not part with it for autograph copies of the masterpieces of ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... encouragement, as we shall see, Harrington was urged to complete his version of the Orlando Furioso, and she willingly accepted in the year 1600 the dedication of Fairfax's admirable translation of the great epic of Tasso. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Bayes, to the style and the matter Of each thing they write suit the way that they dine, Roast sirloin for Epic, broiled devils for Satire, And hotchpotch and trifle for rhymes ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of poetry, philosophy, and prose—especially of prose. They are the grave of history, which, as you know, is made up of the wars and intrigues which have originated in the brains of public men. If your sordid views were true, how do you suppose for one minute that in this great epic struggle we could be consoled by the thought that we are 'making history'? Has there been a single utterance of any note which has not poured the balm of those words into our ears? Think how they have sustained the widow and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... upon the civil wars of France. ... And also upon the epic poetry of the European nations, from Homer down to Milton. London, for N.Prevost ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... people as effectually as any of the historians who went before him. The obsession of "the governing class" has thrust the people into the background. History resolves itself with him into a disgraceful epic of a governing class which despoiled Pope and King with the right hand, and the people with the left. It is a disgraceful epic patched with splendid episodes, but it culminates in an appalling cry of doubt whether, after all, it might not be ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... singing their hymns of love as well as their hymns of hatred. It is these which explain the two million volunteers which in August, 1914, went to swell the huge German conscript armies. It is the obsession of that mystical German creed which explains the epic achievements of the German offensive and the even more astounding achievements of the German defensive. We may continue to denounce the crimes of Germany and the atrocities of the German soldiery—and I have personally denounced them until my readers must have got ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... election sure. Greek architecture—one birth of beauty after another—was born. Athens was crowned with marvellous temples, whose exquisite proportions amaze and charm us to-day—inimitable creations of beauty. Homer came, and then epic poetry was born. AEschylus and tragedy came; Pindar and the lyric song; Theophrastus and pastoral music; Anacreon and the strain which bears his special name. And so Phidias and his companions created sculpture, Herodotus history, Demosthenes oratory, Plato and Aristotle philosophy, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... Vincent, "that, though we have one perfect epic poem, and several which pretend to perfection, we have not one perfect novel in the world. Gil Blas approaches more to perfection than any other (owing to the defect I have just mentioned in Anastasius); but it must be confessed that there is a want ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... break short upon the dipping bows out of the dark, and half-frozen men struggling for dear life with folds of madly thrashing sail. The pictures were, however, necessarily somewhat blurred and hazy, for after all only an epic poet could fittingly describe the things that must be done and borne at sea, and epic poets—it is, perhaps, a pity—are not bred in the forecastle. When he reached the last scene he gained almost dramatic power, and Agatha's face grew strangely white and tense. She saw the dim figures pulling in ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... learned from the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer of phlebotomy. Both were regarded ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Leuconomus, a translation into Greek, of White field. It was his conversion to Evangelicism which gave him his inspiration and his themes. 'The Task' has been as justly called the poem of Methodism as the 'Paradise Lost' has been called the epic of Puritanism. In it we are presented with a number of pictures of the utterly fossilized condition of the clergy of the day in the Established Church (see especially book II., vv. 326-832, in which he satirizes the clergy ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... language of Greece, which became so powerful in the development of the Roman literature and Roman civilization and, in the later Renaissance, a powerful engine of progress. Associated with the language is the literature of the Greeks. The epic poems of Homer, the later lyrics, the drama, the history, and the polemic, all had their highest types presented in the Greek literature. Latin and modern German, English and French owe to these great originators ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... day a poet will be able to sing this great epic in verses which shall answer to the swinging rhythm of battle and roll with the booming of a thousand guns. But, in the meantime, I should like to say a few words about a much humbler, a much simpler, a much ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... week, over a flamboyant design with bosses of lapis lazuli at the four corners; and only gave it up for a life-size recumbent figure in alabaster with four gryphons supporting the sarcophagus. As the soles of his boots thickened with prosperity, so did his stone grow in solidity. Finally an epic of his—Adrastus—took the town by storm, and three editions were exhausted in a single week. When this happened, he sat down with a gigantic sheet of cartridge paper before him and spent a whole year in setting out the elaborated design. By his will he left all his money to pay ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... promise of paternity, a thirst for some loyalty that shall unify life, and in the ordinary course of things he asks himself, "How far do the existing conditions of those assisting in shops fit in with my evident and epic destiny in the matter of love and marriage?" But here, as I have said, comes in the quiet and crushing power of modern materialism. It prevents him rising in rebellion, as he would otherwise do. By perpetually talking about environment and visible things, by ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... fleece, And Argo, manned with all the flower of Greece? Of Thebes' fell brethren, Theseus, stern of face, And Peleus' son, unrivalled in the race, AEneas, founder of the Roman line, And William, glorious on the banks of Boyne? Who has not learned to weep at Pompey's woes, And over Blackmore's epic page to doze? 'Tis I, who dare attempt unusual strains, Of hosts unsung, and unfrequented plains; The small shrill trump, and chiefs of little size, And armies rushing down the darkened skies. Where India reddens to the early dawn, Winds a deep vale from vulgar eyes ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... to hear The moment's music which they gave. Oft pealed for him a lofty tone From nodding pole and belting zone. He heard a voice none else could hear From centred and from errant sphere. The quaking earth did quake in rhyme, Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime. In dens of passion, and pits of woe, He saw strong Eros struggling through, To sun the dark and solve the curse, And beam to the bounds of the universe. While thus to love he gave his days In loyal worship, scorning praise, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the expostulations of Dumon, but again wrote his new epic of Franconnette in Gascon. It took him a long time to clothe his poetical thoughts in words. Nearly five years had elapsed since he recited The Blind Girl of Castel-Cuille to the citizens of Bordeaux; since then he had written ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... "Venus" and the "Lucrece," said finely of Shakespeare "Shakespeare could not have written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought." This prodigality of nature is exemplified equally in his Sonnets. The copious selection here given (which from the wealth of the material, required greater consideration than any other portion of the Editor's task) ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... entirely recovered Nero commanded his presence at Antium, whither the court was going for the hot summer months. Nero was ambitious to write an immortal epic poem which should rival the "Odyssey," and in order that he might describe realistically a burning city, gave a secret command while he was in Antium that Rome should be set ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... other epoch of that sublime scrimmage called history. Five or six names may be selected from the list of the early American prophets whose deeds and outcry, if reduced to hexameters, would be not the Iliad, not the Jerusalem Delivered, but the Epic of ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... twenty years abstained from his pencil, a singular circumstance seems explained by an extraordinary occurrence. TASSO, with feverish anxiety pondered on five different subjects before he could decide in the choice of his epic; the same embarrassment was long the fate of GIBBON on the subject of his history. Some have sunk into a deplorable state of utter languishment, from the circumstance of being deprived of the means of pursuing their beloved study, as in the case of the chemist BERGMAN. His friends, to gain ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... suits your own, and your means. About the letter of Vatinius I laughed heartily. But though I know I am being watched by him, I can swallow his hatred and digest it too. You urge me to "finish": well, I have finished what, in my own opinion at least, is a very pretty "epic" on Caesar, but I am in search of a trustworthy letter-carrier, lest it should share the fate of your Erigona[684]—the only personage who has missed a safe journey from Gaul ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... found at Nineveh of the Creation and the Flood as known to the Assyrians. These tablets formed part of a great epic poem of which Nimrod, the ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... of Tacitus, or the "din" made by the Norse "bards" (skalds) on shields and with shouts as they rushed into battle. It is not in Molbech, but Snorro frequently uses it in his Chronica, 1633.—43. Kalevala: Title of the great Finnish epic, of which the hero is Woinomoinen.—43. Polak: Polander or Pole.—43. Magyar (pron. Madjr): Hungarian.—43. Batuscha: An erratum of the author for his Batuschca (161)—better Batyushca, "father Tsar"—but generally applied by ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Sophocles; and yet Pater declares that the "Philoctetes" of Sophocles, if issued to-day, would be called romantic. And he points out—what indeed has been often pointed out—that the "Odyssey"[7] is more romantic than the "Iliad:" is, in fact, rather a romance than a hero-epic. The adventures of the wandering Ulysses, the visit to the land of the lotus-eaters, the encounter with the Laestrygonians, the experiences in the cave of Polyphemus, if allowance be made for the difference in sentiments and manners, remind the reader constantly ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Purgatory, Canto XI. His "Canzone sopra il Terreno Amore" was thought worthy of being illustrated by numerous and ample commentaries. Crescimbeni Ist. della Volg. Poes. l. v. For a playful sonnet which Dante addressed to him, and a spirited translation of it, see Hayley's Essay on Epic Poetry, Notes ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... valley inhaled with every breath this mingled air of romance and sorrow, history and song, and through those epic days runs a deep-laid consciousness of maternal pain. My mother's side of those long months of waiting was never fully delineated, for she was natively reticent and shy of expression. But piece by piece in later years I drew from her the tale of her long vigil, and obtained some ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... into the histories of these two selves. The official biographer reproduces the public life, the revealing memoir the other. The Charnwood Lincoln, for example, is a noble portrait, not of an actual human being, but of an epic figure, replete with significance, who moves on much the same level of reality as Aeneas or St. George. Oliver's Hamilton is a majestic abstraction, the sculpture of an idea, "an essay" as Mr. Oliver himself calls it, "on American union." It is a formal monument to the state-craft ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the city dweller the aroma of the pine and the music of the wind in its blanches—an epic poem * * * forest-scented, fresh-aired, and wholly American. A stronger character than ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... contrary, in the very extent of its sphere, can better measure itself with the Universe, and create with epic profusion. In an Iliad there is room even for a Thersites; and what does not find a place in the great epic ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... well attempt to empty the waters of the boundless sea into a narrow well, or to portray the splendor of the risen sun and the starry heavens with ink. No picture of the Saviour, though drawn by the master hand of a Raphael or Duerer or Rubens—no epic, though conceived by the genius of a Dante or Milton or Klopstock, can improve on the artless narrative of the gospel, whose only but all-powerful charm is truth. In this case certainly truth is stranger and stronger than fiction, and speaks best itself without comment, explanation, and eulogy. Here ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... but we bring together two kinds of animals so remote from each other in structure that the wildest imagination can scarcely fancy a transition between them. A comparison may make my meaning clearer as to the relative standing of these groups. The Epic Poem is a higher order of composition than the Song,—yet we may have an Epic Poem which, from its inferior mode of execution, stands lower than a Song that is perfect of its kind. So the plan of certain branches is more comprehensive and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... heroine' clamoured he, 'And make her some great Princess, six feet high, Grand, epic, homicidal; and be you The Prince to win her!' 'Then follow me, the Prince,' I answered, 'each be hero in his turn! Seven and yet one, like shadows in a dream.— Heroic seems our Princess as required— But something ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... believe nobody has made before me. You know very well that I write verses sometimes, because I have read some of them at this table. (The company assented,—two or three of them in a resigned sort of way, as I thought, as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and was going to read half a dozen books or so for their benefit.)—I continued. Of course I write some lines or passages which are better than others; some which, compared with the others, might be called relatively excellent. It is in the nature of things that I should ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the Arrakan Pagoda to-day, but a pleasant looking man came on board with a chitsaya harp; I had to try and make a jotting of him. G. and Captain Turndrup brought him. He sat and played tunes for hours—epic tunes, which I'd have given anything to remember. His boat-shaped harp of thirteen strings was tuned in minor thirds, so you could readily pick out Celtic tunes on it. I am told Sir Arthur Sullivan came here and listened to his music and made many ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... except an epic poyem on Jonah and the Whale, which I wrote at the age of seven. Most of it consisted of a conversation between them, while Jonah was in the Whale's stomach, which I think showed agility on the part ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... unable to confirm the exaggerations of the Brahmans, and yet reluctant to detract from the epic renown of their country by disclaiming its stupendous dimensions, attempted to reconcile its actual extent with the fables of the eastern astronomers by imputing to the agency of earthquakes the submersion ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... scene of the fabled golden age from which Saturn and the ancient deities had been expelled by Jupiter. But contrary to this pagan instinct, the Cumaean Sibyl stretched forward to a distant heaven of her aspirations and hopes—to a nobler future of the world, not sentimental and idyllic, but epic and heroic. She pictured the blessing or restoration of this earth itself as distinct from an invisible world of happiness. And in this respect she is more in sympathy with the Jewish and Christian religions than with her own. The golden age of the Hebrews was in the future, and ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the editor has chosen two from which to reprint brief passages. The first is Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, the simple and straightforward personal narrative of one whom all must now concede to have been a very great man; the other is that human and poignant epic of the stranger from Denmark who became one of us and of whom we as a people are tenderly proud. The Making of an American is in some ways a unique book; concrete, specific, self-revealing and yet dignified; a book that one could wish that every ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... his turn read aloud the fragment of an epic called L'Aveugle and two or three of the Elegies, till, when he ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Rustum is based on an episode related in the Shahnamah, or Book of Kings, by Firdusi, the epic poet of Persia. The chief hero of the Shahnamah is Rustum, the Hercules of Persian mythology. Rustum was the son of Zal, a renowned Persian warrior. When a mere child, he performed many wonderful deeds requiring great strength and valor. He became the champion of his people, restored ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... the most natural and indigenous productions of a true author's mind, is, by common consent, an epic poem: verily, a wearisome, unnecessary, unfashionable bit of writing. Nevertheless, let my candour humbly acknowledge that, for the larger canticle of two mortal days, I was brooding over, and diligently brewing up, a ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of fiction, and political life should never enter into them, except as a subordinate element; but there is a border-land between the two, in which politics and society act and react on each other, and it is from this field that the great subjects for epic and dramatic poetry have always been reaped. Hawthorne only knew of this by hearsay. Of the strenuous conflict that continually goes on in political centres like London and New York, a struggle for wealth, for honor, and precedence; of plots and counterplots, of foiled ambition and ruined ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... by an immense firelight. His red hair and beard looked almost scarlet, and his pale face as bright as a boy's. Something violent, something that was at once love and hatred, surged in the strange heart of the Gael below him. He had an unutterable sense of epic importance, as if he were somehow lifting all humanity into a prouder and more passionate region of the air. As he swung himself up also into the evening light he felt as if he were ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... 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, Whose silence is a hymn of praise And ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... it sends no messenger boys ahead to distribute its itinerary handbills." There is no fault of style which these few lines do not display. They combine, with a singular success, commonness and pomp. The epic poets of old were wont to illustrate the life of man by the phenomena of nature. The vulgar American reverses the process—he illustrates nature ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... in vain, for they were wasted on the rocks of rocks, a strong will and a vulgar soul. But indeed the whole thing was like epic poetry wrestling with the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... of the tales is slight; yet who can think of the Greeks without remembering the story of Troy, or of Rome without a backward glance at AEneas, fabled founder of the race and hero of Virgil's world-famous Latin epic? Any understanding of German civilisation would be incomplete without knowledge of the mythical prince Siegfried, hero of the earliest literature of the Teutonic people, finally immortalized in the nineteenth century through the musical dramas of Wagner. Any understanding of English ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... pre-war achievements in the field of polychromatic romanticism will hardly be prepared for his present development, which lifts him at a bound from the overcrowded ranks of lyric-writers to the uncongested heights whereon recline the great masters of epic poetry. And yet it was perhaps inevitable. The thunder and the reek of war (the last two years of which, we believe, were spent by Mr. Geek in the Egg Control Department) could scarcely have failed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... quiet within the tomb, and a grassy quiet without, that pleased exceedingly; but though the memories of the place were so high and epic, it only suggested bucolic associations, and, sunken into that nook of hill-side verdure, made me think of a spring-house on some far-away Ohio farm; a thought that, perhaps, would not have offended the poet, who loved and sang of humble country things, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... from a large and well-marked epic cycle, the central tale of the series being the anonymous "Cattle of Cooly," wherein is related the war waged by the Irish Queen Mab against her husband for the possession of a mystic brown bull. In the course of this war the chief hero, Cuchulaind, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... have succeeded in one of the real arts, in epic poetry, in tragedy or comedy, in history or philosophy, who have taught men or charmed them. The others of whom we have spoken are, among men of letters, what wasps are ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... death by butterflies." His own fault, the simpleton! Instead of cramp couplets, each like a knife in your entrails, he should write, says Bluphocks, both classically and intelligibly.—AEsculapius, an Epic. Catalogue of the drugs: Hebe's plaister—One strip Cools 20 your lip. Phoebus's emulsion—One bottle Clears your ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... his control of its action and direction was incomplete owing to bodily fatigue. Hence it lay open to assault, at the mercy of a thousand and one crowding thoughts and perceptions. And over these he desired to gain ascendency—to drive, rather than be driven by them. The epic of his three-score years, from its dim, illusive start to this dramatic and inexorable finish—but instantly disclosed to him in the reluctant admissions of the good-hearted Irish doctor—flung by at a double, in coloured yet incoherent progression, so to speak, now marching to triumphant ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the old English epic of Beowulf, shows the language in another aspect. Here, as in all poetry, archaic forms abound, and the syntax is intentionally involved. It is written in the old alliterative rhythm, described in the ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun, as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... grave of Davis will spring a massive monument, which will forever remain a landmark in American history,— aye, in the mighty epic of the world! More imposing cenotaphs have risen, costlier mausoleums have charmed the eye, more gigantic monuments have aspired to kiss the clouds; but to the student of mankind none were more significant, to the historian none ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... book which I read through and through in early childhood to great profit. This was Cottle's "Alfred," an epic of some merit, but chiefly in this, that it sets forth tolerably clearly the old Norse life and religion. George Boker owned and gave me some time after a book entitled "Five Norse Poems," in the original, and translated. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... family; one sole little nation, assembling in joy and pride to celebrate that diamond wedding, the rare prodigious nuptials of two heroic creatures whom life had glorified and from whom all had sprung! And what an epic, what a Biblical numbering of that people suggested itself! How even name all those who entered the farm, how simply set forth their names, their ages, their degree of relationship, the health, the strength, and the hope that they had ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... essentials necessary for the true conformation of the sublimest effort of poetic genius, the construction of an "Epic Poem," are numerically three; viz., a beginning, a middle, and an end. The incipient characters necessary to the beginning, ripening in the middle, and, like the drinkers of small beer and October leaves, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various |
