"Homer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first Crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. But in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of coloring quite unknown to the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and Tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness {71} and power. The Faery Queene, too, was a tale of knight-errantry. Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with the familiar adventures and figures of Gothic ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and shining pedants, who adorn their conversation, even with women, by happy quotations of Greek and Latin; and who have contracted such a familiarity with the Greek and Roman authors, that they, call them by certain names or epithets denoting intimacy. As OLD Homer; that SLY ROGUE Horace; MARO, instead of Virgil; and Naso, Instead of Ovid. These are often imitated by coxcombs, who have no learning at all; but who have got some names and some scraps of ancient authors by heart, which they improperly and impertinently retail ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... sailing from the pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) to Corfu. Yet such a course taken now would land the traveller in Africa. Odysseus is said in his voyage in springtime to have seen the Pleiades and Arcturus setting late, which seemed to early commentators a proof of Homer's inaccuracy. Likewise Homer, both in the Odyssey [2] (v. 272-5) and in the Iliad (xviii. 489), asserts that the Great Bear never set in those latitudes. Now it has been found that the precession of the ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... the display of eloquence; and was fond of talking, often in public. We know that he developed a certain talent in this direction, and was particularly successful in the gentle art of wounding people. His favourite quotation was the celebrated verse of Homer— ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... wouldn't mind going back, Homer," said Mrs. Waddle, and they looked at each other as in the days ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... history as told by Livy, and without any inventive or constructive power of his own copies, with tasteless pedantry, Homer and Vergil. 'He cannot perceive that the divine interventions which are admissible in the quarrel of Aeneas and Turnus are ludicrous when imported into the struggle between Scipio and Hannibal. Who can help resenting the unreality when at Saguntum ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... that I'm getting rich in that line, for on New Year's Day Mr. Bhaer gave me a fine Shakespeare. It is one he values much, and I've often admired it, set up in the place of honor with his German Bible, Plato, Homer, and Milton, so you may imagine how I felt when he brought it down, without its cover, and showed me my own name in it, ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... public of ladies, whose suffrage, the two men, different as they were in most things, were especially courting. Richardson's popularity among them needs not to be recalled, and as for Greene, he was stated at the time of his greater vogue to be nothing less than "the Homer of women."[126] ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... left us late!" No sooner ceas'd the sound, than I beheld Four mighty spirits toward us bend their steps, Of semblance neither sorrowful nor glad. When thus my master kind began: "Mark him, Who in his right hand bears that falchion keen, The other three preceding, as their lord. This is that Homer, of all bards supreme: Flaccus the next in satire's vein excelling; The third is Naso; Lucan is the last. Because they all that appellation own, With which the voice singly accosted me, Honouring they greet me thus, and well they judge." So I beheld united the bright school ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the Hellespont, and through the narrow strait of Abydos, and so on into the Propontis, which we call Marmora now. And there they met with Cyzicus, ruling in Asia over the Dolions, who, the songs say, was the son of AEneas, of whom you will hear many a tale some day. For Homer tells us how he fought at Troy; and Virgil how he sailed away and founded Rome; and men believed until late years that from him sprang the old British kings. Now Cyzicus, the songs say, welcomed the heroes; for his father had been one of ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... pronounced wrongly, for the whole story is a fiction. But at this peculiar moment of hunger and of avarice, I confess I was too ready, and gave a check for the amount. I had no sooner, however, satisfied myself with what Homer calls [Greek: edetnos ede potetos], and we moderns, meat and potatoes—than I began to suspect the soundness of the scheme, or the company, who had gone to the expense of a chaise for eight miles merely to collect this subscription of mine; and I was curious ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... de Honate, who at that date were the possessors of the peculiar roman type used in the Latin translations. After the Aesop this particular font of Greek type next appeared in the first edition of Homer, printed at Florence in 1488 by Bartolommeo di Libri, and in three of his subsequent books, once at Rome early in the 16th century, after which ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... cities claim great Homer dead, Through which the living Homer begged his bread." So sang, as if the thought had been his own, An unknown bard, improving on a known. "Neglected genius!"—that is sad indeed, But malice better would ignore than heed, And Shepherd's soul, we ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... said Rogers hastily, as though he felt ashamed of himself or were acknowledging a fault in his construing of Homer. 'I understand it perfectly. Only I put all those things—imaginative things—aside when I went into business. I had to concentrate my energies ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... upon the "Batrachomyomachia," and proved that the poet's object was to excite a distaste for sedition. Pierre la Seine, going a step farther, shows that the intention was to recommend to young men temperance in eating and drinking. Just so, too, Jacobus Hugo has satisfied himself that, by Euenis, Homer meant to insinuate John Calvin; by Antinous, Martin Luther; by the Lotophagi, Protestants in general; and, by the Harpies, the Dutch. Our more modern Scholiasts are equally acute. These fellows demonstrate a hidden meaning in "The Antediluvians," a parable ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... estimates as most important the fact that the Greek always gave precedence to children and said, .'' The Greek naturalists, Hippocrates and Aristotle, modestly held woman to be half human, and even the poet Homer is not free from this point of view (cf. the advice of Agamemnon to Odysseus). Moreover, he speaks mostly concerning the scan- dalmongering and lying of women, while later, Euripides directly reduces the status of women to the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Homer, thy song men liken to the sea, With every note of music in his tone, With tides that wash the dim dominion Of Hades, and light waves that laugh in glee Around the isles enchanted: nay, to me Thy verse seems as the River of source unknown ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... an exordium, I feel a little ashamed of my hero, and could wish, for the credit of my tale, it were not more necessary to invoke the historic muse of Fielding, than that of Homer or Tasso; but imperious Truth obliges me to confess, that Tallien, who is to be the subject of this letter, was first introduced to celebrity by circumstances not favourable for the comment of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... love-stories were written before the Christian era: the Amor and Psyche of Apuleius for instance. Indeed love in all its forms was familiar to the ancients. Where can we find a more beautiful expression of ardent passion than glows in Sappho's songs? or of patient faithful constancy than in Homer's Penelope? Could there be a more beautiful picture of the union of two loving hearts, even beyond the grave, than Xenophon has preserved for us in his account of Panthea and Abradatas? or the story of Sabinus the Gaul and his wife, told in the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Homer, by Mr. T. A. Buckley, has just appeared in London. No prose version will cause any just notion of the spirit of Homer. Of the half dozen metrical translations published recently, we think that of our countryman ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... made in choice Romaic—and which, doubtless, sounded much more heroic and elegant in that idiom than in simple English, was highly applauded by his followers—indeed, had they ever heard of Homer, they would have considered it equal in substance and talent to anything ever uttered by the most valiant of the heroes he speaks of. It was scarcely concluded, however—and they were still discussing the subject, when the man at the helm, who had kept his eye to windward, exclaimed ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... mortal man. In the world Dr Grantly never lays aside that demeanour which so well becomes him. He has all the dignity of an ancient saint with the sleekness of a modern bishop; he is always the same; he is always the archdeacon; unlike Homer, he never nods. Even with his father-in-law, even with the bishop and dean, he maintains that sonorous tone and lofty deportment which strikes awe into the young hearts of Barchester, and absolutely cows the whole parish of Plumstead Episcopi. 'Tis only ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... patriotism and history. The life of man is the cathedral window, and religion is the colored figure that stands in it. The two are inseparable. You can not abolish the figure without breaking the window; you can not banish religion without destroying humanity. Try to explain Homer's world without Olympus; account for Mohammedanism and make no reference to faith; write the history of the Middle Ages and take no note of the "Divine Comedy"; sum up the meaning of Persian and Indian civilization and pay no heed to religion; show what ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... deserves some notice, as hardly any other anciently domesticated bird or quadruped has varied so little. That geese were anciently domesticated we know from certain verses in Homer; and from these birds having been kept (388 B.C.) in the Capitol at Rome as sacred to Juno, which sacredness implies great antiquity[455]. That the goose has varied in some degree, we may infer from naturalists ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... destruction (Polit. 269 ff.). No doubt in this idea of cycles Plato is influenced by the popular thought of his time: this feeling that there had been a lost Golden Age in the past was deeply rooted in Greek mythology. We get it long before Plato, in Hesiod, and there are similar touches in Homer, and once men believe that they have sunk from glory, there is always the dread that if ever they recover it they will lose it again. And with Plato this dread is reinforced by his sense of something incurable in ...
— Progress and History • Various
... leave unmeddled with. In like manner Baptism, the Sacrament, and the Office of Preaching have remained among us against the power of many tyrants and heretics that have opposed the same. These our Lord God hath kept and maintained by his special strength. Homer, Virgil, and suchlike are profitable and ancient books; but, in comparison of the Bible, they are nothing to ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... that we are to think that Homer wanted judgment, because Virgil had it in a more eminent degree; or that Virgil wanted invention, because Homer possessed a larger share of it: each of these great authors had more of both than, perhaps, any ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... her. It's not to be thought of for a moment. It's a pity that she couldn't have a chance here—but how could she! I had thought she might marry a gentleman, but I dare say she'll do as well as the rest of her friends—as well as Mary B., for instance, who married—Homer Pettifoot, did you say? Or maybe Billy Oxendine might do for her. As long as she has never known any better, she'll probably be as well satisfied as though she married a rich man, and lived in a fine house, and kept a carriage and servants, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... existing—there was no doubt about that—but so unnecessary, such a thing to believe in— Shaw and Wells and the serious sixpenny weeklies! What were they after, scrubbing and demolishing, these elderly people? Had they never read Homer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans? He saw it clearly outlined against the feelings he drew from youth and natural inclination. The poor devils had rigged up this meagre object. Yet something of pity was in him. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... certain extent inseparable from the conception of life, but to insist on ethics as the chief interest of the human pageant was surely absurd. One might as well read Lycidas for the sake of its denunciation of "our corrupted Clergy," or Homer for "manners and customs." An artist entranced by a beautiful landscape did not greatly concern himself with the geological formation of the hills, nor did the lover of a wild sea inquire as to the chemical analysis of the water. Lucian saw a colored and complex ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... somewhat slower, this circle becomes interrupted in one part; and then the time taken up in such a revolution of the stick is the same that the observer uses in changing his ideas: thus the [Greek: dolikoskoton enkos] of Homer, the long shadow of the flying javelin, is elegantly designed to give us an idea of its velocity, and not of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... in some circles Mr. BRADSHAW holds a position comparable only to the position of HOMER. I once knew an elderly clergyman who knew the whole of Mr. BRADSHAW'S book by heart. He could tell you without hesitation the time of any train from anywhere to anywhere else. He looked forward each month to the new number, ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... chivalry, properly so called, depends on the recognition of the order and awe of lower and loftier animal life, first clearly taught in the myth of Chiron, and in his bringing up of Jason, AEsculapius, and Achilles, but most perfectly by Homer, in the fable of the horses of Achilles, and the part assigned to them, in relation to the death of his friend, and in prophecy of his own. There is, perhaps, in all the "Iliad," nothing more deep in significance—there is nothing in all literature ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... clerk or a noble gentleman, his critics complain because the common people cannot understand his words. A similar situation appears in modern times when Arnold lays down the law that the judges of an English version of Homer must be "scholars, because scholars alone have the means of really judging him," and Newman replies that "scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public must be the ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... that I had tried harder for what is called Fame, but generally (as now) I care very little about it. After all,—unless one could be Shakespeare, which (clearly) is not an easy matter,—of what value is a little puff of smoke from a review? If we could settle permanently who is to be the Homer or Shakespeare of our time, it might be worth something; but we cannot. Is it Jones, or Smith, or ——? Alas! I get short-sighted on this point, and cannot penetrate the impenetrable dark. Make my remembrances acceptable ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... truth of the Pentateuch is everywhere assumed by the writers of the New Testament in the most absolute and unqualified manner. They do not simply allude to it and make quotations from it, as one might do in the case of Homer's poems, but they build upon the facts which it records arguments of the weightiest character, and pertaining to the essential doctrines and duties of religion. This is alike true of the Mosaic laws and of the narratives that precede them or are interwoven ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... vastly to the interest of this legend is that we find it in Homer. It is essentially the same with the belt of Aphrodite (Hymn, l. 88). In Iliad xiv., 214, Aphrodite takes it off and lends it to Hr to charm Zeus withal. When we add that just above in the same context (Iliad xiv., ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... these famous warriors endeavour to satisfy at once the contradictory tastes of their patrons for marvels and for truth. Their works are a collection of attested prodigies. They are unanimous in putting aside Homer's story, which does not contain enough miracles to please them, and, being in consequence little disposed to leniency, they reject the whole of it as apocryphal. I confess, says one of them, that Homer was a "marvellous clerk," but his tales must not be believed: "For well we know, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... We've been through that." The sergeant went to the door and opened it. "Say, Homer, take another look around the walk and the bushes. There's supposed to be two of ...
— The Ultroom Error • Gerald Allan Sohl
... for it, dwelt in Ravenna for a number of years, under the protection of its gracious lord. And here by his teachings he trained many scholars in poetry, especially in the vernacular, which vernacular to my thinking he first exalted and brought into repute amongst us Italians no otherwise than did Homer his amongst the Greeks or Virgil his amongst the Latins. Before him, though it is supposed that it had already been practised some short space of years, yet was there none who by the numbering of the syllables and by the consonance of the terminal parts ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... grace divine her soul is blest, And heavenly Pallas breathes within her breast; In wonderous arts than woman more renowned, And more than woman with deep wisdom crowned. HOMER. ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... Every man in the ship, from the commander to the youngest boy, could feel and understand this natural beauty; but there were many on board the squadron who had still higher enjoyment, as they gazed on those isles and shores which recalled the classic verse of Homer and of Virgil. For them every island, cape, river, and mountain was fraught with interest. There lay Tenedos, renowned of old; there the mountain isle of Imbros stood out in bold relief from the snow-clad summits of Samothracia. ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... you?" he said. "This is what we call long grass"; and he asked if I could "see any track now." "It's as plain as a pikestaff," he declared, trying to show what he called a "clear break all the way." "Oh I'm a dead homer all right," he shouted after further going as we came ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... cold analytical light which the "Juventui Mundi" pours upon the nebulous realm of Hellenic lore and Heroic legend, we learn that Homer knew "no destiny fighting with the gods, or unless in the shape of death, defying them,"—and that the "Nemesis often inaccurately rendered as revenge, was after all but self-judgment, or sense of moral law." Even in the dim Homeric dawn, Conscience ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... brother David fired the shot. Before we knew that Jackson was out of the Valley, news came of the battle of First Manassas, in which General Bee conferred upon him and his brigade the soubriquet of "Stonewall," and by so doing likened himself to "Homer, who immortalized the ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... ranks with the transcendent creations of human genius; the poetry, the statues, the temples, of Greece. It produces and represents as they did whatever is most beautiful in the spirit of man and often expresses what is most profound. And who are the great composers, who hereafter will rank with Homer, with Sophocles, with Praxiteles, or with Phidias? They are the descendants of those Arabian tribes who conquered Canaan, and who by favour of the Most High have done more with less means even than ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... went to Strassburg to complete his law course. There Herder happened to be, even then a famed critic and scholar, and he aroused in Goethe a love and understanding of what was really great and genuine in literature: especially Homer, the Bible, Shakspere, and the Volkslied i.e., the simple folksong. In the fall of the year Goethe met Friederike Brion in the parsonage at Sesenheim, a village near Strassburg. Now Herder's teaching bore fruit in an outburst of real song (1, 2 and 4). The influence of the Volkslied ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... meet with no opposition the subject of them feels decidedly the better for them afterwards. That anger is not without its pleasure is a truth that was recorded even by Aristotle;[1] and he quotes a passage from Homer, who declares anger to be sweeter than honey. But not in anger alone—in hatred too, which stands to anger like a chronic to an acute disease, a man may indulge with ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... shedding tears contrasts strongly with the external stoicism of modern civilization; but it is true to Arab character, and Easterns, like the heroes of Homer and Italians of Boccacio, are not ashamed of what we look upon as the result of feminine hysteria - "a ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... antagonism to the mores of their ancestors. In the Homeric poems cases are to be found of disapproval by a later generation of the mores of a former one. The same is true of the tragedies of the fifth century in respect to the mythology and heroism in Homer. The punishment of Melantheus, the unfaithful goatherd, was savage in the extreme, but when Eurykleia exulted over the dead suitors, Ulysses told her that it was a cruel sin to rejoice over slain enemies.[143] In the Iliad ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... among the habitual spoils of the grocer.[8] It is sad, and is suggestive of many inquiries, that this abundance was followed, at least in the West, by a famine of more than a thousand years. And it is hard, even after all allowances, to conceive that of all the many manuscripts of Homer which Italy must have possessed we do not know that a single parchment or papyrus was ever read by a single individual, even in a convent, or even by a giant such as Dante, or as Thomas Acquinas, the first of them unquestionably master of all the knowledge that was within the ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... poetic past! Else might these moonlit prairies show at dawn, The dew-swept circle of the elfin dance— These woodlands teem with sportive fay and faun— These grottoes glimmer with sweet Echo's glance. Perchance a future Homer might have wrought From out the scattered wreck of ages fled, Some long lost Troy, where mighty heroes fought, And made the ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes; and it seems superfluous, when we consider the remote geographical position of the Ethiopians, and how very little the Greeks had to do with them, to inquire further why Homer calls them "blameless." ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... Babylonian and Egyptian statues, paintings, and seals, which are the product of that early thought for which there was no essential difference between man and beast. The festival in which the gods carouse is of a piece with the divine Ethiopian feasts of Homer. On the other hand, the idea of the omnipotence of the divine word, when Marduk makes the garment disappear and reappear, is scarcely a primitive one. It is substantially identical with the Biblical "Let it be, and it was." It is probable that the poem ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... been an open winter, 'nd there wuz fever all around us. The Baxters lost their little girl, and Homer Thompson's children had all been taken down. Ev'ry night 'nd mornin' we prayed God to save our darlin'; but one evenin' when I come up from the wood-lot, the Old Man wuz restless 'nd his face wuz hot 'nd he talked in his sleep. Maybe you've been through it yourself,—maybe ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... elevated or too refined to glow with fervor in the commendation or the love of individual benefactors. All this is unnatural. It is as if one should be so enthusiastic a lover of poetry, as to care nothing for Homer or Milton; so passionately attached to eloquence as to be indifferent to Tully and Chatham; or such a devotee to the arts, in such an ecstasy with the elements of beauty, proportion, and expression, as to regard ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the hope of New France was gone. Born and educated in camps, Montcalm had been carefully instructed, and was skilled in the language of Homer as well as in the art of war. Greatly laborious, just, disinterested, hopeful even to rashness, sagacious in council, swift in action, his mind was a well-spring of bold designs; his career in Canada a wonderful struggle against inexorable destiny. Sustaining hunger and cold, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... those which nations have produced in the earliest stages of their culture. These works bring children face to face with the picture which mind has sketched for itself in one of the necessary stages of its development. This is the real reason why our children never weary of reading Homer and the stories of the Old Testament. Polytheism and the heroism which belongs to it are just as substantial an element of childish conception as monotheism with its prophets and patriarchs. We stand beyond both, because ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... his fellow-men. Individual men, as Lycurgus, Solon, Pericles, Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon have left the impress of their own mind and character upon the political institutions of nations, and, in indirect manner, upon the character of succeeding generations of men. Homer, Plato, Cicero, Bacon, Kant, Locke, Newton, Shakspeare, Milton have left a deep and permanent impression upon the forms of thought and speech, the language and literature, the science and philosophy of nations. And inasmuch as a nation is the aggregate of individual beings endowed with ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... javelin, as it was the most obvious, so probably it was the earliest step in advance. Close upon this followed the sling, and last the arrow and the bow. The invention of the latter weapon is ascribed by Pliny, in the chapter above cited, to a son of Jupiter. In the days of Homer it was the weapon of the gods; and thousands of years after, it was the pride and glory of the English yeoman. The classical scholar will remember the description in the fourth book of the Iliad, of the bow with which Pandaros shot ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... was able to collect twenty or thirty men around him, advanced into the midst of the enemy, where they fought hand to hand, bayonet to bayonet, and sword to sword, with the tumult and ferocity of Homer's combats before the walls of Troy. Attacked unexpectedly in the dark, and surrounded by enemies before we could arrange to oppose them, no order or discipline of war could be preserved. We were mingled with the Americans ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... Ireland had at hand all the materials for a great national epic, a wealth of saga-material replete with interesting episodes, picturesque and dramatic incidents and strongly defined personages, yet she never found her Homer, a gifted poet to embrace her entire literary wealth, to piece the disjointed fragments together, smooth the asperities and hand down to posterity the finished epic of the Celtic world, superior, perhaps, to the Iliad or the Odyssey. What has come down to us is "a sort of ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... and the sooner we should reach that best state of humanity that was attainable. And here it is, that Christianity, as a rule of moral conduct, surpasses all others. Men, in general, look up to men for models. Thus Homer makes one of his heroes, when giving counsel to his son, say, "Always emulate the best." Thus also we should say to our children, if a person of extraordinary character were to live in our neighbourhood, "This is the pattern for your virture." But Jesus Christ says, aim at perfection beyond that ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... have always known, who built the Parthenon and crowned the Acropolis; but not until Schliemann had by faith and good works removed the mountain of Hissarlik, did we know that the Troy, of which blind Homer sang, was not a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... all its excellences it would be unjust to complain that the Zone "Y. M." is a trifle "low-brow" in its tastes, that the books on its shelves are apt to be "popular" novels rather than reading matter, that its phonographs are most frequently screeching vaudeville noises while the Slezak and Homer disks lie tucked away far down near ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... preserve your own position." This adventure in itself, without going further, Might serve as a lesson, to most of mankind, For of us mortals, a certain part inclines, To the belief, that, with the help of mind, The book of Destiny may easily be read, But this book, by Homer and his disciples sung, What is it called but Chance, by ancients, And by us Christians named Providence instead. Now in Chance there can no science be, Or why should it be called by them Chance— And things uncertain, who knows in advance? If all depends upon the fixed decree, Of Him who does ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... contemplation of death is where the donor would rather have the thing himself than that the donee should have it, and that the latter should rather have it than his own heir. An illustration may be found in Homer, where Telemachus makes a ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... courage, and it matters little whence the illustrations come. Doubtless, for every great deed ever narrated, there were a hundred greater ones untold; and the noblest valor of the world may sleep unrecorded, like the heroes before Homer. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... that I was obliged to perform completely all his pleasure. He commanded me many times that I should seek to see this youthful angel, so that I in my boyhood often went seeking her, and saw her of such noble and praiseworthy deportment, that truly of her might be said that saying of the poet Homer: 'She does not seem the daughter of a mortal, but of God.' And it befell that her image, which stayed constantly with me, inspired boldness in Love to hold lordship over me; but it was of such noble virtue, that it never suffered that Love should rule ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... has been a magnificent failure. I suppose in the whole of India there are few men whose learning is greater than his, and I don't think there are many men more beloved. He has a great white beard, and the profile of Homer, and a laugh that brings the roof down. He has wasted all his money on two great objects: to help others, and on alchemy. He holds huge courts every day in his garden of all the learned men of all religions—Rajahs and beggars ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... tried friends on either side of him. Many of these country places I came to know afterwards from the talk of the men, and many others I have travelled through, so that the names upon the banners have come to have a real meaning with me. Homer hath, I remember, a chapter or book wherein he records the names of all the Grecian chiefs and whence they came, and how many men they brought to the common muster. It is pity that there is not some Western Homer who could record the names of these brave peasants and artisans, and recount ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... translator from the Greek and the Latin Congreve first brought himself to the attention of Dryden, who pronounced the youthful Congreve "more capable than any man I know" to translate the whole of Homer. Congreve never completed that proposed translation, but years later he was singled out by Pope for the dedication of his Homer. That Congreve's genuine interest in the classics continued throughout his life is attested by the constant and carefully ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... of Homer, not elect in vain, Deep trumpets blow before thee, shawms behind Mix music with the rolling wheels that wind Slow through the labouring triumph of thy train: Fierce history, molten in thy forging brain, Takes ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the powers of the ablest artist, and at best he could give but a very imperfect notion of it. To describe it so that its beauty, brilliancy, and wondrous nature shall be in the slightest degree appreciated by my readers would require a command of words such as no poet since Homer—nay, not Homer himself—possessed. What was strange, and can perhaps be rendered intelligible, was the variation, or, to use a phrase more suggestive and more natural, if not more accurate, the extreme mobility of the ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... subject of reading however my mind had strong contentions with itself: poetry, and the belles lettres, Homer, Horace, Virgil, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Tasso, Ariosto, Racine, Moliere, Congreve, with a long and countless et caetera, were continually tempting me to quit the barren pursuits of divinity and law, for the study of which I had come to Oxford. Yet ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... to-day, it may not impossibly be due to the fact that we have ceased to prize the old, old tales which have been the delight of the child and the child-man since the foundations of the world. If you want your child to love Homer, do not withhold ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of the day." Now since, of these people, they who rise at six pique themselves on their early rising, in reference to those who rise at nine; and they, in their turn, on theirs, in reference to those who rise at twelve; since, like Homer's generations, they "successive rise," and early rising is, therefore, as I said, a phrase only intelligible by comparison, we must (as theologians and politicians ought oftener to do) set out by a definition of terms. What is early ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... long ere The Dawn the rosy East has kissed; High reared her sacred temples in Olympia's shady groves, and built There sacred altars to her gods. Old Zeus and Phoebus oft here sat In council with their fellow gods. And Homer, fiery bard, was first To smite the chords of nature's lyre; Sweet sang he till the earth was filled With rarest strains of rapturous song! Then art and letters blew and blushed, The fairest flowers of ages past, Whose essence, spilled upon the breeze, Is wafted ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... not. The thieves ransacked the library and got very little for their pains. The whole place was turned upside down, drawers burst open and presses ransacked, with the result that an odd volume of Pope's 'Homer,' two plated candlesticks, an ivory letter-weight, a small oak barometer, and a ball of twine, are ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Travel, fair women and college life, the Savile club, and Great Malvern or the Cornish coast, music in Paris or Vienna—this of course was the natural milieu for such a man. Instead of which our poor scholar (with Homer and Shakespeare and Pausanias piled upon his one small deal table) had to encounter the life of the shabby recluse in London lodgings—synonymous for him, as passage after passage in his books ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... somewhat important to make up our minds on this matter? Are all these great men mistaken, or are we? Are Shakespeare and AEschylus, Dante and Homer, merely dressing dolls for us; or, worse than dolls, unnatural visions, the realization of which, were it possible, would bring anarchy into all households and ruin into all affections? Nay, if you can suppose this, take lastly the evidence ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... the fires, he made his way down-stairs in the dark of a winter morning and found, if the fire had been properly raked up the night before, a few coals in the ashes in the kitchen fireplace. The last person who went to bed the night before had done exactly what Homer describes as the practice in Ulysses's time, when he tells us that Ulysses covered himself with leaves after he ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... Old Person of Cromer, Who stood on one leg to read Homer; When he found he grew stiff, He jumped over the cliff, Which concluded ...
— Book of Nonsense • Edward Lear
... shows; and how the Princesses had their trains borne as they crossed the park. He asked her what quality in herself she valued the most; and owned that he was hugely indebted to his coolness. When his colours were not drying fast enough, he read her a page or two of grand heroic reading from Pope's 'Homer' about Agamemnon and Achilles, Helen and Andromache; when she tired of that he was back again to the sparkling gossip of the town, for he was a brilliant fellow, with a clear intellect and a fine taste; and he had stored up and arranged elegantly on the ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... translation has been so frequently taken by the Latin poets—by Virgil and Horace, let us say, as being those best known—that they have been regarded by some as no more than translations. To them to have been translators of Homer, or of Pindar and Stesichorus, and to have put into Latin language ideas which were noble, was a work as worthy of praise as that of inventing. And it must be added that the forms they have used have been perfect in their kind. There has been no need to them for close translation. They ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... by their immense horns; Gringalet followed our example. Lucien sat down so as to laugh at his ease, for l'Encuerado, instead of running away, drew his bill-hook, assuming a threatening attitude to his enemies, and, like one of Homer's heroes, defied them to come near him. At last the whole band of beetles united and suspended themselves to the branch of a ceiba, a tree for which the Hercules ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... situations that rapidly succeed each other. The whole country consists of high pointed hills, at one time appearing in the form of pyramids, at others of a globular or conical form, and seeming as it were under the protection of some neighbouring mountain, such as Peak Homer, or another lying north-by-west of it, and even a third farther inland. Liberal as nature has been in the adornment of these parts, the industry of the Japanese seems not a little to have contributed to their beauty; for nothing indeed can equal the extraordinary degree of cultivation everywhere ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... argument against the literal interpretation is further furnished by iii. 2. The verse is commonly translated: "And then I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver, and an homer of barley, and a lethech of barley;" and is explained from the custom prevalent in the East of purchasing wives from their parents. But it is very doubtful whether the verb [Hebrew: krh] has the signification "to purchase." There is no necessity for deviating ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... and deservedly, in favor of the great poets of antiquity. Unmeasured praise has been bestowed upon the epic grandeur of Homer and the classical purity of Virgil. They have ever been considered as foremost amongst the best models of poetic excellence. Yet there was wanting to them the true sources of poetic inspiration, whence flow the loftiest conceptions and sublimest emanations of genius. Homer never rose ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... shepherd race, And Nile substructs her granite base,— Tented Tartary, columned Nile,— And, under vines, on rocky isle, Or on wind-blown sea-marge bleak, Forward stepped the perfect Greek: That wit and joy might find a tongue, And earth grow civil, HOMER sung. ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... river of Ionia, in the neighborhood of Smyrna, whence Homer is called Melesigenes. The Mincio watered the city of Mantua famous as the birthplace of Virgil. Sebetus is now called the Fiume della Maddalena—it ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... "sky": it had become to them a personal name of a great spiritual power, which they were free to invest with the noblest ideal of personality. But very likely there is also another reason: I believe that the Olympian Zeus, as modelled by Homer and accepted by following generations, was not the original [Greek: Zeus pater] at all, but a usurper who had robbed the old Sky-father of his throne and of his title as well, that he was at the outset a hero-king who some time after his death ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... of moral and sensuous beauty. Illiteracy was no longer the style at court. Elizabeth herself set the example in the study of Greek. Books and manuscripts were eagerly sought after, Scholars became conversant with Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the great tragic poets Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus; and translations for the many of Vergil, Ovid, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca poured forth from the printing-presses of London. The English mind was strongly tempered ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... the Greeks and Romans were wont to slip clear of the employment of their [Greek: thanatos], mors, etc., by such circumlocutions as vitam suam mutare, transire e seculo; [Greek: koimesato chalkeon hypnon]—he slept the brazen sleep (Homer's Iliad, [Greek: Lamda], 241); [Greek: ton de skotos oss' ekalypsen]—and darkness covered his eyes (Iliad, [Greek: Zeta], 11); or he completeth the destiny of life, etc. This reminds us of the French aversion to uttering their ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and the church-bells. For the necessity of the first something may be said. But the heavy clangor of the bells is doubtless more than a discomfort to many, and it is wholly useless, while the music of the organs and the bands is a pleasure. Do the Aldermen, like Homer, sometimes nod? Sometimes, for an inadvertent hour, do the finer instincts of public spirit flag in those civic bosoms? What evil genius, hostile to the enjoyment of the people, persuaded them? Did the city fathers for one ill-starred ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... imitated style"; for, of the hundreds who have tried, how many, besides Franklin, have really succeeded in imitating it? We do not believe that Latin and Greek are an "obstructing nuisance," or that the student of Homer and Thucydides and Demosthenes and Plato and Aristotle and Caesar and Cicero and Tacitus is merely studying "the prattle of infant man," or "adding the ignorance of the ancients to the ignorance he was born with." We believe, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... particularly interesting to compare Taras Bulba with the trilogy of the Polish genius, Sienkiewicz. The former is tiny in size, the latter a leviathan; but the effect produced is the same. It is what we feel in reading Homer, whose influence, by the way, is as powerful in "Taras Bulba" as it is in "With ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... the generations of men; which is at once a higher art and a purer glory than distinguishes those who build the walls of cities, or lay the foundations of empires. The cities which contested for the honor of being the birthplace of Homer are forgotten, or remembered only because they contested for the honor, while Homer himself is immortal. If, then, the mere birth of a human being is an honor to a city, how illustrious the distinction of those who guide the footsteps ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... unacquainted with the original, and familiar with Homer only through the brilliant rifacimento of Pope, should complain of the redundancies and repetitions which he meets here, let the writer remind him that the attempt is to render the ancient poet, not only in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... no myths; no heroes. They look back on no Heroic Age, no Achilles, no Agamemnon, and no Homer. The past is vacant. The have not even a 'Wacht am Rhein' or 'Marseillaise' to chaunt in chorus with quickened step and flashing eye. No; nor even a ballad of the hearth, handed down from father to son, to be sung at home festivals, as a treasured silver tankard is brought out to drink ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... Napoleon's voyage had been one of constant peril; for the Mediterranean was traversed in all directions by English ships of war, in whose presence resistance would have been hopeless. He occupied his time, during this period of general anxiety, in very peaceful studies: he read the Bible, the Koran, Homer; conversed with his savans on the old times and manners of the East; and solved problems in geometry. He also spent many hours in playing at the game of vingt-un; and M. de Bourienne says, that he never hesitated to play unfairly when it suited his purpose, though ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... her question with a laugh. "But I wasn't always a tobacco- grower, and there were poets before Homer, who is about the only one I've ever read. It's true I've tried to lose the little education I ever had—that I've done my best to come down to the level of my own cattle; but I'm not an ox, after all, except ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Consolidated Savings Bank!" Auntie Sue spoke the words in a voice that was little more than a whisper. It was to the Empire Consolidated Savings Bank that she had sent the money which she had received from her brother in Buenos Aires; and Homer T. Ward, the president of that bank, was one of her old pupils. Why, her stranger guest, in the other room there, was that very moment wearing one of the ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... trapping the boys who could not, until I finally forgot most of it. But when progress took place, what did it mean? First it meant Caesar, with the foreknowledge that to master Caesar meant only being set at Virgil, with the culminating horror of Greek and Homer in reserve at the end of that. I preferred Caesar, because his statement that Gaul is divided into three parts, though neither interesting nor true, was the only Latin sentence I could translate at sight: therefore ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... instances of the wide range of the spirit of poetry. Shall we, who have seen Byron writing, as it were, in the midst of us, yield assent to calling Greece and Italy the countries of imagination, par excellence, because they have produced Homer and Dante? Assuredly not. We cannot even admit, as a general proposition, that the languages of the south are always the smoothest and most melodious, and the northern ones harsh, and not adapted for music. The liquid, smooth, and effeminate language of modern Italy is totally ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... In Homer there is a disputed reference to malaria, but it is not possible to ascertain whether the disease was present during the rise of Greek civilisation, and there are no references to this disease in the literature from 700 B.C. to 550 B.C. [58] From this date references to ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... 3249. It was the Old, as opposed to the Middle, the New, and the Low: it contained the Dynasties from I. to X., and it was the age of the Pyramids, at once simple, solid, and grand. When the praiser of the Past contends that modern civilization has improved in nothing upon Homer and Herodotus, he is apt to forget that every schoolboy is a miracle of learning compared with the Cave-man and the palaeolithic race. And, as the Past has been, so shall the ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... Maro hath pathos and splendour, The long lines of Homer majestic'lly roll; But to me Donach Ban breathes a language more tender, More kin to the child-heart that ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... but a heap of cast skins, or of shed armor, is alike unworthy of all regard or imitation. We owe much true sublimity, and more of delightful picturesqueness, to the introduction of armor both in painting and sculpture: in poetry it is better still,—Homer's undressed Achilles is less grand than his crested and shielded Achilles, though Phidias would rather have had him naked; in all mediaeval painting, arms, like all other parts of costume, are treated with exquisite care and delight; in the designs ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... quite well known, the mental process by which it functions is practically unknown. The direction instinct of the homing pigeon is marvelous, but we know that that instinct does not leap full- fledged from the nest. The homer needs assistance and training. When it is about three months old, it is taken in a basket to a point a mile distant from its home and liberated. If it makes good in returning to the home loft, the distances ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... dancing, Now leaping and prancing; The band still continued to play; And "Puss-in-the-corner," And "Little Jack Homer," Were games very much in their way; With singing and screeching, And laughter far-reaching, They had a good time, I dare say. Miew, miew, miew, ...
— The 3 Little Kittens • Anonymous
... main subject in every discussion and it was discussed with wonderful acumen. Later it took on a different relation to the new life that sprung up and it bore its part in every gathering much as the stories of Troy might have done in the land where Homer sang. To survive, however, in these reunions as a narrator one had to be a real contributor to the knowledge of his hearers. And the first requisite was that he should have been an actor in the scenes he depicted; secondly, that he should know how to ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... fashionable euphemism, i.e., artificial way of expressing oneself—a time of forms of life strange to us, and therefore, to judge about Shakespeare, one should have in view the time when he wrote. In Homer, as in Shakespeare, there is much which is strange to us, but this does not prevent us from appreciating the beauties of Homer," say these admirers. But in comparing Shakespeare with Homer, as does Gervinus, that infinite distance ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... enjoyment of all the best and nicest things in this world. He did what he was told, but in an uninterested sort of way, just as if politics and county business, and work at the estate, were just as much tasks thrust on him as Virgil and Homer had been; and put his spirit into ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... petticoat, the losing a fan, or a bottle of sal volatile—and what makes Ariel's speech more ridiculous is the place where it is spoken, on the sails and cordage of Belinda's barge." And then he compares the Sylphs to the Discord of Homer, whose feet are upon the earth, and head in the skies. "They are, indeed, beings so diminutive that they bear the same proportion to the rest of the intellectual that Eels in vinegar do to the rest of the material world; ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... conferred on him the king's ring, an instance more ancient than Prometheus, whom fables call the inventor of the ring. Therefore let those who will hold, with Pliny and his followers, that its use is more recent than Homer. The Greeks seem to have derived the custom of wearing it from the East, and Italy from the Greeks. Juvenal and Persius refer to {417} rings which were worn only on birthdays. Clemens Alexandrinus recommends a limit ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... abundance of literary talent and an important output of works of which few English readers have any conception. For instance, who has ever heard, in Great Britain, of Adam Michiewicz the great Polish poet, who, critics declare, can be placed in the same category with Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Klopstock, Camoens, and Milton? Joseph Kraszewski as a novel writer occupies in Poland as high a position as Maurice Jokai does in Hungarian literature, while Mme. Eliza Orzeszko is considered to be the ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... solicited chains, rather than be roasted alive by those flying monsters, which the people seem to have taken for the works of magic, if not magicians themselves. The display was followed by a repast in the old heroic style, and which will not be forgotten, should Abyssinia ever give the world a sable Homer. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... this important factor in the origin of language, and as no competent writer has pointed out any fallacy in it, I think I am justified in supposing it to be new and important. Mr. Gladstone informed me that there were many thousands of illustrations of my ideas in Homer."—A.R.W. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... to a man's estate, to go to Delphi and offer firstfruits of their hair to the god, Theseus also went thither, and a place there to this day is yet named Thesea, as it is said, from him. He clipped only the fore part of his head, as Homer says the Abantes did. And this sort of tonsure was from him named Theseis. The Abantes first used it, not in imitation of the Arabians, as some imagine, nor of the Mysians, but because they were a warlike people, and used to close fighting, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... concentration of action into a short time, and the use of episode and dialogue. The main difference lies in the impersonality of the primitive epic, whose author has so skillfully hidden himself behind his work that, as some one has said of Homer, "his heroes are immortal, but ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... Homer specially delighted in drawing the same figure. For what is the "Odyssey," but a history of the orator, in the largest style, carried through a series of adventures furnishing brilliant opportunities ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... and made countless other men realize theirs. He wrote familiar letters to Homer, Sallust, Plato, Socrates and Seneca, addressing them as equals, and issued their replies. He showed the world that time is only an illusion, and that the men of Greece derived their life from the same source from whence ours is derived, and that in all respects they ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Roman religion so reverent, as those which will be found at the base of my art teaching, and current through the entire body of my works. But it was from the Bible that I learned the symbols of Homer, and the faith of Horace; the duty enforced upon me in early youth of reading every word of the gospels and prophecies as if written by the hand of God, gave me the habit of awed attention which afterwards made many passages of the profane writers, frivolous to an irreligious reader, deeply ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... was he himself a profound student of it, but he suggested to Boccaccio that line of study which governed the entire intellectual life of the author of the "Decameron." With the application of Boccaccio to the translation of Homer into Latin we perceive a singular illustration of the trend of the classic devotion of the time. Despite the fact that the "Divina Commedia" had magnificently demonstrated the beauty of Italian as a literary medium, fourteenth century scholars regarded the language with contempt. Pride ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... dmiourgos], from [Greek: dmios], of or for the people, and [Greek: ergon], work), a handicraftsman or artisan. In Homer the word has a wide application, including not only hand-workers but even heralds and physicians. In Attica the demiurgi formed one of the three classes (with the Eupatridae and the geomori, georgi ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... In Homer we get a glimpse of a theory of his time, to wit, that each separate decision given by the magistrate in any litigated controversy was furnished to him by Zeus specially for that case. The Greek word ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... illness, you'll have the appetite of an ostrich. Well, in one way, that will be fortunate, since we are living, as you may see, in a somewhat Homeric fashion. Carrambo! you will be deeming my manners quite as rude as the roughest of Homer's heroes. I am forgetting to introduce you to one of whom you've heard me speak. Though it don't so much signify, since the lady has made your acquaintance already. Permit me to present my ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... sen., soon abandoned the law for other pursuits. He was familiar with the representative English authors, and specially fond of the Greek language and literature, which he cultivated during his life. He had a tenacious memory, and could quote Homer by the page. Henry Paine's mother, Jane Thomson Warren, was the daughter of Ebenezer T. Warren, of Foxborough, the brother of General Joseph Warren, who fell at Bunker Hill. Of the three children of Lemuel and Jane T. (Warren) Paine, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... flowers turn double, and the leaves turn flowers; That young and tender crescent-moon, thy slave, 135 Sleeping above her robe as buoyed by clouds, Refines upon the women of my youth. What, and the soul alone deteriorates? I have not chanted verse like Homer, no— Nor swept string like Terpander, no—nor carved 140 And painted men like Phidias and his friend: I am not great as they are, point by point. But I have entered into sympathy With these four, running these into one soul, Who, separate, ignored each other's art. 145 Say, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... fights and heroic duels that are rather tedious by their similarity, and offensive from the smell of the shambles; and which any quick-witted stripling with the knack of rhyming might perhaps have done as well, and less coarsely, after reading Chapman's or Ogilby's Homer, or the fighting scenes in Spenser, the Border Ballads, &c. But even this composition is not unconscious of the true afflatus, such as is incommunicable by learning, not to be inhaled by mere imitative powers, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... grammar but Lascares, for I did not carry Theodorus with me; nor have they any dictionaries but Hesichius and Dioscerides. They esteem Plutarch highly, and were much taken with Lucian's wit and with his pleasant way of writing. As for the poets, they have Aristophanes, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles of Aldus's edition; and for historians, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Herodian. One of my companions, Thricius Apinatus, happened to carry with him some of Hippocrates's works and Galen's ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... themselves in Egypt during the Macedonian occupation, and whose furniture and belongings had been publicly sold and scattered on occasion of their rapid withdrawal. There were found not only fragments of classical texts, as of Homer, Plato, and the previously unknown treatise on "The Government of the Athenians," not, perhaps, composed, but utilised, by Aristotle, but also many fragments of Christian literature, which made it probable that the libraries of Christian families also had been thrown on ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... the Cyclops hammering lightning sharp at the ends, on an anvil.[29] Of course, you will here and there find feeble evidences of a higher sensibility, chiefly, I think, in Plato, AEschylus, Aristophanes, and Virgil. Homer, though in the epithets he applies to landscape always thoroughly graphic, uses the same epithet for rocks, seas, and trees, from one end of his poem to the other, evidently without the smallest interest in anything of the kind; and in the mass of heathen writers, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... Sir Bartholomew who drew my attention to the exhaustive monograph on the Island of Salissa written by Professor Homer Geldes, of Pearmount University, Pa., U.S.A. The book was published ten years ago, but has never been widely read. I am indebted to the professor for the ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... night; "but it is not a knowledge of Goethe, of Kant, or Shakespeare; it is not a knowledge of the poets, the scientists, the philosophers, all whom the world holds greatest in the realm of thought; it is a knowledge of Thee, my God, to know whom is life eternal! Men think they can know Homer, Plato, Confucius—and so they can. But they think they can not know Thee! And yet Thou art nearer to us than the air we breathe, for Thou art Life! What is there out in the world among the multifold interests of mankind that can equal in importance ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... freedom from such a weakness partly, no doubt, to his natural indolence, but still more to the fact that he was not only no pedant, but not even a very learned man. He knew no Greek, but was familiar with Latin. His quotations and allusions were chiefly drawn from Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and the Bible, where he found what most appealed to him—simplicity and grandeur of thought and diction. At the same time, he was a great reader, and possessed wide information on a vast variety of subjects, which a clear and retentive memory put always at his command. The ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... in this large but thinly-peopled tract. We observe there a curious combination of the monarchical and patriarchal states, with a dash of democracy into the bargain. Several times I have been reminded of Homer's heroic age. The princes and the people seem alternately to appear on the scene, exercising sovereign sway. The great Sultan is elected from out of the country; but he is compelled to seek the ratification of the chiefs, the elders, and the populace within. Then there is the great chief of ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... line. 210 Not as the ancient heroes did, Who, that their base-births might be hid, (Knowing they were of doubtful gender, And that they came in at a windore) Made Jupiter himself and others 215 O' th' gods, gallants to their own mothers, To get on them a race of champions, (Of which old Homer first made Lampoons.) ARCTOPHYLAX, in northern spheres Was his undoubted ancestor: 220 From him his great forefathers came, And in all ages bore his name. Learned he was in med'c'nal lore; For by his side a pouch he wore, Replete with strange Hermetic powder, 225 That wounds nine miles point-blank ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... a terrific diatribe against a foe. In either case, there might be "thoughts that breathe and words that burn"; still, there was but little of true criticism. The matchless papers on Spenser and Homer represent one class, and the articles on Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt the other. While the former exhibit the tender sympathy of a poet and the enthusiasm of a scholar, the latter reveal the uncompromising partisan, swinging the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... religion) the surest path." His attachment to some of our own poets, and to the classic authors of antiquity, discovers itself in many of his pages; and his devout turn of mind strongly shines throughout. His allusion to Homer, in vol. iii. page 7, sufficiently shews how ardently this industrious servant, this barrow wheeler, must have searched the great writers of ancient times, to discover their attachment to rural nature, and to gardens. ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... pious, domestic, but they now added foreign ornaments. So also with literature; their own native literature was scanty and practical—laws and rustic proverbs—but they set themselves to produce a new literature, modelled on the Greek. Virgil followed Homer; Plautus copied Menander; and Roman literature took on that secondary and reminiscent character which it never lost. It was a literature of culture, not of creed. This people had so practical a genius that they could put the world ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... its influence even beyond the Atlantic Ocean. It is important to remember that throughout the early history of Europe and up to the close of the fifteenth century the approach to the home of the Negro was by land. The Soudan was thought to be the edge of the then known world; Homer speaks of the Ethiopians as "the farthest removed of men, and separated into two divisions." Later Greek writers carry the description still further and speak of the two divisions as Eastern and Western—the Eastern occupying ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... closing lines of Keats's famous sonnet to Homer, in which a great poet has admirably depicted the scene, though, by a strange error, giving the credit ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... verse. I listen to this sublime genius in comparison with whom I, a simple herdsman, an humble farmer, am as nothing. What, indeed,—if product is to be compared with product,—are my cheeses and my beans in the presence of his "Iliad"? But, if Homer wishes to take from me all that I possess, and make me his slave in return for his inimitable poem, I will give up the pleasure of his lays, and dismiss him. I can do without his "Iliad," and wait, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... get a universe to thicken down out of it); and besides, all the potencies of vegetable and animal life, and all the great powers of the human mind, in a rather vaporous condition, it is true, but still all there—Socrates, Seneca and Solomon, Moses, Solon and Blackstone, Homer, Milton and Shakespeare, Demosthenes, Cicero and Daniel Webster, Watt, Stephenson, Fulton and Morse, popes, puritans and evolutionists, universities and newspapers and congresses, the United States and the British Empire, and the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson |
