"Poetry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It ranks high among the miracles of English poetry wrought by Milton. Many a mile from Ludlow have I called to mind one of its ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... an idea of her own. She's just sweet and willing. I hate deceitful girls. Every one of them wrote notes to the boys—the same kind of notes—and some of them tried to write poetry. Most of them had a copy of the piece I wrote. They had great fun over it—getting the boys to guess what girl wrote it. I've written a dozen pieces before this and they've all ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... schylus and the contemporary Greek artists—the only perfect examples of the dithyrambic dramatist before Wagner. If attempts have been made to trace the most wonderful developments to inner obstacles or deficiencies, if, for instance, in Goethe's case, poetry was merely the refuge of a foiled talent for painting; if one may speak of Schiller's dramas as of vulgar eloquence directed into uncommon channels; if Wagner himself tries to account for the development of music among the Germans by showing that, inasmuch ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... winning on her esteem. Women are the strangest beings! Let them guard against these natural and impetuous characters, say I. The business papers lay very quietly on the table, whilst the conversation flowed as easily into another channel. Poets and poetry were again the subject of discourse; and here our Michael was certainly at home. The displeasure which he had formerly exhibited passed like a cloud from his brow; he grew elated, criticized writer after writer, recited compositions, illustrated them with verses from the French and German; repeated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... lover and her priest, and Men, transformed by popular etymology into Manes, the good and beautiful, was looked upon as the giver of good luck, who protects men after death as well as in life. This religion, evolved from so many diverse elements, possessed a character of sombre poetry and sensual fanaticism which appealed strongly to the Greek imagination: they quickly adopted even its most barbarous mysteries, those celebrated in honour of the goddess and Atys, or of Sauazios. They tell us but little of the inner significance of the symbols ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... years ago there went forth from our homes hundreds of thousands of men to do battle for their country. All the poetry of war soon vanished, and left them nothing but the terrible prose. They waded knee-deep in mud. They slept in snow-banks. They marched till their cut feet tracked the earth. They were swindled out of their honest rations, and lived on meat not fit for a dog. They had jaws ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... fooled my reason thus, believe me, Your eyes can only help the cheat, Your smile more thoroughly deceive me. I think it well that men, dear wife, Are sometimes with such madness smitten, Else little joy would be in life, And little poetry ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... represented this steady reliance on God Almighty in his twenty-third Psalm, which is a kind of pastoral hymn, and filled with those allusions which are usual in that kind of writing. As the poetry is very exquisite, I shall present my reader with the ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... who cannot help breaking out in poetry when he thinks of Smith, is made to say that Smith was his captain "in the fierce wars of Transylvania," ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... creatures, as well for pleasure as profit; on which account Italy is called the Garden of Europe. The people are polite, dexterous [sic], prudent, and ingenious, extremely revengeful, jealous, and great formalists; their genius lies much for poetry, music, antiquities, &c. and, in short, all the liberal arts. Their tongue is derived from the ancient Latin. The cities are fair, well built, and magnificent; Rome is looked on as the capital, and is called the Holy, Naples the Noble, Florence the ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... well-arranged hierarchy raises a nation to its loftiest dignity. Genius is bound to follow human nature in all its developments; its strength consists in finding within itself the means for constantly satisfying the whole of the public. The same task is now imposed upon government and upon poetry: both should exist for all, and suffice at once for the wants of the masses and for the requirements of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... said that the dialogue of the Bible lacks the charm of poetry?—that its action and sentiment, its love and its sorrow, are not heightened by those efforts of the fancy which delight us in dramatic authors?—that its simplicity is bald, and its naturalness rough?—that its excessive familiarity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... to listen to the ripple of the water among the grass and pebbles; the tongue and lips of the lake are lapping and whispering all along. It is the merest poetry; but you are ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... to literary rather than linguistic study. In making the selections, my first principle was to give a good deal of the best rather than a little of everything. I wished to make friends for medieval German poetry, and it seemed to me that this could best be done by showing it in its strength and its beauty. So I have ignored much that might have had a historical or linguistic interest for the scholar, and have steadily applied the criterion ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... Roots had always been, to say the least of it, prosaic, and now it was as if poetry had dropped from her lips, as if she had said, "I too was born ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... to it. She was, I have reason to believe, well educated—at all events, much above most persons in the station in life she then occupied; and, young as I was, she taught me to read, and to repeat poetry, and to sing psalms; and though I forget nearly all the events of my life at that time, I remember many of the verses she taught me; they have been a wonderful comfort to me through life. My mother had married unwisely, ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... myth and miracle; in other words, that God is really immanent in his universe, and inseparable from it; that we have been in heaven and under the celestial laws all our lives, and knew it not. Science thus kills religion, poetry, and romance only so far as it dispels our illusions and brings us back from the imaginary to the common and the near at hand. It discounts heaven in favor of earth. It should make us more at home in the ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... with political contests or with affairs of state. He had natural and cultivated tastes outside of those fields. He was a discriminating reader, and enjoyed not only serious books, but inclined also to the lighter indulgence of romance and poetry. He was especially fond of the best French writers. He loved Moliere and Racine, and could quote with rare enjoyment the humorous scenes depicted by Balzac. He took pleasure in the drama, and was devoted to music. In Washington he could usually be found in the best ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... of Schlemihl, appeared Chamisso's Songs and Ballads. His Travels round the World, have also been published. Among his poetry ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... courtiers, according to tradition, that this majestic structure was intended as an ante-room to the great Parliament Buildings which he intended to rear on the banks of the Thames. The person who reads the poetry of the stones inwardly curses the careless archer whose arrow cut short the career of this truly great king, for this is not the only great structure that "William the Red" conceived and ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... about it. I should have been glad also to get him to take back to you the score, now completed, of the chorus which you were so good as to entrust to me ("The iron is hard, let us strike!"), but unfortunately it is not with music as with painting and poetry: body and soul alone are not enough to make it comprehensible; it has to be performed, and very well performed too, to be understood and felt. Now the performance of a chorus of the size of that is not an easy matter in Paris, and I would not even risk it without myself conducting ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... male deer. hour, sixty minutes. heart, the seat of life. our, belonging to us. hear, to perceive by the ear in, within. inn, a hotel. here, in this place. key, a fastener. heard, did hear. quay (ke), a wharf. herd, a drove. rhyme, poetry. hie, to hasten. rime, white frost. high, lofty. knot, a fastening of cord. him, objective case of he. hymn, a song of praise. not, negation. hole, an opening. know, to understand. whole, ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... most erroneous ideas about the nature and works of these sea-builders. Montgomery, in his Pelican Island, makes statements that are shocking to an intelligent thinker, and which no scientist can excuse on the ground of poetical license. "The poetry of this excellent author," says Dana, "is good, but the facts nearly all errors—if literature allows of such an incongruity." Think of coral-animals as being referred to as shapeless worms that "writhe and shrink ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... rootedly a romance of conquest, he had to prove that the thing which conquered in Germany was really more poetical than anything else in Germany. Now the thing that conquered in Germany was about the most prosaic thing of which the world ever grew weary. There is a great deal more poetry in Brixton than in Berlin. Stella said that Swift could write charmingly about a broom-stick; and poor Carlyle had to write romantically about a ramrod. Compare him with Heine, who had also a detached taste in the mystical grotesques of Germany, but who saw what was their ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... love is the one sunbeam of poetry that gilds with a softened splendor the hard, bare outline of many a prosaic life. "Work, work, work, from weary chime to chime"; tramp behind the plough, hammer on the lapstone, beat the anvil, drive the plane, "from morn till dewy eve"; but when the dewy eve comes, ah! Hesperus gleams soft ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... poetry, invaded Ansell. Was it only a pose to like this man, or was he really wonderful? He was not romantic, for Romance is a figure with outstretched hands, yearning for the unattainable. Certain figures of the Greeks, ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... between Charity, and another figure which has no name over its head. The colophon is: "Imprented at London, in Lothbury, over against Sainct Margarytes church, by me, Wyllyam Copland." See Collier's "History of Dramatic Poetry," vol. ii., p. 313. "The 'Interlude of Youth,'" observes Mr Collier, "is decidedly a Roman Catholic production, and I have therefore little doubt that it made its appearance during the reign of Mary;" ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... summer uniform once. I do wish I could have heard him when he undid the package. While Irma was pounding down on it she was discoursing to me how, besides papers, she had cravings for poetry. ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... other piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry we feel near the medival drama. Almost every canto is like a scene; and little adaptation would be required to put it upon the stage. The narrative at the beginning is like a prologue, and then after the close of the piece we have an epilogue, in which the author speaks ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... been to see or enquire for him since his residence amongst them: and they were sure he was very poor, as he had not paid for his lodgings the last three weeks: and, finally, they concluded he was a poet, or else half-crazy, because they had, at different times, found scraps of poetry ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... part to the dogged schematism of the Hindu mind, which dislikes to let go of any part of a thing from the beginning to end. On the one hand, their constant, almost too rhythmic resort to nature in their poetry, and on the other, their Ved[a]nta philosophy, or for that matter their Ars amatoria (K[a]mac[a]stra), the latter worked out with painstaking and undignified detail, illustrate the two points. Hence we find here a situation which is familiar enough in ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... when at last we were safe in the coupe, he fairly went to sleep before we got to the first station.—Hush! you know you did! And no wonder, for he had been up two nights with some sort of infidel who was supposed to be dying. Then that first week at Filey, he used to bring out his poetry books as the proper sort of thing, and try to read them to me on the sands: but by the time he had got to the bottom of a page, I used to hear the words ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... County, with whom he lived some years, in an easy and no contemptible service. Here by the indulgence of a kind master, he had sufficient leisure to apply himself to whatever learning his inclinations led him, which were chiefly history and poetry; to which, for his diversion, he joined music and painting; and I have seen some pictures, said to be of his drawing, which remained in that family; which I mention not for the excellency of them, but to satisfy the reader of his early inclinations to ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... in," Dorothy said, over her shoulder. "Jim is entirely too practical—too prosaic—for this old world of ours. We simply must have a little romance mixed in with our other amusements, and poetry is ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... that her father was now an impoverished man, on whose behalf it was her duty to care that every shilling spent in the house did its full twelve pennies' worth of work. There was a mixture in this of deep tragedy and of little cares, which seemed to destroy for her the poetry as well as the pleasure of life. The poetry and tragedy might have gone hand in hand together; and so might the cares and pleasures of life have done, had there been no black sorrow of which she must be ever mindful. But it was her lot to have to scrutinize the ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, Justin. This shall form the first stage of your historical reading, and is all I need mention to you now. The next, will be of Roman history.* From that we will come down to modern history. In Greek and Latin poetry, you have read or will read at school, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles. Read also Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakspeare, Ossian, Pope's and Swift's works, in order to form your style in your own language. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... told me that you read very beautifully," said this flatterer; "and I should so like to hear you read—poetry of course. You will find plenty of poems in that old bookcase—Cowper, and Bloomfield, and Pope. Now I am sure that Pope is just the kind of poet whose verses you would read magnificently. Shall we explore ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... reading. Is this the passage? "Nor I be made the figure of a seal To privileges venal and mendacious, Whereat I often redden and flash with fire!"— That is not poetry. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... tributes to the songs of the birds. The thoughts and feelings aroused or suggested by these songs are the topics of much of the world's enduring poetry. Longfellow, in his "Birds of Killing-worth" (Tales of a Wayside Inn) sings exquisitely of the use and beauty and worth of birds. Shelley, in his "Skylark", describes in glowing verse "the unbodied joy" that "singing still dost soar and ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... suffrage, would, in some communities, reduce the white man to the position of political nonentity. And no law, no cry about the rights of a down-trodden race, no sentiment expressed abroad, could force the white man to submit quietly to this degradation. Upon the negro's head the poetry of New England has placed a wreath of sentiment. No poet has placed a wreath upon the brow of the California Chinaman, nor upon the head of any foreign element in any of the northern states. Then why this partiality? ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... from poetry to plain prose," said Mr. George, "I think we had better take advantage of the fine weather to go ...
— Rollo in Holland • Jacob Abbott
... Contempt is crept, Rolling in rymes of shameles ribaudrie Without regard, or due decorum kept; Each idle wit at will presumes to make*, 215 And doth the learneds taske upon him take. [* Make, write poetry.] ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... its poetry. Folk-epics: The Nibelungenlied. The Volsunga saga. The German version. Metres. Rhyme and language. Kudrun. Shorter national epics. Literary poetry. Its four chief masters. Excellence, both natural and acquired, of German verse. Originality ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... he exclaimed, "I've no mind to run amuck of Pegasus! I'll get out of your way. Faith, 'tis the first time I've seen poetry in buckskin of this particular binding," and he wheeled his broncho out, leaving me ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... of an experiment I might try, which would illustrate to you a very important subject. Suppose I should call one of the boys, A., to me, and should say to him; 'I want you to go to your seat and transcribe for me a piece of poetry, as handsomely as you can. If it is written as well as you can possibly write it, I will give you 25 cents.' Suppose I say this to him privately, so that none of the rest of the boys can hear, and he goes to take his seat, and begins to work. You perceive that ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... have their own way when they seek entertainment, holding "as it were the mirror up to Nature," and finding that it reflects the commonest of all themes? They among all the nations of the world alone have discovered what to them is music and the poetry of motion in an occurrence that has no geographical limitations, is not restricted by language, nor to be ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... live without poetry, music and art; We may live without conscience, and live without heart; We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man cannot live ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... others—influence reflected back and influence projected forward. As an example of the charm that lies in unostentatious antiphony, consider this passage from Ruskin:—"Originality in expression does not depend on invention of new words; nor originality in poetry on invention of new measures; nor in painting on invention of new colours or new modes of using them. The chords of music, the harmonies of colour, the general principles of the arrangement of sculptural masses, have been determined long ago, and in all probability ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... not in a mood to speak. The occasion and the scene depressed me more than ever did the prospect of a deathbed, or the sight of a patient about to submit to a painful and dangerous operation. My habits of thought are little conversant with the poetry of nature, or of man's condition in this stage of suffering—the duties of an arduous profession are exclusive of those dreamy moods of the mind, which have little in common with the doings of every-day ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... (fem.) in these words: "In the expressions 'a town neterit 'an arm neteri,' ... is it certain that 'a strong city,' 'a strong arm,' give us the primitive sense of neter? When among ourselves one says 'divine music,' 'a piece of divine poetry,' 'the divine taste of a peach,' 'the divine beauty of a woman,' [the word] divine is a hyperbole, but it would be a mistake to declare that it originally meant 'exquisite' because in the phrases which I have imagined ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... in those delicious dreams which are a foretaste of the enjoyments of the spirit-land. In them the soul breathes forth its aspirations in a language unknown to common minds; and that language is Poetry. Here annually, from year to year, I had renewed my friendship with the first primroses and violets, and listened with the untiring ear of love to the spring roundelay of the blackbird, whistled from among his bower of May blossoms. Here, I had ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... me the Tenth; the discovery of a tenth Muse puts the younger Omar on an equal footing with his father in science as well as in poetry. The editor has found that upon quitting forever his native Persia, Omar Khayyam, Jr., brought to Borneo many of the more refined sciences. In his hereditary profession, astronomy, he claims the rare distinction of having first ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... wonderful symbols which the forms and colours of Nature afford charm me and catch at my heart. There is no country scene that is not a state of the soul, and whoever will read the two together will be astonished by their detailed similarity. Far truer is true poetry than science; poetry seizes at first glance in her synthetic way that essential thing which all the sciences put together can only hope to reach at ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... though it shone forth for a time with classic radiance in the writings of Persius, Juvenal, Quintilian, Tacitus, and the Plinies, with the death of freedom, the extinction of patriotism, and the decay of the national spirit, nothing could avert its fall. Poetry had become declamation; history had degenerated either into fulsome panegyric or the fleshless skeletons of epitomes; and at length the Romans seemed to disdain the use of their native tongue, and wrote again in Greek, as they had in the infancy of the national literature. The Emperor ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... crash of glass is heard as the speaker is hurled through the skylight, or he walks out twenty minutes later, bowing profusely as he goes, and leaving us gazing in remorse at a signed document entitling us to receive the "Masterpieces of American Poetry" in ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... truth, I am convinced, which is presupposed in the Christian doctrine of Atonement, as the mediation of forgiveness through the suffering and death of Christ: and it is a truth also, if I am not much mistaken, to which all the highest poetry, which is also the deepest vision of the human mind, bears witness. We may distinguish natural law and moral law as sharply as we please, and it is as necessary sometimes as it is easy to make these sharp and ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... that peace of mind which was never destined to be his," Venice naturally occurred to him as a place where, for a time at least, he should find a suitable residence. He had, in his own language, "loved it from his boyhood;" and there was a poetry connected with its situation, its habits, and its history, which excited both his imagination and his curiosity. His situation at this period is thus feelingly alluded to by Mr. Moore:—"The circumstances under which Lord Byron now took leave of England were such ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... kontentigi. pleasant : afabla, agrabla. pledge : garantiajxo. pliable : fleksebla. plot : konspir'i, -o; intrig'i, -o. plough : plug'i, -ilo. plum : pruno. plumber : plumbisto. plural : multenombro. plush : plusxo. pocket : posxo, enposxigi. pod : sxelo. poem : poemo. poet : poeto. poetry : poezio, versajxo. point : punkto; (cards) poento; (tip) pinto. poison : veneno. poker : fajrinstigilo. pole : stango; (of car) timono; (geog.) poluso. polecat : putoro. police : police, (—"court") jugxejo. policy : politiko. polish : poluri. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... described. In fact the mystics in general seem to have had communion with God and the saints most often when they seemed unconscious to bystanders.[2] The obsession with death, which seems so intimate a part of the stupor reaction, is a fundamental theme in poetry, religion and philosophy. The psychology of this interest is, speaking broadly, the psychology of stupor. So, from a general standpoint, our problem is related to the study of one of the most potent ideas which move the ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... real Hester Stebbins, the spark of fire which is she. The storms have not broken over her head. She will laugh and make poetry of her laughter. If before she met you she wept, that, too, will help the smiling. There is laughter which is the echo of a Miserere sobbed by the ages. Men chuckle in the irony of pain, and they smile cold, lessoned smiles in resignation; they laugh in forgetfulness and ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... exquisite eulogy of the poet Cowper, which readers of Lavengro know full well. Three years before Borrow was born William Cowper died in this very town, leaving behind him so rich a legacy of poetry and of prose, and moreover so fragrant a memory of a life in which humour and pathos played an equal part. It was no small thing for a youth who aspired to any kind of renown to be born in the neighbourhood of the last resting-place of the ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... two months go I completed my ninety-ninth year; but I have health and a new source of happiness in my nephew James and his dear daughter, who are come to reside at Lowestoft. She is a daily friend to me, a second self; as our taste in literature, in poetry, and in morals agree. Only think, the Dean of Norwich sent me his ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... a scatter of paper twinkled down this river just like them dead blossoms. Clem thrawed them, an' they floated away to the sea, past daffadowndillies an' budding lady-ferns an' such-like. 'T was a li'l bit of poetry he'd made up to please me—and I, fule as I was, didn't say the right thing when he axed me what I thought; so Clem tore the rhymes in pieces an' sent them away. He said the river would onderstand. An' the river onderstands why I dropped them dead ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... was only a poor shoe-maker, but he loved reading and poetry, and seems to have taught his little boy a similar love. The shoe-maker amused himself by making a toy theatre for his little Hans, and showed him how to work the puppets, and make them act little plays. This was a winter amusement. In the long summer days he would often ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... the reader wavers in contemplating the problems of trudging Negroes, remember that the type of Negro who is a menace to the community is he who, in moments of leisure, responds to somewhat grosser incentives than the poetry of Longfellow, the romance of Hawthorne, and the philosophy of Emerson. I would reassure your idealism with ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... said the archdeacon, impatient of poetry at such a time. "Well, two paid servants, we'll say; one to look after the men, and the other to look after the money. You and Chadwick are these two servants, and whether either of you be paid too much, or too little, more or less in fact than the founder willed, ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... upon the Stage) and the Stage is clear'd, an Act is then finish'd. Then for Incidents, and the due Preparation of 'em, Terence was admirable: And the true and exact Management of these is one of the most difficult parts of Dramatick Poetry. He contrives every thing in such a manner so as to fall out most probably and naturally, and when they are over they seem almost necessary; yet by his excellent Skill he so cunningly conceals the Events of things from his Audience, till due time, that they ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... once as a pretty photographer's model, and had admired her as an exquisite dancing-creature who seemed to have spun off at a tangent from the painted side of an old Greek amphora. He had actually written poetry to her! And when a poet has done that for a girl he feels that he has done more for her than she can ever repay. Even if she gives him her mortal self, what is that to the immortality ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Pauline salvationist, in which case his more cultivated parishioners dislike him, and say that he ought to have joined the Methodists. Or he may be an artist expressing religious emotion without intellectual definition by means of poetry, music, vestments and architecture, also producing religious ecstacy by physical expedients, such as fasts and vigils, in which case he is denounced as a Ritualist. Or he may be either a Unitarian Deist like Voltaire or Tom Paine, or the more modern sort of Anglican ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... fare, containing all the luxuries as well as necessaries, of life. Politics, for instance, are the roast beef of the times; essays, the plum pudding; and poetry the fritters, confections, custards, and all the et cotera of the table, usually denominated trifles. Yet the four winds are not liable to more mutability than the vehicles of these entertainments; for instance, on Monday, it is whispered—on ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... physical outlet. The only time I was ever on the verge of nervous prostration was after having suppressed the instinct for ten months. The other feelings, which I do not consider as sexual feelings at all, so fill my life in every department—love, literature, poetry, music, professional and philanthropic activities—that I am able to let the physical take care of itself. When the physical sensations come, it is usually when I am not thinking of a loved one at all. I could ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... partnerships how a strong house saves a failing one, and then the Blends go on successfully? Let "P. and G." give us a first-rate Champagne, call it, say, The "G.B.," or "Golden Blend," at a reasonable price, and, to drop once again into poetry, No matter what their name may be, We'll ever bless our P. ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... neither said much. Both seemed to avoid the subject of their conversation as they came. They talked of poetry and fiction, and did not differ. Though Barbara there also had precious insights, happily ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... corn—all of us did, in fact—till the work commenced. It was a delightful topic before we started,; but in two weeks the clusters of fires that illumined the whooping bush in the night, and the crash upon crash of the big trees as they fell, had lost all their poetry. ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... dependence on a corporeal embodiment. One single proved transmission, direct from mind to mind, of the most trivial fact or percept, will do more to make communion with the unseen scientifically conceivable,—I do not say more to make it morally conceivable,—than all the poetry and all the rhetoric which has ever stirred ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... empire of the Caesars have been but for these queens?" Blondet went on; "Lais and Rhodope are Greece and Egypt. They all indeed are the poetry of the ages in which they lived. This poetry, which Napoleon lacked—for the Widow of his Great Army is a barrack jest, was not wanting to the Revolution; it had Madame Tallien! In these days there is certainly a throne to let in France which is for her ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... said I; "and at your merry meetings you sing songs upon the compulsatory deeds of your people, alias, their villainous actions; and, after all, what would the stirring poetry of any nation be, but for its compulsatory deeds? Look at the poetry of Scotland, the heroic part, founded almost entirely on the villainous deeds of the Scotch nation; cow- stealing, for example, which is very little better ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... from those denoted by the contraries and opposites. If 'civilisation' is to be defined, make lists of civilised peoples, of semi-civilised, of barbarous, and of savage: now, what things are common to civilised peoples and wanting in the others respectively? This is an exercise worth attempting. If poetry is to be defined, survey some typical examples of what good critics recognise as poetry, and compare them with examples of bad 'poetry,' literary prose, oratory, and science. Having determined the characteristics of each kind, arrange ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... Miranda was brushing Nettie's hair and scolding her for having such greasy fingers; and her grandmother had a pile, such a pile of sliced apple all ready to be strung. Her head was turning, yes, she would see her and then she could not know about dates or have a lesson in reading poetry! Tiptoing more softly still and holding the skirt of her starched muslin in both hands to keep it from rustling, she at last passed the ordeal and breathed freely as she gained Miss Prudence's chamber. The spirit of handling things ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... hundred yards behind the advance party, but were a good distance in front of the rearguard, when a number of horsemen made a dash from the kopjes which we were skirting, and the rifles began to speak. There was no time for poetry; it was a case of "sit tight and ride hard," or surrender and be made prisoners. Lambie shouted to me: "Let's make a dash, Hales," and we made it. The Boers were very close to us before we knew anything concerning their presence. Some of them were behind us, and some extended ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... route of travel lie sequestered old sugar estates, and villages of romantic and picturesque charm, yet untouched by speculator or capitalist. Antique piles of stone buildings are there, redolent of that peculiar poetry of the pastoral life of Mexico in the tropics. The old Spaniards built well; their solid masonry defies the centuries; and their most prosaic structures were invested with an architectural charm which the rapid money-seeker of to-day cares little for, in his corrugated iron and temporary materialism. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... not because he cared for the wonder and admiration of his fellow-men, but who wrote because he could not help it, because there was always springing up in his mind a clear and sparkling stream of poetry which must have vent, and like the glittering fountain in the fairy tale, draw what you might, was ever at the full, and never languished even by a single drop or bubble. I had so figured him in my mind, and when I saw the Professor two days ago, striding along the Parliament House, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... introduction to the greater poems, informing taste for them and appreciation of them, against the time when the boy or girl, grown into youth and maiden, is ready to swim out into the full current of English poetry. ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... his mother liked to have him with her, and it was the only day in the week when he could indulge her in that way. You would have liked to see Adam reading his Bible. He never opened it on a weekday, and so he came to it as a holiday book, serving him for history, biography, and poetry. He held one hand thrust between his waistcoat buttons, and the other ready to turn the pages, and in the course of the morning you would have seen many changes in his face. Sometimes his lips moved in semi-articulation—it was ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... think I pointed out in my last lecture, is much more difficult than serious poetry, because there are all sorts of rules. In serious poetry there are practically no rules, and what rules there are may be shattered with impunity as soon as they become at all inconvenient. Rhyme, for instance. A well-known ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... declares that it is "useful and salutary" to ask their prayers. There are expressions addressed to the Saints in some popular books of devotion which, to critical readers, may seem extravagant. But they are only the warm language of affection and poetry, to be regulated by our standard of faith; and notice that all the prayers of the Church end with the formula: "Through our Lord Jesus Christ," sufficiently indicating her belief that Christ is the Mediator of salvation. A heart tenderly attached to the ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... Justice Ludlow had been a judge of the Supreme Court of New York; James Putman was considered one of the ablest lawyers in all America; the Rev. and Hon. Jonathan Odell, first Provincial Secretary, had acted as chaplain in the Royal army, practised physic and written political poetry; Judge Joshua Upham, a graduate of Harvard, abandoned the Bar during the war, and became a colonel of dragoons; Judge Israel Allen had been colonel of a New Jersey Volunteer corps, and lost an estate in Pennsylvania through his devotion to the Loyalist cause; Judge Edward ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... with Lawrence Barrett, he said: "The literature of the New World must look to the West for its poetry."] ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... have reached a larger circulation than was ever attained by any journal South of Mason and Dixon's line. It is full of interesting varied matter, having an able agricultural department, presided over by the veteran editor and successful agriculturist, Hon. C.C. Langdon. Its general literature, poetry, stories, etc., make it highly acceptable to the ladies. The year will open with a new continued story, of deep interest, by one of the most distinguished writers of the day. The price was recently ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... by the reason. Their form may be changed but not their substance. To remove them requires not disproof of this or that fact, but an intellectual discipline which is rare even among the educated classes. A religious creed survives, as poetry or art survives,—not so long as it contains apparently true statements of fact but—so long as it is congenial to the whole social state. A philosophy indeed is a poetry stated in terms of logic. Considering the natural conservatism of mankind, the difficulty is to account for progress, not for ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... common spy on his army; would he see anything in him but the weak victim, like many others, of a scheming woman? Stories current in camp and Congress of the way that this grim humorist had, with an apposite anecdote or a rugged illustration, brushed away the most delicate sentiment or the subtlest poetry, even as he had exposed the sham of Puritanic morality or of Epicurean ethics. Brant had even solicited an audience, but had retired awkwardly, and with his confidence unspoken, before the dark, humorous eyes, that seemed almost too tolerant of his grievance. ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... young as I might be, but I am a deal younger than I look. Listen, dearie, I have never FELT old yet! Isn't that a thing to be grateful for? I don't read much poetry, except it be in the Church Hymnal, but I cut a verse out of a magazine a year ago which just suits my idea of life, and, what is still more wonderful, I took the trouble to learn it. Oliver Wendell ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... not realize the expectations of Dr. Bell, chiefly because Mr. John Taylor, out of feelings easily comprehended, did not join him in his endeavours with the heartiness he expected. To make the appeal appear as much in favour of poetry as of a single poet, Mr. Taylor, in his letters, asked assistance for Keats as well as for Clare, wording his request in terms more dignified than persuasive. There was only one response to this petition, which came from Earl Fitzwilliam, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... we really to be beaten in this election [for the Poetry Professorship]? I will tell you a secret (if you care to know it) which not above three or four persons know. We have 480 promises. Is it then hopeless? ... I don't think our enemies would beat 600; at least, it would ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... fleet as the marvellous horse Pegasus, who had wings as well as legs, and was even more active in the air than on the earth? To be sure, a great many people denied that there was any such horse with wings, and said that the stories about him were all poetry and nonsense. But, wonderful as it appeared, Bellerophon believed that Pegasus was a real steed, and hoped that he himself might be fortunate enough to find him; and, once fairly mounted on his back, he would be able to fight the Chimaera ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... I don't quite see; why can't you floor generals with rhymes which are not regular poetry? Are they so ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... wrinkled, with prominent teeth and a few scattered grey hairs, but nevertheless not a disagreeable countenance; and very cheerful, merry, courteous, and talkative, much more so than I should have expected from the grave and didactic character of his writings. He held forth on poetry, painting, politics, and metaphysics, and with a great deal of eloquence; he is more conversible and with a greater flow of animal spirits than Southey. He mentioned that he never wrote down as he composed, but composed ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... done for Lord Byron. Let us analyze facts, question the eye-witnesses of his life, and peruse his admirable and simply-written letters, wherein his soul has, so to say, photographed itself. Acts are unquestionably more significative than words; yet if we wish to inquire into his poetry, not by way of appreciating his genius (with which at present we have nothing to do), but the nature of the man, let us do so loyally. Let us not attribute to him the character which he lends to his heroes, nor the customs which he attributes ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... feature in his character was dwelt upon by his disciples. Not a doubt that he could have got whatever he liked to go in for, had he not been so fastidious and high-minded. He was fellow of his college as it was, had got a poetry prize which, perhaps, was not the Newdigate; and smiled indulgently at those who were more warm in the arena of competition than himself. On other occasions when "men" came to luncheon, the Contessa, though quite ready to be amused by them ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... the earth should be looked at from without and from within. Some that they had most loved to read were likewise there: "Pollock's Course of Time"; the slow outpourings of Young, sad sectary; Milton, with the passages on Hell approvingly underscored—not as great poetry, but as great doctrine; nowhere in the bookcases a sign of the "Areopagitica," of "Comus," and "L'Allegro"; but most prominent the writings of Jonathan Edwards, hoarsest of the whole flock of New World ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... pressing necessity that he coveted it, but simply from a strong desire to exercise an inborn talent. It was as natural to him to steal, particularly if it required cleverness and ingenuity, as it is for an artist or a poet to paint or write poetry, so all the while he looked, his mind was busy with a plan to rob the old ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... hand, and to be even pitched in a key that was rather feminine than masculine. Of course I must have been deceived; nobody was near me: my imagination had played me a trick, or else there was more truth than poetry in the tradition that Halloween is the carnival-time of disembodied spirits. It did not occur to me at the time that a stumble is held by the superstitious Irish to be an evil omen, and had I remembered it it would only have been to laugh at it. At all events, I was physically ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... in perfect good faith considers himself superior to those about him, is in no danger of humiliation. In spite of his affectations, Don Pedro was a man of culture, fond of literature, and endowed with a taste for poetry. He had been known occasionally to celebrate events pertaining to the kingdom, or the royal family in several stanzas of a classic, somewhat pompous, style. But although people had tried to persuade him to publish them, he never ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... singer sang these lines is beyond the conception of ordinary singers, public or private. Here one of nature's orators spoke poetry to music with an eloquence as fervid and delicate as ever rung in the Forum. She gave each verse with the same just variety as if she had been reciting, and, when she came to the last, where the thought rises abruptly, and is truly noble, she sang it with the sudden pathos, the weight, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... BASSETT, Leland Stanford Junior University. Especial emphasis is placed on the relation of thought and speech, technical vocal exercises being subordinated to a study of the principles underlying the expression of ideas. Illustrative selections of both poetry ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... all the scripture had passed under his eyes. At eighteen years he knew all the sutra and the doctrines of Shaka (Sakyamuni), and books whether exoteric or esoteric. Moreover he understood thoroughly astrology and almanacs, the poetry of Morokoshi (China) and Nippon, and instrumental music. Truly once heard he knew ten times, so clever he was." It was to this Saint, in his eighty-second year, that the order came to lay the ghost of O'Kiku, to dispel the disorderly spectres of the well of the ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... the revival of literature, and wrote a series of witty, though objectionable stories, from which the English Chaucer borrowed the notion of his "Canterbury Tales." Chaucer is the father of English poetry, and kindled a love of literature among his isolated countrymen; and was one of the few men who, in the evening of his days, looked upon the world without austerity, and expressed himself with all the vivacity ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... of the sixteenth century there were living in Ferrara (it was at that time flourishing under the sceptre of its magnificent archdukes, the patrons of the arts and poetry) two young men, named Fabio and Muzzio. They were of the same age, and of near kinship, and were scarcely ever apart; the warmest affection had united them from early childhood ... the similarity of their positions ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... child, had so little occupied himself with things about him, and had been so entirely taken up with his passion, and the poetry of existence unlawfully forced, that if his knowledge of the circumstances of Emmeline's murder had depended on the newspapers, he would have remained in utter ignorance concerning them. From the same causes he was so entirely ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... of this Satire, published anonymously, fourteen lines on the subject of Bowles's Pope were written by, and inserted at the request of, an ingenious friend of mine, [2] who has now in the press a volume of Poetry. In the present Edition they are erased, and some of my own substituted in their stead; my only reason for this being that which I conceive would operate with any other person in the same manner,—a determination not to publish with my name ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... naething aboot yer poetry. I hae read auld John Milton ower an' ower, though I dinna believe the half o't; but, oh! weel I like some o' the bonny bitties at the ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... byproduct of the national despair and turmoil was the feverish activity in all fields of creative endeavor. Novels streamed from the presses, volumes of poetry became substantial items on publishers' lists and those which failed to find a publisher were mimeographed and peddled to a receptive public, while painters working with Renascence enthusiasm turned out great canvases as fast as their brushes could spread the oils. We had suddenly ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... effects, beginning and ending a picture in a scheme of color, atmosphere, clever composition, and above all the play of light-and-shade. He was one of the early masters of full sunlight, painting it falling across a court-yard or streaming through a window with marvellous truth and poetry. His subjects were commonplace enough. An interior with a figure or two in the middle distance, and a passage-way leading into a lighted background were sufficient for him. These formed a skeleton which he clothed in a half-tone ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... imposed upon, in his faith, fierce as an outlaw in his conflicts with men, will be yet exquisitely alive to the nicest consciousness of woman; will as delicately appreciate her instincts and sensibilities, as if love and poetry had been his only tutors from the first, and had mainly addressed their labors to this one object of the higher heart, education; and in due degree with the tenderness with which he will regard the sex, will be the vindictive ferocity with which—even though no ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... dignity to a down-trodden race and happiness to a blasted universe. Alas, alas! On this food had Richard Mutimer pastured his soul since he grew to manhood, on this and this only. English literature was to him a sealed volume; poetry he scarcely knew by name; of history he was worse than ignorant, having looked at this period and that through distorting media, and congratulating himself on his clear vision because he saw men as trees walking; the bent of his mind would have led him to natural science, but opportunities ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alterations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by shewing how great machinations ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... effect, on this legend in Lalla Rookh, which poem, indeed, is redolent of roses. But poetry generally is as full of the rose as the rose is of poetry, and it would take a volume to deal adequately with all the fancies and superstitious associations of the queen of flowers. Before quitting the subject, ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... think there is too much science and too little history and literature in your list of books, and we should recommend a course of poetry also, as well as some works ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... passions, Mr. Prescott, perhaps smiling is the word," he said. "Such a peace as that appeals to me. I am not fond of war and I know that you are not. I feel it particularly to-night. There is poetry in the heavens so calm and ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... dignity, and force, distinguish the one species; ease, simplicity, and purity, the other. Both shine from their native, distinct, unborrowed merits, not from those which are foreign, adventitious, and unnatural. Yet those excellencies, which make up the essential and constituent parts of poetry, they ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... to Mary Magdalene have suggested that he was a Catholic, but his prose writings abundantly prove that he was an ardent Protestant. Breton had little gift for satire, and his best work is to be found in his pastoral poetry. His Passionate Shepheard (1604) is full of sunshine and fresh air, and of unaffected gaiety. The third pastoral in this book—"Who can live in heart so glad As the merrie country lad"—is well known; with some other of Breton's daintiest poems, among ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Register," "exposes several of our eminent poets." Jacob published while Gay was living, and seems to allude to this literary co-partnership; for, speaking of Gay, he says: "that having an inclination to poetry, by the strength of his own genius, and the conversation of Mr. Pope, he has made some progress ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... which his parents, and especially his mother, wished Thomas to pursue; neither of them had much faith in poetry or literature as a resource for his subsistence. Accordingly, in 1799, he crossed over into England, and studied in the Middle Temple; and he was afterwards called to the bar, but literary pursuits withheld ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... repeat the familiar names of the eminent painters and sculptors whom he encouraged and enriched, nor give a list of the skilful architects employed in the construction of his magnificent palaces of St. Germain and Fontainebleau, of Chambord and Chenonceaux. Poetry, not less than painting and architecture, witnessed his liberality. Clement Marot, whose name has been regarded as marking the first truly remarkable epoch in the history of this department of French ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... certain respect to the superstitious narrative of the Breton leader. He was not surprised to find such beliefs and such poetry in a man born in face of a savage sea, among the Druid monuments of Karnac. He realized that Milliere was indeed condemned, and that God, who had thrice seemed to approve his judgment, alone could save him. But one last question ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the waves, the ship glided smoothly on before a gentle breeze. Miss Lydia was not sleepy, and nothing but the presence of an unpoetical person had prevented her from enjoying those emotions which every human being possessing a touch of poetry must experience at sea by moonlight. When she felt sure the young lieutenant must be sound asleep, like the prosaic creature he was, she got up, took her cloak, woke her maid, and went on deck. Nobody was to be seen except the sailor at the helm, ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... pined away, which was no more than natural if, as some people affirmed, his ordinary diet was fog, morning mist and a slice of the densest cloud within his reach, sauced with moonshine whenever he could get it. Certain it is that the poetry which flowed from him had a smack of all these dainties. The sixth of the party was a young man of haughty mien and sat somewhat apart from the rest, wearing his plumed hat loftily among his elders, while the fire glittered on the rich embroidery of his dress and gleamed intensely ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... de Roda, who was a man of letters, a 'rara aves' in Spain. He liked Latin poetry, had read some Italian, but very naturally gave the palm to the Spanish poets. He welcomed me warmly, begged me to come and see him again, and told me how sorry he had ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to Susan Jenks," said the General—"when her poetry expresses itself in waffles and ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... city called Ujjain, whose people delight in noble happiness, and feel no longing for heaven. In that city there is real darkness at night, real intelligence in poetry, real madness in elephants, real coolness in pearls, ...
— Twenty-two Goblins • Unknown
... did some poems, chiefly on sacred subjects. Not much as poetry, perhaps, judged by severe standards, but I am told they are regarded as marvels of piety and sweetness. I may have a copy in my luggage, which I will show you after we are ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... what is natural with us, what is innate in character, what was visible among us in the earliest times, and what, I still believe, persists among us—a respect for the aristocratic intellect, for freedom of thought, ideals, poetry, and imagination, as the qualities to be looked for in leaders, and a bias for democracy in our economic life. We were more Irish truly in the heroic ages. We would not then have taken, as we do today, the huckster or the publican and make them our representative men, ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... show that the ancient Greeks did not distinguish in pronunciation between the rough and smooth breathing any more than their modern representatives.] Aristotle remarks that the fallacy is one which cannot easily occur in verbal argument, but rather in writing and poetry. ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... a fashion, this child, in whom the simplicity of practical life and the poetry of imaginative life were curiously blended, she had a fashion of going to her window every night when the moon or stars were shining, to look out for a minute or two before she went to bed; and sometimes the minutes were more than any good grandmother or aunt ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... though I had committed a sacrilege, in that I had spoiled some dream of hers. Then again I myself would become lost in dreams, to be aroused by a soft voice saying: "Well, why do you not go on?" Two people of the opposite sexes reading poetry in the woods is a solemn matter. This is not appreciated at the time, however. ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... play. It has never been reprinted, and thoroughly deserves on its own merits a place in the present collection. The conduct of the story is simple and straight-forward; the interest is well sustained; and the poetry has all the freshness and glow ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... from his mother that James received his talent for writing poetry. Though never a poet, she was exceedingly apt, as were all her people, in writing rhymes. The beautiful tributes that Riley, later in life, paid his mother show that she always understood and ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... a more ludicrous object," asked the Squire, "than shabby, and chubby, and warty little Oliver Goldsmith, when he first waddled, staring and gaping, through Green-Arbor Court, and up Fishstreet Hill? And has he not given us prose and poetry that will live as long as the ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... happiness. This took place in my presence. I remember with what admiration and sympathy I gazed at Yakov. I thought him a hero!.... And afterwards, what mournful conversations passed between us. 'Seek consolation in art,' I said to him. 'Yes,' he answered me; 'and in poetry.' 'And in friendship,' I added. 'And in friendship,' he ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... trouble of a painful refusal. She had begun to think—what girls of nineteen are very slow to comprehend—that there might be other things in the world besides love and its ideal dreams. She had read more than usual—some sensible prose, some lofty-hearted poetry; and was, possibly, "a sadder and a wiser" girl than she had been that ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... English poets—who wrote splendid poetry, if only one could read it. 'Tis such hard, tough, jaw-breaking English, that it is little wonder his very name shows we must use the muscles of our mouths when we attempt it. He lived soon after the time of Wickliffe, and imbibed some of his ideas. ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... explains that some of his quotations had to be corrected). The sentimental vein of Rousseau's generation still flows and vibrates in him, as when he says that he has never been able to read the letters of Wolmar to St Preux in Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise without shedding tears. German minor poetry, now quite forgotten, attracted him almost as much as the great pages of Schiller, Buerger, and Goethe. The Misses G. possess a manuscript translation in three volumes, in the Major's own hand, of Wieland's Agathodemon done into English. This ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... where the citizen, grumbling about his griefs and troubles, relates his great disappointment, when he took his seat in the theatre "expecting Aeschylus,'' to find that when the play came on it was Theognis; and secondly in a scene of the Frogs (acted 405 B.C.), where the throne of poetry is contested in Hades between Aeschylus and Euripides, the former complains (Fr. 860) that "the battle is not fair, because my own poetry has not died with me, while Euripides' has died, and therefore he will have it with him to recite''-a clear reference, as the scholiast points ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... now consulted awhile, and now forgotten:—so remain, relishing my situation, till night fell and the lights of the city kindled; and thence stroll homeward by the riverside, under the moon or stars, in a heaven of poetry and digestion. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... daughter, writes trashy verses about a man who was wronged, and went off and howled himself to a long repose, sick of this vale of tears, et cetera. Finally, in the midst of his despair, long hair, bad poetry and painting, an enterprising friend, who sees he has an eye for color, its harmonies and contrasts, raises him with a strong hand into the clear atmosphere of exertion for a useful and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... declaim, they encouraged his natural love of literature. His taste was formed in those days and it was curiously old-fashioned. His diction in a prepared oration might have come from the days of Grattan: and he maintained the old-fashioned habit of quotation. No poetry written later than Byron, Moore and Shelley made much appeal to him, save the Irish political ballads. But scarcely any English speaker quoted Shakespeare in public so often or so aptly ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... of the "control" began to recite a verse of poetry—a cheap, sentimental bit of trash. It was maddening, under ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Dick," Sheila said; "he asked me to grow up and marry him some day. He said I should sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, and feast upon strawberries, sugar and cream—like the poetry." ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... from somewhere came the voice of the lady, singing a strange sweet song, of which she could distinguish every word; but of the sense she had only a feeling—no understanding. Nor could she remember a single line after it was gone. It vanished, like the poetry in a dream, as fast as it came. In after years, however, she would sometimes fancy that snatches of melody suddenly rising in her brain must be little phrases and fragments of the air of that song; and the very fancy would make ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... Mr. Green downstairs, the latter accomplishing the descent not without difficulty and contusions, and having pointed out the way to Mr. Slowcoach's rooms, Mr. Robert Filcher relieved his feelings by indulging in a ballet of action, or pas d'extase; in which poetry of motion he declared his joy at the last valuable addition to Brazenface, and ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... taste in literature was almost Elizabethan. She was not allowed, of course, to glance at early English novels, which her governess classed with late English and American in point of morality, but no poetry except Byron ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the one half world/Nature seems dead] That is, over our hemisphere all action and motion seem to have ceased. This image, which is perhaps the most striking that poetry can produce, has been adopted by Dryden in his ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... object than the chance of achieving a victory. Laugh at me, if you please, for uttering what you may consider a foolish opinion, but I look upon it as a serious misfortune to them that the two words Gloire and Victoire rhyme together: they so constantly occur in that portion of their poetry which is the most popular, and the best calculated to excite them in a high degree—their vaudeville songs—that the two ideas they express have become identical in their minds; and he will deserve well of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... like my mamma. You're so complete, somehow—as Frenchwomen are, at their best. I often think of you as a kind of pocket combination of Somebody's Hundred Best Books: Romance, Practical Common Sense, Poetry, Wit, Wisdom, Fancy ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... book, which I purchased, was a curious mixture. Side by side with the flippant, rowdy nonsense of the Paris music-halls, there were many pastoral pieces, not without a touch of poetry, I thought, and instinct with the brave independence of the poorer class in France. There you might read how the wood-cutter gloried in his axe, and the gardener scorned to be ashamed of his spade. It was not very well written, this poetry of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
