"Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... language owes 'tartuffe' and 'tartufferie'. 'Reynard' too, which with us is a duplicate for fox, while in the French 'renard' has quite excluded the older 'volpils', was originally not the name of a kind, but the proper name of the fox-hero, the vulpine Ulysses, in that famous beast-epic of the middle ages, Reineke Fuchs; the immense popularity of which we gather from many evidences, from none more clearly than from this. 'Chanticleer' is in like manner the proper name of the cock, and 'Bruin' of the bear in the same poem{100}. These have ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... received that morning from a soldier brother who had taken part in that epic of human gallantry had apparently inspired the Young Doctor. He pointed ahead with a dramatic gesture at the cliffs. "Yonder are the Turks! See, they fly, they fly!" A pair of agitated cormorants, sunning themselves on the rocks, flew seaward with outstretched ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... confined to the great metropolitan churches and cathedrals, where they could be seen of men, but were frequently found in quiet and secluded villages, nestled among pastoral solitudes, far away from the gaze and admiration of the world. Though the spire of Salisbury was, perhaps, an epic in Masonic poetry, yet in humble hamlets of England, beyond her most distant hills, and amid many an unnamed "sunny spot of greenery," were idyls sung no less exquisite than this. Many a village-spire, of conception no less beautiful, arose above the tree-tops among the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... the new-born infant summon the breast of its nurse, and the dying man still receives with some pleasure the final potion, which, alas, he is not destined to digest." Occasionally he affects an epic strain, invoking Gasteria, "the tenth muse, who presides over the pleasures of taste." "It is the fairest of the Muses who inspires me: I will be clearer than an oracle, and my precepts will traverse the centuries." Beneath his pen, soup, "the first ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... here overtook the demon Shurpanakhi. It is altogether too savage an appellation for a city whose purity was established in the "Krita Yuga," and whose fame is coeval with that of the great protagonists of Hindu myth and epic. The great city of religion in the West stood upon seven hills, the holy city of the East stood upon nine; and the famous rivers which flow past them whisper in each case of a heritage of undying renown. Fancy hand in hand perhaps with a substratum ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... chronicle can not be restated in these pages. The action of this book moves forward into the light of manhood, into the region of middle age. Furthermore, its theme is more personal. Its scenes are less epic. It is a study of individuals and their relationships rather than of settlements and migrations. In short, "A Daughter of the Middle Border" is the complement of "A Son of the Middle Border," a continuation, not a repetition, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... to him for giving us an Homer, yet had he doubled our obligation by giving us—a Pope. He had a strong imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few weeks ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Achilles dwelt there with his ancient comrades, and how he was now wedded to Helen of Troy. Yet the local tradition of Lacedaemon showed the sepulchre of Helen in Therapnae. According to a Rhodian legend (adopted by the author of the "Epic of Hades"), Helen was banished from Sparta by the sons of Menelaus, came wandering to Rhodes, and was there strangled by the servants of the queen Polyxo, who thus avenged the death of her husband at Troy. It is certain, as we learn both from Herodotus (vi. 61) and from Isocrates, that Helen ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... the later Italians of the Renaissance had copied from Virgil, as Virgil had copied it from the Sicilian and Alexandrian Greeks, and to which had been given the name of Bucolic or Pastoral. Petrarch, in imitation of Virgil, had written Latin Bucolics, as he had written a Latin Epic, his Africa. He was followed in the next century by Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516), the "old Mantuan," of Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost, whose Latin "Eglogues" became a favourite school-book in England, and who was imitated by a writer ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... relates in his brief way of the people called Gold-Teeth on the frontier of Burma, that ludicrous custom which Mr. Tylor has so well illustrated under the name of the Couvade. There is more savour of laughter in the few lines of a Greek Epic, which relate precisely the same custom of a ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... with united forces, take for a time a single direction. So she taps it at its sources, and leads it away to various ends, useful because they are harmless. Bibliomania, tulipomania, potichomania, squaring the circle, perpetual motion, a religious epic, the northwest passage,—anything will serve the purpose. Divide et impera is her motto. The hobby is the safeguard of society. Once mounted, every enthusiast ambles quietly off on some errand of his own, caring little what direction he takes, provided only it be the other. The Fifth-Monarchy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... with rare skill and patience by Lyell, the dominant view of the past history of the earth was catastrophic. Great and sudden physical revolutions, wholesale creations and extinctions of living beings, were the ordinary machinery of the geological epic brought into fashion by the misapplied genius of Cuvier. It was gravely maintained and taught that the end of every geological epoch was signalised by a cataclysm, by which every living being on the globe was swept away, to be replaced by a brand-new creation when the world returned to quiescence. ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... talent was dramatic, not didactic, or epic, or pastoral. Pope was not so deep in the drama as in other matters, and Cibber was one of its luminaries; he wrote some of the best comedies of his day. He also succeeded where Dryden, for lack of true dramatic ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... it), which yielded 8,000 pounds: see Voltaire, OEuvres Completes, xiii. 408.] An incomparable piece, patronized by Royalty in England; the delight of all kindred Courts. The light dancing march of this new "Epic," and the brisk clash of cymbal music audible in it, had, as we find afterwards, greatly captivated the young man. All is not pipe-clay, then, and torpid formalism; aloft from the murk of commonplace ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... geographical and historical research that Tolstoi imposed on himself as a preliminary to the writing of "War and Peace," he did not write the history of that epoch, nor would a genuine student quote him as in authority. He created a prose epic, a splendid historical panorama, vitalised by a marvellous imagination, where the creatures of his fancy are more alive than Napoleon and Alexander. Underneath all the march of armies, the spiritual purpose of the author is clear. The real greatness of man consists ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... Sir Asinus with a polite bow, Jacques went down the staircase. As for Sir Asinus, in the excess of his rage he sat down and composed a whole canto of an epic—which luckily has not descended to our day. The ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... might; and therefore I dismiss the worm With all dry things but one. Figures away, Do you begin to see this man a little? Do you begin to see him in the air, With all the vacant horrors of his outline For you to fill with more than it will hold? If so, you needn't crown yourself at once With epic laurel if you seem to fill it. Horrors, I say, for in the fires and forks Of a new hell — if one were not enough — I doubt if a new horror would have held him With a malignant ingenuity More to be feared than ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... regarding chiefly the sufferings of Christ, or the conditions of our own sin: while through the entire system of these musical complaints are interwoven moralities, instructions, and related histories, in illustration of both, passing into Epic and Romantic verse, which gradually, as the forms and learnings of society increase, becomes less joyful, and more didactic, or satiric, until the last echoes of Christian joy and melody vanish in the 'Vanity ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... us, and drifting gales ran shudderingly along the bleak strand, and rising over the waters, lashed them into fury, till they broke upon the ears like distant thunder. Sometimes there was an epic grandeur in these scenes, when a rush of black clouds, descending upon the sea, blotted out its mighty palpitations, burying it, and the masses that floated on its surface, under one vast pall, which hung there like a curtain, till the lightning rent ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... of literature: and these qualities, apart from the fact that they are necessary to the full dramatic moment, have also an aesthetic effect proper to themselves. Thus the development ha the beauty which lies in a necessary progress; but this beauty is common to the epic, the novel, and the symphony, while the unity given by the confrontation and tension of simultaneous forces belongs to the drama alone. It is therefore development as serving the dramatic end ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... this class of men developed more regular and ample measures. They evolved the hexameter; the laisse of the Chansons de Geste; the strange technicalities of Scandinavian poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in professional ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... many and so various works which have not unworthily associated with almost every department of literature the name of a single English writer, it is CHAPTER THE LAST. Had the author lived to finish it, he would doubtless have added to his Iliad of the Siege of Paris its most epic episode, by here describing the mighty combat between those two princes of the Parisian Bourse, the magnanimous Duplessis and the redoubtable Louvier. Amongst the few other pages of the book which have been left unwritten, we must also reckon with regret some pages descriptive of the reconciliation ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... excited great interest and keen rivalry. Complaints had been made that the club had hitherto devoted itself almost altogether to abstract rhapsodies, and had omitted the cultivation of itself in the epic or heroic side of its genius. On the other hand, the abstract rhapsodists protested that any one could write ballads, and that the subject to be chosen should at least be such as would admit of any treatment. One member suggested we should ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... the ancient deities had been expelled by Jupiter. But contrary to this pagan instinct, the Cumaean Sibyl stretched forward to a distant heaven of her aspirations and hopes—to a nobler future of the world, not sentimental and idyllic, but epic and heroic. She pictured the blessing or restoration of this earth itself as distinct from an invisible world of happiness. And in this respect she is more in sympathy with the Jewish and Christian religions than with her own. The ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the contrary, in the very extent of its sphere, can better measure itself with the Universe, and create with epic profusion. In an Iliad there is room even for a Thersites; and what does not find a place in the great epic of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... note of humanity. In his introduction to, "The Rise of the Greek Epic,"(21) Gilbert Murray emphasizes the idea of service to the community as more deeply rooted in the Greeks than in us. The question they asked about each writer was, "Does he help to make better men?" or "Does ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... an epic or climb a mountain is merely a dogged thing; the result is more interesting to most than the process. Mountains, being cloud-compellers, are rain-shedders, and the shed water will not always flow with decorous gayety in dell or glen. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... a picturesque village, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, is entitled to notice in the annals of literature, as the family seat of the MILTONS, ancestors of Britain's illustrious epic poet. Of this original abode, our engraving is an accurate representation. One of Milton's ancestors forfeited his estate in the turbulent times of York and Lancaster. "Which side he took," says Johnson, "I know not; his descendant ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... least four criminally wasted years, to say nothing of the benumbing and desiccating effect of that old system of education! Chalk and chalk-dust! The Mediterranean a tinted portion of the map, Italy a man's boot which I drew painfully, with many yawns; history no glorious epic revealing as it unrolls the Meaning of Things, no revelation of that wondrous distillation of the Spirit of man, but an endless marching and counter-marching up and down the map, weary columns of figures to be learned by rote instantly to be forgotten again. "On June the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the Calmuck Tartars; they hold (see Bergmann's 'Streifereien') that their 'Dschangariade' is the finest of all epic poems, past or coming; and, therefore, the Calmuck Lives of the Poets will naturally be inimitable. But confining our view to the unhappy literatures of Europe, ancient or modern, this is what we think of Dr. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... give the song of Demodocus in full, but a brief summary of what he sang before the Phaeacians. A later poet, Arctinus, took up the legend here alluded to, and developed it in a separate epic, called the Iliou-persis or Sack of Troy. Indeed a vast number of legends and lays about the Trojan War bloomed into epics, which were in later times joined together and called the Epic Cycle. Thus ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... the classical translations that used to make him inaccurate, a scrap of a very boyish epic about King Arthur, beginning with a storm at Tintagel, sundry half ballads, the verses he was suspected of, and never would show, that first summer at Hollywell, and a very touching vision of his fair young mother. Except a translation or two, some words written ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... see the ideals of our English forefathers before they left their Continental home to settle in this island. Opinions may differ as to the date at which the poem of "Beowulf" was written, the place in which it was localised, and the religion of the poet who combined the floating legends into one epic whole, but all must accept the poem as embodying the life and feelings of our Forefathers who dwelt in North Germany on the shores of the North Sea and of the Baltic. The life depicted, the characters portrayed, the events described, are such as a simple ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... of this great navigator is an epic of the ocean, which will stir the brave heart for many ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... true that no one can safely be pronounced happy while he lives, if that event which terminates life can alone crown its honors and its glory, what felicity is here! The great epic of their lives, how happily concluded! Poetry itself has hardly closed illustrious lives, and finished the career of earthly renown, by such a consummation. If we had the power, we could not wish to reverse this dispensation of ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... praise be simply said Of him, the younger Vane, Puritan and patriot, Whose dedicated head Was laid upon the block In thy name, Liberty! Can praise be simply said of such as he! Needs must the soul unlock All gates of eloquence to sing of these. Such periods, Such epic melodies, As holds the utterance of the earlier gods, The lords of song, one needs To sing the praise of these! No feeble music, tinklings frail of glass; No penny trumpetings; twitterings of brass, The moment's effort, shak'n from pigmy bells, Ephemeral ...
— An Ode • Madison J. Cawein
... characters and in the sentiments, not in the circumstances or situation. Portia is dignified, splendid, and romantic; Rosalind is playful, pastoral, and picturesque: both are in the highest degree poetical, but the one is epic and the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... after a few ineffectual attempts at conversation goes to bed alone; the candles gutter, flicker, and die out; the room is filled of sacred silence. Once more the clock chimes forth the hour—the hour of fluted peace, of dead desire and epic love. Oh not for aye, Endymion, mayst thou unfold the purple panoply of priceless years. She sleeps—PRISCILLA sleeps—and down the palimpsest of age-old passion the lyres of night breathe forth their poignant ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... are already contained in the "Communist Manifesto,'' a work of the most amazing vigor and force, setting forth with terse compression the titanic forces of the world, their epic battle, and the inevitable consummation. This work is of such importance in the development of Socialism and gives such an admirable statement of the doctrines set forth at greater length and with more pedantry ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... on the sublime, too much occupied with the effect of the whole, to tell a common history. His conceptions are epic, and his persons, and his colors, have as little to do with ordinary life, as the violent action of his actors have resemblance to the usually ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... his vision fixed on the aim, that is, the victory that sooner or later would be celebrated to the clinking of glasses—why, from that point of view Weixler was right! It must make him indignant to have events of such epic grandeur made ridiculous by such a chicken-hearted creature as Simmel and degraded into a ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... Donaldson's true courage, cheerfulness, self-denial, readiness to sacrifice himself for others, is no less than an epic of the noblest heroism that stands an irrefutable answer to the charge later made ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... there is any other place in Sicily so faultless as Sta. Catarina? Taormina is a paradise, an epitome of all that is beautiful in Italy,—Venice excepted. Girgenti is a solemn epic, with its golden temples between the sea and hills. Cefalu is wild and strange, and Monreale a vision out of a fairy ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... schools.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} He did not permit Christians to be educated in the learning of the Greeks, since he considered that only from them the power of persuasion was gained. Apollinaris,(112) therefore, at that time employed his great learning and ingenuity in the production of a heroic epic on the antiquities of the Hebrews to the reign of Saul as a substitute for the poem of Homer.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} He also wrote comedies in imitation of Menander, and imitated the tragedies of Euripides and the odes ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... letter written to his friend Scipio Gonzaga ("Di prizione in Sant' Anna, questo mese di mezzio l'anno 1579"), Tasso exclaims, "Ah, wretched me! I had designed to write, besides two epic poems of most noble argument, four tragedies, of which I had formed the plan. I had schemed, too, many works in prose, on subjects the most lofty, and most useful to human life; I had designed to unite philosophy with eloquence, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... all poetry into three kinds,—lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry, and there is no better general division. The lyric, which is properly a song, expresses the transient feeling or mood of the writer, and therefore is never very long. One must ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... gorgeous, flamingo-colored blossoms, and great, flapping leaves, like elephant's ears,—have a singular working upon my imagination; and remind me of a menagerie and wild-beasts kept in cages. But your illustration is finer;—indeed, a grand figure. Put it down for an epic poem." ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... write you a letter of comfort, I would sit down to it with as much pleasure as I would to write an epic poem of my own composition that should equal the Iliad! Religion, my dear friend, is the true comfort. A strong persuasion in a future state of existence; a proposition so obviously probable, that, setting revelation ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... exercise so powerful an influence upon the progress of our own, was at last opened to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain undecided. Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio—both his epic poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which Petrarch praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were mingled with others of undeniable jocoseness—the immortal "Decamerone." He could examine the refined gold of Petrarch's own verse ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... his turn read aloud the fragment of an epic called L'Aveugle and two or three of the Elegies, till, when ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... century is emphasizing the fact that neither happiness nor perpetuity of government is possible without the development of a spirit of service,—a truth long since taught by English literature. We may learn this lesson from Beowulf, the first English epic, from Alfred the Great, from William Langland, and from Chaucer's Parish Priest. All Shakespeare's greatest and happiest characters, all the great failures of his dramas, are sermons on this text. In The Tempest he presents Ariel, tendering his ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... that something. Why cannot this book be set apart exclusively for those lofty spirits who, like you, are preserved from worldly pettiness by solitude? They might impress on it the melodious rhythm which it lacks, and which, in the hands of one of our poets, might have made it the glorious epic for which France still waits. Still, they will accept it from me as one of those balustrades, carved by some artist full of faith, on which the pilgrims lean to moderate on the end of man, while gazing at the choir ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... pounds sterling for the Revolution Book, with a "pathetic feeling" which brought "tears" to her eyes. From beyond the waters there is a hand held out; beyond the waters too live brothers. I would only the Book were an Epic, a Dante, or undying thing, that New England might boast in after times of this feat of hers; and put stupid, poundless, and penniless Old England to the blush about it! But after all, that is no matter; the feebler the well- ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... old man to weeping! And the tear was so genuine, so convincing, so majestic that it induced in Edwin a blank humility. He was astounded, mystified; but he was also humbled. He himself was never told, and he never learnt, the explanation of that epic tear. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... defend the magnificent creator of 'The Bride of Lammermoor' and 'The Fair Maid of Perth,' "the whole past lives in those admirable novels of his;—that is history, that is epic!" ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... from that speciment that our schoolmaster ain't simply flirtin' with the muses when he originates that epic; no sir, he means business; an' whenever I throws it into the selectmen, I does it jestice. The trustees used to silently line out for home when I finishes, an' never a yeep. It stuns 'em; it shore fills 'em to ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... drug on the market. Nobody read it (or wrote it) these days; and any one who attempted to sell it was clearly mad. Oh, a jingle for Punch might pass, you know; something clever, with a snapper to it. But epic poetry? Sonnets? Why, didn't you know that there wasn't a magazine going that did not have some sub-editor who could whack out fourteen lines in fourteen minutes, whenever a page needed filling up? These things he had been told times without number. ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... harmonious Greek calm is hard to find. "For repose and serenity of mind," says a modern author, "we must go back to the Greek temple and statue, the Greek epic and drama, the Greek oration and moral treatise; and modern education will never become truly effectual till it brings more minds into happy contact with the ideal of a balanced, harmonious development of all the powers of ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... plate they saw the Cone of Battle hurling itself toward Roger's planetoid. They saw the pirate fleet rush out to do battle with Triplanetary's massed forces, and with bated breath they watched every maneuver of that epic battle to its savagely sacrificial end. And that same battle was being watched, also with ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... range of rocks, behind which the danger is shown to come, tends to excite our curiosity; we form conjectures of the enemy, their number, nearness of approach, and from among the manly warriors before us form episodes of heroism in the great intimated epic: and have we not seen pictures by Rembrandt, where "curiosity" delights to search unsatisfied and unsatiated into the mysteries of colour and chiaro-scuro, receding further as we look into an atmosphere pregnant with all uncertain things? We think we have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Most of the epic poems of the middle ages in which Roland's death is recorded, especially the different old French Chansons de Roland ou de Roncevaux, an Icelandic poem on the subject, and Stricker's middle-high German lay of Roland, all ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... 100 B.C., a member of the great Julian gens, which claimed descent from AEneas and Venus, the glories of which are celebrated in Vergil's immortal epic. Thus the future leader of the turbulent democracy, and the future despot who was to humble the nobles of Rome, was by birth an aristocrat of bluest blood. His life might easily have come to an untimely end in the days of Sulla's bloody ascendency, for he was connected by marriage with Marius ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... four months later he was pointed out to strangers by the people of Sweetwater Springs. "That is Richard Clement, the sole owner of 'The Witch,' a mine valued at three millions of dollars." This in itself was truly an epic. ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... models of composition. Lord Bolingbroke may have published in French a sketch of his Reflections on Exile: but his reputation now reposes on the address of Voltaire, "Docte sermones utriusque linguae;" and by his English dedication to Queen Caroline, and his Essay on Epic Poetry, it should seem that Voltaire himself wished to deserve a return of the same compliment. The exception of Count Hamilton cannot fairly be urged; though an Irishman by birth, he was educated in France from his childhood. Yet I am surprised that a long residence ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer of phlebotomy. Both ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Roland is from the French Epic, probably of the eleventh century, but resting on earlier materials, legend and ballad. William Short Nose is also from the chanson ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... muse of epic poetry, rests for a moment the long trumpet whose epic strains are wont to stir the courage of men. Polymnia, the muse of sacred poetry, leans upon the lyre whose vibrant strings thrill the gentler emotions of ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... same manner, there is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in history as one consistent epic.[7] Yet every student ought to know that mastery is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term to things unlike, insist that freedom is the primitive condition of the race from which ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... or its works of art. This character is prophesied only in part by what is said and thought while the people is becoming great, and the molten constituents are sparkling as they run into their future form. We have been so dependent upon traditional ideas that we suppose an epic, for instance, to be the essential proof that a people is alive and has something to express. Let us cease to wonder whether there will ever be an American poem, an American symphony, or an American Novum Organon. It is a sign of weakness and subservience: and this is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... truth moving about me all the while, and in breasts that I did not comprehend. For all my life up to this time and beyond it, as you shall see, was occupied with money making and with watching principally the epic development of America. But I was later to awake as from a day dream or from a life in a shell, to the consciousness of a brighter world of sunlight and of wings. I was at peace now, and with Dorothy, whose frailty required my watchfulness and my care, and whom ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... epic and lyrical, was thus antagonistic to the drama. So, also, Dr. Chrysander contends, was the Hebrew himself. Not only had he no predilection for plastic creation, his life was not dramatic in the sense illustrated in Greek ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... has hardly been seen in any other epoch of that sublime scrimmage called history. Five or six names may be selected from the list of the early American prophets whose deeds and outcry, if reduced to hexameters, would be not the Iliad, not the Jerusalem Delivered, but the Epic of Human Liberty. ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... feet, putting down his still half-full glass. "I'll make this epic story short, Max. As you said, the two actually valid methods of rising above the level in which you were born are in the Military and Religious Categories. Like you, even I ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... variously designated than Comus. Milton himself describes it simply as "A Mask"; by others it has been criticised and estimated as a lyrical drama, a drama in the epic style, a lyric poem in the form of a play, a phantasy, an allegory, a philosophical poem, a suite of speeches or majestic soliloquies, and even a didactic poem. Such variety in the description of the poem is explained partly by its complex charm and many-sided interest, ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... out, and whilst he was driving in a cab towards the Via Venti Settembre, he recalled to mind the heroic story of old Orlando's life which had been told him in Paris. It was like an epic poem, full of faith, bravery, and the disinterestedness of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Ching is the best example, there is the same deep sadness, the haunting sorrow of doom. To look on beautiful things is only to feel more poignantly the passing of bright days, and the time when the petals must leave the rose. The form of desire hides within it the seeds of decay. In this epic of which I have spoken, Buddha sees the lovely and virtuous Lady Aruna coming to greet him, says ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... has little to do with the positive truths of our actual life, and does not pretend to deal with the larger passions and more stirring interests of our kind. It is but an episode out of the graver epic of human destinies. It requires no explanation of its purpose, and no analysis of its story; the one is evident, the other simple,—the first seeks but to illustrate visible nature through the poetry of the affections; the other is but the narrative of the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fascinating book, The Epic of America, speaks over and over again of the culture of the pre-Revolutionary towns along the Atlantic seaboard, and what a high point it had reached. No better example could be found than this old town with its families who had come from well-to-do circumstances, ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... people gradually becoming civilized, the study of liberal accomplishments flourished, having been first introduced by the Bards, the Eubages,[49] and the Druids. The Bards were accustomed to employ themselves in celebrating the brave achievements of their illustrious men, in epic verse, accompanied with sweet airs on the lyre. The Eubages investigated the system and sublime secrets of nature, and sought to explain them to their followers. Between these two came the Druids, men of loftier genius, bound in brotherhoods according to the precepts and example ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... strange and unexpected uses, yet always avoiding affectation by the sheer vitality of his strength. As for the matter of these first chapters, one might say that nothing whatever happens in them. They are an epic of adolescence wherein growth is the only movement. Events are for the second half of the volume. Here Michael has come down from Oxford, and has set himself to find and rescue by marriage the girl Lily, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... speaking, to copy or imitate. The justness of the representation is lost, and the mind is displeased to find a picture which bears no resemblance to any original. Nor are such excessive refinements more agreeable in the epistolary or philosophic style, than in the epic or tragic. Too much ornament is a fault in every kind of production. Uncommon expressions, strong flashes of wit, pointed similes, and epigrammatic turns, especially when laid too thick, are a disfigurement rather than any embellishment of discourse. As the eye, in surveying ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... three greatest epic poets of the world were blind,—Homer and Milton; while the third, Dante, was in his later years nearly, if not altogether, blind. It almost seems as though some great characters had been physically crippled in certain respects so that they ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Legend of St. Andrew among the other poems of the Anglo-Saxons? and what are its chief merits as a work of art? The Old English epics may be divided into two general classes: the heroic epic, of which the Beowulf is the chief example; and the larger group of religious epics, including the poems of Cynewulf, of Pseudo-Caedmon, ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... developments. Romances are to show us heroic ideals. Lyrics of joy, of sorrow, of passion, of emotion natural and spiritual, are to be sung. The sense of beauty is to grow. The drama is to arise from beginnings to be but faintly traced in early days. Epic poetry is to take a great place. Character modified, enriched by foreign strains, is to mould a noble literature—noble through many and many a gift and grace. A great poet is to arise with sympathies large and wide, to show us, in verse most musical, ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... scope and resources, it is chiefly remarkable for its limitations—for what it has not, rather than what it has. In the first place there are no long poems. There is nothing which even remotely resembles an epic—no Iliad or Divina Commedia—not even a Nibelungen Lied or Chevy Chase. Indeed, narrative poems of any kind are short and very few, the only ones which I have met with being two or three ballads of a sentimental cast. Didactic, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... expostulation to Warton, Mason did not go the length of disclaiming the satire, though he was angry enough that it should be laid at his door. I have heard that he received with much apathy the praises offered him by Hayley, in the Essay on Epic Poetry. He has remarked, "that if rhyme does not condense the sense, which passes through its vehicle, it ceases to be good, either as verse or rhyme."[2] This rule is laid down too broadly. His own practice was not always consonant with it, as Hayley's never was. With Darwin's ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... lady, executed with all his happiest point. Of this dense, epigrammatic style, in which every line is a cartridge of wit in itself, Sheridan was, both in prose and verse, a consummate master; and if any one could hope to succeed, after Pope, in a Mock Epic, founded upon fashionable life, it would have been, we should think, the writer of this epilogue. There are some verses, written on the "Immortelle Emilie" of Voltaire, in which her employments, as a savante and a woman of the world, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... six octavo volumes; an analysis of the Attic art of the fifth century B.C. in three volumes; an exhaustive history of northern thirteenth-century art, in ten volumes; a life of Sir Walter Scott, with analysis of modern epic art, in seven volumes; a life of Xenophon, with analysis of the general principles of education, in ten volumes; a commentary on Hesiod, with final analysis of the principles of Political Economy, in nine volumes; and a general description of the geology ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... novels of Scott, for instance, takes up Tom Jones, he, after a vain attempt to read, may lay it down with a feeling of surprise and dissatisfaction; but Tom Jones remains still to his convictions 'an epic in prose,' the fiction par excellence of the language. As for Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison, we have not heard of any common reader in our generation who has had the hardihood even to open the volumes; but Richardson as well as Fielding retains ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... epics and wonder-myths that celebrated the doings of the volcano goddess Pele and her compeers. Thus in the cantillations of the old-time hula we find a ready-made anthology that includes every species of composition in the whole range of Hawaiian poetry. This epic[1] of Pele was chiefly a more or less detached series of poems forming a story addressed not to the closet-reader, but to the eye and ear and heart of the assembled chiefs and people; and it was sung. The Hawaiian song, its note of joy par excellence, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... to carry a breath of the Atlantic on its beams. The road ran up and down as if our motor were a ship on a deep-sea swell; and such a sense of space and light was in the distances, such a veil of beauty over the whole world, that the vision of that army on the move grew more and more fabulous and epic. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... of the literature of the middle ages culminates in the Christian poet, Dante. History, theology, politics, paganism, sweet and melancholy elegies, flashes of fiery indignation, all men and all generations, meet in his majestic epic. Yet the closest unity is preserved through this astonishing range of subjects; one sublime idea broods over its every line,—the idea of a God of perfect justice—of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... uplands set I saw the dream; the streets I trod, The lit straight streets shot out and met The starry streets that point to God; The legend of an epic hour A child I dreamed, and dream it still, Under the great grey water-tower That strikes the stars on ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... the role of a reigning beauty; but she was not at all averse to the literary entertainments of this salon, in which her own fascinations were so delightfully sung. She found the flattering verses of Voiture more to her taste than the stately epic of Chapelain, took his side warmly against Benserade in the famous dispute as to the merits of their two sonnets, "Job" and "Urania," and won him a doubtful victory. The poems of Voiture lose much of their flavor in translation, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... the charity to play at chess with me, I was allowed to do nothing save read, from morning to night. As my taste and appetite were gratified in nothing else, I indemnified myself by becoming a glutton of books. Accordingly, I believe, I read almost all the old romances, old plays, and epic poetry, in that formidable collection, and no doubt was unconsciously amassing materials for the task in which it has been my lot ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... then, as a desperate hero dies, she slopes her huge warlike beak at the hostile water and rushes to her own ruin with a surge and convulsion. The victorious sea sweeps over it and hides it, laughing at her work. She will keep it safely. That is the unsung epic of the Milwaukee, without which I should have little to say of the submarine diving during ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... no doubt, the garden scent Brings back some brief-winged bright sensation Of love that came and love that went,— Some fragrance of a lost flirtation, Born when the cuckoo changes song, Dead ere the apple's red is on it, That should have been an epic long, Yet scarcely served ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... waves Shine from a sister valley;—and afar The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves The Latian coast where sprang the Epic War.' ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... attached themselves to their better-situated brethren, becoming their dependents and willing tools. The relation of the nobility to the peasantry is well characterised in a passage of Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz, where a peasant, on humbly suggesting that the nobility suffered less from the measures of their foreign rulers than his own class, is told by one of his betters that this is a silly remark, seeing that peasants, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Jose, and there was a hitch in his voice, "you are an epic—and the world is the poorer that it cannot ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... be a good military critic; but all this is possible without his possessing any positive qualities of a great general, just as a literary critic may show the profoundest acquaintance with the principles of epic poetry without being able to produce a single stanza of an epic poem. Nevertheless, I shall not give up my faith in General McClellan's soldiership until he is defeated, nor in his ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... mind, Long as the flame of gratitude shall burn, Or human tears bedew the patriot's urn, Thy sound shall dwell on each Columbian tongue And live lamented in elegiac song! Till some bold bard, inspired with Delphic rage! Shall with thy lusters fire his epic page! ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... the war was, it was at any rate a great thing; it did this much for countless minds that for the first time they realized the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under which we had been living our lives of comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw the stars above ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... the editor has chosen two from which to reprint brief passages. The first is Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, the simple and straightforward personal narrative of one whom all must now concede to have been a very great man; the other is that human and poignant epic of the stranger from Denmark who became one of us and of whom we as a people are tenderly proud. The Making of an American is in some ways a unique book; concrete, specific, self-revealing and yet dignified; a book that one could wish ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... my worthy sire! but skill And vigour lack, how great soe'er the will. Not every one can paint in epic strain The lances bristling on the embattled plain, Tell how the Gauls by broken javelins bleed, Or sing the ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... over and over again, with unflagging vehemence, with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers and thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; she calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in this tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is tortured to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. La recherche du terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en saveur, la surabondance des vocables ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of Siegfried and Byrnhild constitutes the greatest epic in Teutonic Gothic literature. Its origin is hard to trace, but parts of the legends carry the investigator back to Iranian sources. Its greatest development, however, may justly be credited to Icelandic sagas, in which the mythology of the Norse people has a prominent place. In both the Gothic and ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... poem; the subject is national and historical. Thus far it must be interesting to my countrymen. But most of the events were so recent, so important and so well known, as to render them inflexible to the hand of fiction. The poem therefore could not with propriety be modelled after that regular epic form which the more splendid works of this kind have taken, and on which their success is supposed in a great measure to depend. The attempt would have been highly injudicious; it must have diminished ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... mania, I neglected my studies to compose poems, which certainly can have shown no great promise, to judge by a line of too many feet which became famous among my companions—the beginning of an epic ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... slenderness. Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly Up to its climax and then dying proudly? Who found for me the grandeur of the ode, Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load? Who let me taste that more than cordial dram, The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram? Shew'd me that epic was of all the king, Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring? You too upheld the veil from Clio's beauty, And pointed out the patriot's stern duty; The might of Alfred, and the shaft of Tell; The hand of ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... them out of mischief. As my taste and appetite were gratified in nothing else, I indemnified myself by becoming a glutton of books. Accordingly, I believe I read almost all the romances, old plays, and epic poetry in that formidable collection, and no doubt was unconsciously amassing materials for the task in which it has been my lot ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... publication, in 1855, of the Poems, in two volumes, entitled "Men and Women," Browning reviewed his work and made an interesting reclassification of it. He separated the simpler pieces of a lyric or epic cast—such rhymed presentations of an emotional moment, for example, as "Mesmerism" and "A Woman's Last Word," or the picturesque rhymed verse telling a story of an experience, such as "Childe Roland" and "The Statue ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... disposed to ally him, takes his seat on the bench of the historians of his time and country." He once expressed the opinion that the historical romance approaches, in some measure, when it is nobly executed, to the epic in poetry.[456] When a medal of Scott, engraved from the bust by Chantrey, was struck off, he suggested the ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... know that they brought with them a considerable measure of civilization, and soon erected cities. Indraprastha, built near the site of the present city of Delhi, and Hastinapore, some thirty miles from it, figure largely in the Mahabharut, the giant Hindu epic. Kunauj, lying east and south of Delhi, became some time afterwards the capital of a widely extended empire, which lasted, with vicissitudes, down to Muhammadan times. Benares is seen in the dim light of antiquity as a favourite abode of Brahmans, and as sacred on ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... And this was the epic age, over whose departure my late eloquent and prophetic friend and correspondent, Edmund Burke, so movingly mourned. Yes, they were glorious times. But no sensible man, given to quiet domestic delights, would exchange his warm fireside and muffins, for a heroic ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... understood the cows to signify the light of morning, and it would seem also that they thought that the waters mentioned in the story signified the rain. But why do they speak of these acts as heroic deeds, exploits of a mighty warrior, in the same tone and with the same epic fire as when they sing of Indra's battles in times near to their own, real battles in which their own forefathers, strong in their faith in the god, shattered the armies of hostile Aryan tribes ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... compared with what we know of Corinna or Thespis. More objectively and definitely it can be traced in a remarkable change of dialect. The old Attic poets, like Solon, were comparatively little affected by the epic influence; the later elegists, like Ion, Euenus, and Plato, ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... victims to the swords of the Greeks in a scene of indescribable carnage and terror. Cassandra and the Trojan women, driven to take shelter in the temple of Cybele, slay themselves rather than fall into the hands of their captors. 'La Prise de Troie' is perhaps epic rather than dramatic, but as a whole it leaves an impression of severe and spacious grandeur, which can only be paralleled in the finest inspirations of Gluck. In the second division of the work, 'Les Troyens a Carthage,' ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... fetch another king from thence." Adieu! my dear child. I am sensible that I write you short letters, but I write you all I know. I don't know how it is, but the wonderful seems worn out. In this our day, we have no rabbit women-no elopements-no epic poems,(744) finer than Milton's-no contest about harlequins and Polly Peachems. Jansen (745) has won no more estates, and the Duchess of Queensberry is grown as tame as her neighbours. Whist has spread an universal opium over the whole nation; it makes courtiers and patriots sit ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... improve the climatic conditions, for the sanitation and embellishment of home environments, for the love of the beautiful and useful combined in the music and majesty of a tree, as fancy and truth unite in an epic poem, Arbor Day was created. It has grown with the vigor and beneficence of a grand truth or a great tree. It faces the future. It is the only anniversary in which humanity looks futureward instead of pastward, in which there is a consensus of thought for those who are to come after ...
— Arbor Day Leaves • N.H. Egleston
... in the soft light. A horned owl "hoo-hoo-ed," and a far-off wolf uttered a drawn-out, soft, melancholy cry, as Rolf finished his dried meat, tightened his belt, and set out on a long, hard run that, in the days of Greece, would have furnished the theme of many a noble epic poem. ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... our valley inhaled with every breath this mingled air of romance and sorrow, history and song, and through those epic days runs a deep-laid consciousness of maternal pain. My mother's side of those long months of waiting was never fully delineated, for she was natively reticent and shy of expression. But piece by piece in later years I drew from her the tale of her long vigil, and obtained some hint ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... longer claim even a shadow of divine authority, since they have been distinctly traced back to a human origin. It has been recently discovered that they are simply a restatement of the Babylonian cosmology, as given in a literary production ages older than the Bible, an epic poem of very remote date. They are, doubtless, an outgrowth of the cosmological ideas of early man, and those who accept them must do so on the basis of belief in their probability; it is no longer permissible to claim for them ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... nothing, but out of things wholly different. Produced by a shock or a revelation, as two gases lit will, in a sharp explosion, unite to form a liquid wholly unlike either, so after a great conquest, a battle, the sudden preaching of a creed, these primal literatures appear in an epic or a dithyrambic code of awful law. Their first effort is their mightiest. They come mature. They are allied to that element of the catastrophic which the modern world (taking its general philosophy from its social condition) denies, ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... K. Restauraw is one of the few superior hostelries of the Territory. Mrs. Rucker, its charming proprietress, is a cook who might outrival even that celebrated chef, now dead, M. Soyer. Her pies are poems, her bread an epic, and her beans a dream, Mrs. Rucker has cooked her way to every heart, and her famed establishment is justly regarded as the bright particular gem in ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the lawyer, when I had quite done, "this is a great epic, a great Odyssey of yours. You must tell it, sir, in a sound Latinity when your scholarship is riper; or in English if you please, though for my part I prefer the stronger tongue. You have rolled much; quae regio in terris—what parish in Scotland (to make a homely translation) ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... might have stepped out of a bandbox. Yesterday was one of those lovely days of early April, and I wanted to take my children for a walk, while I was still able—for the warning bell is in my ears. Such an expedition is quite an epic to a mother! One dreams of it the night before! Armand was for the first time to put on a little black velvet jacket, a new collar which I had worked, a Scotch cap with the Stuart colors and cock's ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... And grew immortal in his own despite. Ben, old and poor, as little seemed to heed The life to come, in every poet's creed. Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit; Forget his epic, nay Pindaric art; But still I love the language of his heart. "Yet surely, surely, these were famous men! What boy but hears the sayings of old Ben? In all debates where Critics bears a part, Not one but nods, and talks of Jonson's art, Of Shakespeare's nature, and of Cowley's ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... meekly, and borrowed fourpence of the operatic villain. Then he took the 'bus for Scotland Yard. There was a not ill-looking servant girl in the 'bus. The rhythm of the vehicle shaped itself into rhymes in his brain. He forgot all about his situation and his object. He had never really written an epic—except "Paradise Lost"—but he composed lyrics about wine and women and often wept to think how miserable he was. But nobody ever bought anything of him, except articles on bacon-curing or attacks on vestrymen. ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... Great Homer sings his epic high; The hero fronts his dangers; The brave his duty still doth ply— And did it while, I won't deny, Philosophers were strangers: But grant by heart and brain achiev'd What Locke and Des Cartes ne'er conceiv'd— By them yet, as behoved, It ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... commemorated. No conversation of any length can be carried on without a reference to Camoens and to Vasco da Gama. All history and all progress appear to have culminated and stopped then. Apparently nothing worthy of note has happened since. Camoens returned to Lisbon in 1569, and his great epic poem saw the light in 1572. He died in a public hospital in Lisbon in 1579 or 1580. In the latter year began the "sixty years' captivity," when Portugal became merely a Spanish province; yet there is no recollection of this—except the ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... be brought against Blackmore's Prince Arthur, than those raised by Mr. Dennis, the Poem would be faultless; for what has the doctrine of the church of England to do with an epic poem? It is not the doctrine of the church of England, to suppose that the apostate spirits put the power of the Almighty to proof, by openly resisting his will, and maintaining an obstinate struggle ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... in philosophy, in legislation, or in the fine arts, except only that, as to one of these arts, viz. poetry, a single god vaunted himself greatly in simple ages. But he attempted neither a tragedy nor an epic poem. Even in what he did attempt, it is worth while to follow his career. His literary fate was what might have been expected. After the Persian war, the reputation of his verses rapidly decayed. Wits arose in Athens, who laughed so furiously ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... first appeared in 1855. In it Mr. Longfellow has woven together the beautiful traditions of the American Indians into one grand and delightful epic poem. The melodies of its rhythm and measure flow from his classic pen in unison with the hoof-beats of the bison, the tremulous thunder of the Falls of Minnehaha, the paddle strokes of the Indian canoeist, and he has done more to immortalize in song and story the life and environments ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... nobler branches of our art. Upon this principle the Roman, the Florentine, the Bolognese schools, have formed their practice; and by this they have deservedly obtained the highest praise. These are the three great schools of the world in the epic style. The best of the French school, Poussin, Le Sueur, and Le Brun, have formed themselves upon these models, and consequently may be said, though Frenchmen, to be a colony from the Roman school. Next to these, but in a very different style of excellence, we may rank the ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... is redolent with the spirit of the Odyssey, that glorious primitive epic, fresh with the dew of the morning of time. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read his recital of the adventures of the wily Odysseus, slightly expurgated though it be, and adapted for the intelligence of youthful minds. Howard Pyle's illustrations ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... by some regarded as scarcely raised in refinement and sensibility above the rank of the more polished domestic animals of our own great and enlightened land, we should often find them replete with the choicest elements of the truly epic, the comic, and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... is an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit, barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... Camoens! Did you ever read him? The Lusiad, I mean? It's the man-of-war epic of the world, my lad. Give me Gama for a Commodore, say I—Noble Gama! And Mickle, White-Jacket, did you ever read of him? William Julius Mickle? Camoens's Translator? A disappointed man though, White-Jacket. Besides ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville |
