"Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shops, men and women together, loving, marrying, breeding, and above all living! "All of life is good!" Each one of these millions had its own drama, each to itself, as hers had been to her, with that tragic importance of being lived but once from the germ to the ultimate dust. Each one was its own epic, its own experience, and its own fulfilment. As Renault once said, "Any of the possibilities may lie in a human soul." And in that was the hope and the faith for Democracy,—the infinite ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... 1914. Increase of British responsibilities, and of the air force. The temper of the air force. The Epic of Youth. ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... any poetical gentleman who desires to write an Epic (in not less than twenty-four Books) on the Life and Adventures of PUNCHINELLO, to be printed on vellum paper, with profuse illustrations, and bound in morocco, this ambitious and worthy person has our full permission to go ahead, and may he find (which we do ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... of the Finnish national poem; of all poems that in which the popular, as opposed to the artistic, spirit is strongest. The Kalevala is thus a link between Marchen and Volkslieder on one side, and epic poetry on ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... exploits of Myles Standish throws a clearer light upon a heroic figure in our earliest history, and it has an epic quality which will appeal to old and young. While the facts of history are presented, the author has adroitly reconstructed the little-known earlier years of Standish's life, basing his imaginative work upon the probabilities ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... with paintings which still exist, and which must have been quite luxurious for those poor oxen. Let us interrogate these paintings and those of all these walls; they will instruct us, perhaps, with reference to the destination of the building. There are mythological and epic pieces reproducing certain sacred subjects, of which we shall speak further on. Others show us winged infants, little Cupids weaving garlands, of which the ancients were so fond; some of the bacchanalian ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... terrible love, a promise of paternity, a thirst for some loyalty that shall unify life, and in the ordinary course of things he asks himself, "How far do the existing conditions of those assisting in shops fit in with my evident and epic destiny in the matter of love and marriage?" But here, as I have said, comes in the quiet and crushing power of modern materialism. It prevents him rising in rebellion, as he would otherwise do. By perpetually talking about environment and ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... represented as closed with Seven Seals. In it we find the Seven genii of the Ancient Mythologies; and the doctrine concealed under its emblems is the pure Kabala, already lost by the Pharisees at the advent of the Saviour. The pictures that follow in this wondrous epic are so many pantacles, of which the numbers 3, 4, 7, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... that his father was preyed upon, just as certainly as any wild thing in the forest. At first the enemies had been saloon-keepers, and wicked men who tempted him to drink with them. The names of these men were household words to him, portents of terror; they peopled his imagination as epic figures, such as Black Douglas must have been to the children of the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... early epic poet, reputed author of the 'Capture of Oechalia', which he was said to have received from Homer as the dowry of the ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... dream, we are told, to acquire a competency by painting commissions, and then dedicate his time and pencil to historical compositions,—a dream which many artists have dreamed; but his works have little of the epic in them. Nature gave him good advice, when she directed his steps to the surf-beat shore, and bade him paint the swelling tide, the busy boats, fishermen drying their nets, and the sea-eagle looking from the rock upon his wide and, to him, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... be learned from the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer of phlebotomy. Both were regarded as the sons of AEsculapius; they were soldiers as ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... natural and apparently easy—an epic in moleskin and human flesh, with only the little glimmer of oil-lamps, which darted from side to side in a mad mazurka of toil, crossing and recrossing, swinging and halting, the flames flattening out with every heave of their owners' bodies, then abruptly being brought ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... of science and the handiwork of genius had interested and sometimes amazed him, but never had he looked upon physical effort that thrilled him as did this that he was looking upon now. There was almost the spirit of the epic about it. They were the survival of the fittest—these men and dogs. They had gone through the great test of life in the raw, as the pyramids and the sphinx had outlived the ordeals of the centuries; they were different; they were proven; ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... who was born for no less an undertaking, and whom posterity shall bless for its accomplishment. Methinks, I am already taking fire from such a character, and making room for him, under a borrowed name, amongst the heroes of an epic poem. Neither could mine, or some more happy genius, want encouragement ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... had been expelled by Jupiter. But contrary to this pagan instinct, the Cumaean Sibyl stretched forward to a distant heaven of her aspirations and hopes—to a nobler future of the world, not sentimental and idyllic, but epic and heroic. She pictured the blessing or restoration of this earth itself as distinct from an invisible world of happiness. And in this respect she is more in sympathy with the Jewish and Christian religions than with her own. The golden ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the wild buffalo is morose and uncertain, and such is its strength and courage that in the Hindu epic of the Ramayana its onslaught is compared to that of the tiger.[1] It is never quite safe to approach them, if disturbed in their pasture or alarmed from their repose in the shallow lakes. On such occasions they ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... the valley of the shadow of death, insanity. We recall many odd and pleasant figures in this street; first the old printers who succeeded Caxton, who published for Shakespeare or who timidly speculated in Milton's epic, that great product of a sorry age; next, the old bankers, who, at Child's and Hoare's, laid the foundations of permanent wealth, and from simple City goldsmiths were gradually transformed to great capitalists. Izaak Walton, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... minstrelsy admit of simple classification. The Duan Mor is the epic song; its subdivisions are termed duana or duanaga. Strings of verse and incidents ([Greek: Rhapsodia]) were intended to form an epic history, and were combined by successive bards for that purpose. The battle-song (Prosnuchadh-catha) was the next in importance. The model of this variety ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... a long breath, regarded Lawlor again with that considerate, expectant eye, and then turned on his heel and strode from the room. Back to Bard came fragments of tremendous cursing of an epic ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... the thirteenth century, a development full of incidents and experiments and variety. I have called the early form rude, but the phrase is not very happy, as those who know either the early mosaic or the early epic will understand. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... gets ready to do business in a 20-knot sou'wester it sends no messenger boys ahead to distribute its itinerary handbills." There is no fault of style which these few lines do not display. They combine, with a singular success, commonness and pomp. The epic poets of old were wont to illustrate the life of man by the phenomena of nature. The vulgar American reverses the process—he illustrates nature ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... Kolskegg his brother, who "sailed long ago and far away from us" in obedience to the doom or sentence of the Thing—all these bring out sharply the quite reckless daring of Gunnar himself, who braves the decree. A mysterious and epic touch is added by the three ancient hags-evidently of these minor Norns who watch over individual destinies and announce the irrevocable doom of the gods. It was Hallgerd who broke their thread, representing, of ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... two Babylonian epics, fragments of which were found on clay tablets in a royal library at Nineveh. The epic of the Creation tells how the god Marduk overcame a terrible dragon, the symbol of primeval chaos, and thus established order in the universe. Then with half the body of the dead dragon he made a covering for the heavens and set therein the stars. Next he caused ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... Satire and Epic Poetry belong to the latter years of his life, and represent maturer thought than is to be found in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesie." That essay, published in 1667, draws its chief interest from the time when it was written. A Dutch fleet was at the mouth of the Thames. ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... Baruch of the Roman world, the prophet of the downfall of the Aryan Ante-Christian civilization,—Tacitus." This God-consciousness is found first in the Grecian feeling of the Commonwealth,—the idea of a common good surpassing a personal good; then in the conception of the Epic, which assumes a political as well as a physical Kosmos, or order; then in the grand moral ideas lying at the basis of the Mythology,—the myths, for instance, of Prometheus, and the picture of Nemesis and the Fates. Next, the deep sense of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... a periphrasis for woman that bears gold on her arm. (2) "Skates that skim." etc.. a periphrasis for ships. (3) "Odin's mocking cup," mocking songs. (4) An allusion to the Beast Epic, where the cunning fox laughs at the flayed condition of his stupid foes, the wolf and bear. We should say, "Don't stop to speak with him, but rather ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... of Davis will spring a massive monument, which will forever remain a landmark in American history,— aye, in the mighty epic of the world! More imposing cenotaphs have risen, costlier mausoleums have charmed the eye, more gigantic monuments have aspired to kiss the clouds; but to the student of mankind none were more significant, to the historian none more interesting, to the poet ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... mansions, a thousand or more acres of park in the making. But the San Francisco which he had known as a boy had greatly changed, even before the fire. Angela was aware of this, though she had not been able to realize the vastness of the change; and though she knew that the city was reborn since the epic tragedy which laid it low, she had expected to find it in a confused turmoil of growing. The work done in six or seven years by men who loved the City of the Golden Gate—men who gave blood and fortune for her, as men will for an adored woman—was almost incredible. "Rome ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the oldest poem in the English language. It is our "old English epic"; and, like much of our ancient verse, it is a war poem. The author of it is unknown. It was probably composed in the fifth century— not in England, but on the Continent— and brought over to this island— not on paper or on parchment— but in ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... Beristain, will be confirmed. Mexico, he says, was the sunflower of Spain. When in her principal universities there were no learned men to fill the mathematical chairs, Mexico could boast of Don Carlos de Siguenza y Gngora: when in Madrid there was no one who had written a good epic poem, in Mexico the ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... must need laugh, lest, like Beaumarchais, I should weep. What, after all, do I know of him? What is there in my armoury to pierce this impenetrable outer-man? Once, when I was Browning-mad, I began an epic. Yes, I, an epic! I pictured the hordes of civilisation sweeping over an immense and beautiful mountain, crushing, destroying, manufacturing, and the burden of their cry was a scornful text of Ruskin's—"We do not ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... told: how he loved his country, and for another and a broader love, growing out of his first passion, fought it; and being small by comparison, and finding no giant of the Philistines disposed to receive a stone in his fore-skull, pummelled the obmutescent mass, to the confusion of a conceivable epic. His indifferent England refused it to him. That is all I can say. The greater power of the two, she seems, with a quiet derision that does not belie her amiable passivity, to have reduced in Beauchamp's career the boldest readiness for public action, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... national and contemporary events in place of the deeds of old-time heroes. For this new departure he apologizes in the introductory verses (preserved in the scholiast on Aristotle, Rhetoric, iii. 14), where he says that, the subjects of epic poetry being all exhausted, it was necessary to strike out a new path. The story of his intimacy with Herodotus is probably due to the fact that he imitated him and had recourse to his history for the incidents of his poem. The Perseis ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Indian. The "Egyptian" form is found in Burmah (Smeaton, l. c., p. 128), as well as the Indian, a fact of which Prof. K. Krohn was unaware though it turns his whole argument. The evidence we have of other folk-tales of the beast-epic emanating from India improves the chances of this also coming from that source. One thing at least is certain: all these hundred variants come ultimately from one source. The incident "Inside again" of the Arabian Nights (the Djinn and the bottle) and European ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... to teeth of Time, So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry; Blot out the Epic's stately rhyme, But spare his ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... to us in common life what, in an epic poem, we are accustomed to praise as a stroke of art in the poet; namely, that when the chief figures go off the scene, conceal themselves or retire into inactivity, some other or others, whom hitherto we have scarcely ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... shaken off the unwholesome dust which had accumulated upon his soul, and had for the first time in his life breathed the undiluted air of healthful human intercourse. Annunciata was to him a living poem, a simple and stately epic, whose continuation from day to day filled his life with sonorous echoes. She was a modern Nausicaa, with the same child-like grandeur and unconscious dignity as her Homeric prototype. It was not until to-day that he had become aware of the distance which separated him ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... that of Greece and Rome rather than on that of ancient Israel. But he had been perfectly willing to accept that fate—and to remodel the form and style of the book of Job on what he considered the pattern of the classical epic. ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... 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 ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... for his great epic, viz. the Fall of Man and his expulsion from Paradise—perhaps the most momentous incident in the history of the human race—was one worthy of the genius of a great poet and in the treatment of which Milton has been sublimely successful. The newly created Earth; the untainted ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... 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 ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of Assyrian Literature is not confined to hymns, or even to inscriptions. A nameless poet has left in the imperishable tablets of a Babylonian library an epic poem of great power and beauty. This ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... Dorothea was just then under way—Goethe and Schiller interchanged views by letter on the subject of epic poetry in general and the ballad in particular. As they had both written ballads in their youth, it was but natural that they should be led to fresh experiments with the species. So they both began to make ballads for next year's Musenalmanach. Schiller contributed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... 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
... invisible rills and rivers breaking forth from Tir-na-noge, the soul of the island, and glittering in the sunlight of its mystic day. What we see here is imaged forth from that invisible soul and is a path thereto. In the heroic Epic of Cuculain Standish O'Grady writes of such a fountain, and prefixes his chapter with the verse from Genesis, "And four rivers went forth from Eden to water the garden," and what ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... is perhaps not much to look at, it is a very great treasure. For it is not only the oldest epic poem in the Anglo-Saxon language, it is history too. By that I do not mean that the story is all true, but that by reading it carefully we can find out much about the daily lives of our forefathers in their homes across the seas. And besides this, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... highest, and that however, in his riper age, he might come down in his pretensions, and think that to translate an ode of Horace, or to turn a song of Waller or Prior into decent alcaics or sapphics, was about the utmost of his capability, tragedy and epic only did his green unknowing youth engage, and no prize but the highest was fit ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Favourite Elopement in Fiction" would be outside the purview of any of her girls. She would substitute instead (with my permission), "The Debt of Literature (as well as Science) to DARWIN" and "My Favourite Piece of Epic Poetry." In fine, if I did not really mind, she would herself set all the questions and I should examine the answers. She thought that the more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... never seen her look so great, and lofty, and resolute as she looked now; a little stern, too, as one who had a great duty to do, and was inflexible as iron. When truly feminine features stiffen into marble like this, beauty is indeed imperial, and worthy of epic song; it rises beyond the ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... minor passions in the Garden. It sees and passes on, embodying none of them in deathless epic as His passion was embodied.... Men and women have cried out to listening Heaven that the cup might pass from their lips, and it has not been permitted to pass, as His was not permitted to pass. In the souls of men and of women is something of the divine, something ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... to be native to India. Although this discussion does not bear directly upon the {14} origin of our numerals, yet it is highly pertinent as showing the aptitude of the Hindu for mathematical and mental work, a fact further attested by the independent development of the drama and of epic and lyric poetry. ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... should go to London oftener,' said Picotee, to turn the conversation. 'But she lives mostly in the library. And, O, what do you think? She is writing an epic poem, and employs ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Their like 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 ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... Wordsworth as you find you can assimilate, but do not attempt either of his long poems. The time, however, is now come for a long poem. I began by advising narrative poetry for the neophyte, and I shall persevere with the prescription. I mean narrative poetry in the restricted sense; for epic poetry is narrative. *Paradise Lost* is narrative; so is *The Prelude*. I suggest neither of these great works. My choice falls on Elizabeth Browning's *Aurora Leigh*. If you once work yourself "into" this poem, interesting ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... a rhythm that is lyric, exquisitely descriptive of the picturesque tropical scenery and exotic vegetations, fragrant and luxuriant; there are intimate accounts of adventuring and primitive life; there are personal touches which lend a colour only personal touches can, as Aphara tells her prose-epic of her Superman, Caesar the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... for anything of the sort. He revealed to me a whole world of fascinating romance of which I had never before suspected the existence. Some day, perhaps, a poet—he will have to be a great poet—will discover that the system of credit by means of which our civilisation works, deserves an epic. Neither the wanderings of Ulysses nor the discoveries of a traveller through Paradise and Purgatory make so splendid an appeal to the imagination as this vastly complex machine which Ascher and men like him guide. The oceans of the world are covered thick with ships. Long freight trains ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... second-rate work of first-rate performers to sink into oblivion. But at the same time there might be a great future before any artist who could discover a new medium of utterance. It seems at present, to take literature, as if every form of human expression had been exploited. We have the lyric, the epic, the satire, the narrative, the letter, the diary, conversation, all embalmed in art. But there is probably some other medium possible which will become perfectly obvious the moment it is seized upon and used. To take ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and Wing-and-Wing were given to the public in 1842, both of them taking a high rank among Cooper's sea-tales. The first of these is a sort of naval epic in prose; the flight and chase of armed vessels hold us in breathless suspense, and the sea-fights are described with a terrible power. In the later sea-tales of Cooper, it seems to me that the mastery with which he makes his grand processions ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... sterile and dry, all the water having been swallowed by a gigantic frog or toad which was compelled, by queer stratagems, to regurgitate it. These are little children's imaginings. Among the Hindoos the same myth takes the form of an alluring epic—the dragon watching over the celestial waters, of which he has taken possession, is wounded by Indra after a heroic battle, and restores them ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... Arcadian myth of Demeter Erinnys is undeniably a blending of the epic tradition [of the ideal war-horse] with the local cult of Demeter. . . . It is a probable hypothesis that the belief in the wedding of Demeter and Poseidon comes from the sight of the waves passing over the cornfield. . . ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... scenery alternates, like the Rhine's below Constance, between rocky gorges and flat moist meadows dotted with hamlets, churches and towns. Bala—otherwise Lin-Jegid and Pimblemere ("Lake of the Five Parishes")—has some traditional connection with the great British epic, or rather with its accessories—the Morte d'Arthur—of which Tennyson has availed himself in Enid, mentioning that Enid's gentle ministrations soothed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... spent in preparing the first edition, published in 1804-07. The work was based chiefly on Washington's own diaries and letters and secret archives and it told not simply the epic story of this great life but the truth about the birth of our nation. Marshall later spent fifteen years revising the first edition, verifying to the last detail every chapter, page and paragraph of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... confident that some day a poet will be able to sing this great epic in verses which shall answer to the swinging rhythm of battle and roll with the booming of a thousand guns. But, in the meantime, I should like to say a few words about a much humbler, a much simpler, a much more familiar subject. It awakes ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... posthumous pyramid. And wherever he goes he is flattered by perceiving that his book is the very desideratum for which the world is unwittingly waiting; and in his sleeve he smiles benevolently to think how happy mankind will be as soon as he vouchsafes his epic or his story. It is delightful to us to think of all the joys with which, for twenty years, that Expositor filled the dear mind of Dr. Doddridge; how one felicitous rendering was suggested after another; how a bright solution of a textual difficulty would rouse him an hour before his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... or work-house in the metropolis escaped a visitation from the hard glazed hat. Along the wharves, among the shipping on the bank-side, up the river, down the river, here, there, everywhere, it went gleaming where men were thickest, like the hero's helmet in an epic battle. For a whole week the Captain read of all the found and missing people in all the newspapers and handbills, and went forth on expeditions at all hours of the day to identify Solomon Gills, in poor little ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... to the exploits of the Emden, its mysterious disappearance and the narrative of its heroes—a great epic of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... and the bursting of this boy. Truly he was a fine sight, Barbox Brothers, with serious attentive face, an ear bent down, much jostled on the pavements of the busy town, but afraid of losing a single incident of the epic, lest he should be examined in it by-and-by and ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... stars,—the brief, bright rhyme of the flashing comet,—the canticle of the rose as she bears her crimson heart to the smile of the sun,—the chorus of green leaves chanting orisons to the wind—the never completed epic of heaven's lofty solitudes where the white moon paces, wandering like a maiden in search of love,— all these and other unnumbered joys he has lost—joys that Sah- luma, child of the high gods and favorite of Destiny drinks in with the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... be 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 the Divine Providence. The ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... fairs, were the ready theaters of strolling players. The people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,—no, not by the strongest party,—neither then could king, prelate, or puritan,—alone or united, suppress an organ, which was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch,[530] and library, at the same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national interest,—by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating it in ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... islands. Mr. Southey wades through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, strings them into an epic." And so forth; Peacock going on to characterise, in further illustration of his argument, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Moore, and Campbell. He did not refer to Shelley; and Shelley read his friend's whimsical ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... his labors, Paul's figure assumed a certain epic dignity. As a stern lord with a handful of armed followers keeps down a subjugated people, so Paul, at the head of a few hundred workmen, held sway over the unruly forces of Nature always more or less ready to revolt. There were always dikes to be repaired, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... a time your poet launched a great epic in his mind. Alas, I was not careful, and it struck your ringing anklets and came to grief. It broke up into scraps of songs and lay scattered at your feet. All my cargo of the stories of old wars was tossed by the laughing waves and soaked ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... famous: I am sure of it; and if you lived in London, you would hear of him even now. Oh, sir! such a portrait as he painted the other day! But I must tell you all about it." And therewith Lionel plunged at once, medias res, into the brief broken epic of little Sophy, and the eccentric infirm Belisarius for whose sake she first toiled and then begged; with what artless eloquence he brought out the colours of the whole story,—now its humour, now its pathos; with what beautifying ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... under the protection of the powerful Uguccione, lord of Pisa, while he wrote the Purgatorio. The second part of his epic dealt with the region lying between the under-world of torment and the heavenly heights of Paradise itself. Here the souls of men were to be cleansed of their sins that they might be pure in ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... Obscures with husks the golden grain. Not all the bards of other days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could bring to that one simple phrase What were not rather loss than gain; That elegy so briefly fine, That epic writ in half a line, That little which so much conveys, Whose silence is a hymn of praise ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... secrets and situation, has been also objected to by critics. The discovery is indeed purposely made to the audience, and supplies the want of a chorus. But to speak in Monsieur Brumos's own stile: "If Homer, in his Epic poem, found a Patroclus necessary to his Achilles, and Virgil an Achates to Aeneas, such examples may well justify the Dramatic Poets in calling in the assistance of associates, who generally appear of more use than ornament to the piece." Besides, ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... period of development for Israel from a family to a nation, and towards the close of the period Balaam, an outsider, bears witness in spite of himself to the growing numbers of the nation and to its glorious future.—In literary form it is a 'mixed epic' or 'canti-fable': a story in prose that breaks into verse at appropriate places. (Compare the expression took up his parable: the parable is an undefined term for a more specialised literary form occurring in the course of more general literature, such as a fable in the midst ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... part of the essay. When Macaulay passes over Milton's sonnets with a paragraph, while he devotes sixteen paragraphs to "Paradise Lost," he indicates by the greater mass the greater value he ascribes to the epic. So again, a very good proof that he did not intend this essay to be a literary criticism primarily, another evidence beside the closing paragraph, is found in his division of the whole essay. To ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... litterateur of the present day has not such a very hard fight for a livelihood, if his pen has only a certain lightness and dash, a rattling vivacity and airy grace. It is only the marvellous boys who come to London with epic poems, Anglo-Saxon tragedies, or metaphysical treatises in their portmanteaus, who must needs perish in their prime, or stoop to the drudgery of office ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... history of mankind. The work is especially valuable for the unconscious light which it throws upon the life, manners, politics, and literature of the country. It presents a vivid picture of the character of the men with whom it deals. It is sometimes called the Epic of the Sudan. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... not engaging with the highest species of his art: the perusal of the Greek tragedians had given rise to some late translations;[29] the perusal of Homer seems now to have suggested the idea of an epic poem. The hero whom he first contemplated was Gustavus Adolphus; he afterwards changed to ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Dutch empire-builders in the Insulinde, the conditions which prevail under the rule of the chartered company in Borneo, the opening-up of Indo-China and the Malay Peninsula, the regeneration of Siam, the epic struggle between civilization and savagery which is in progress in all these lands—these are phases of Malaysian life which, if this book is to have any serious value, I cannot ignore. That is why it is a melange of the frivolous and the serious, the picturesque and the prosaic, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... of fiction, and political life should never enter into them, except as a subordinate element; but there is a border-land between the two, in which politics and society act and react on each other, and it is from this field that the great subjects for epic and dramatic poetry have always been reaped. Hawthorne only knew of this by hearsay. Of the strenuous conflict that continually goes on in political centres like London and New York, a struggle for wealth, for honor, and precedence; of plots and counterplots, of foiled ambition ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... to answer questions about storks and their habits. He had tired of them in a moment, and was passionately interested in mules. "There ought to be an epic written about the mules of North Africa!" he exclaimed. "I tell you, it's a great subject. Look at those poor brave chaps struggling to pull carts piled up with casks of beastly Algerian wine, through that sea of mud, which ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Moors vainly tried to retake it; but on his death, which is supposed to have occurred in 1099, Valencia again fell. Romance has colored with glowing tints this scanty historic outline of the Cid's life. Spanish literature, for two or three hundred years after his death, is almost confined to epic or ballad poetry, of which he is the hero. To acquire such a fame demanded a force of character, which, if not accurately painted by these loving and fanciful narrators, cannot have fallen far short of the glory with which ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... Johnson, trampling poor Macpherson under foot, like an enraged elephant, for daring to say that he had collected from the mountaineers of wild Scotland the poems of Ossian, and that they had been transmitted, from mouth to mouth, through ages. But the great epic of the son of Fingal will survive, part ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... era. It seems to have been immemorially known in Hindustan by the name of Chaturanga, that is the four "angas" or members of an army, which are said in the Amarakosha to be Hasty-aswa-ratha-padatum, or Elephants, Horses, Chariots and Foot Soldiers, and in this sense the word is frequently used by epic poets in their descriptions of real armies. By a natural corruption of the pure Sanskrit word, it was changed by the old Persians into Chatrang; but the Arabs, who soon after took possession of their country, had neither the initial or final letter of that word in their alphabet, ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... 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 to suit ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unskillfully contrived, and the charity of relatives, and the patience of tradesmen, will see you through. But a funeral—that's different! Undertaker—that means money. Was it possible that the sordid epic of their lives must be capped by the crowning insult, the Poormaster and the Pauper's Field? If only poor Paw could have waited a little before he claimed the spotlight—until prices fell a little or Nat got back with ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... man shall admire and almost adore the Epic poems of the Ancients, and yet despise and execrate the ancient Romances, which are only Epics ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... years Tasso remained at Ferrara, constantly writing sonnets and short poems of all descriptions, which were most often addressed to Leonora, but at the same time he was busily working upon that longer poem in epic form, descriptive of the First Crusade, the Gerusalemme liberata, wherein he puts a new feeling into Italian poetry, which had been expressed before by Ariosto in his amatory verse, but which cannot ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... his own bedroom, when no alien eye penetrated his solitude, his bitterness was epic and terrible. In the consistency of that egotism which had first made, then unmade him, there was no room for remorse; no possibility of self-accusation. If his star was to set it would set on his last terrific stand against the squares of the enemy, with ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... would write himself up to the chin in verse. His muse was singularly prolific and her progeny various. He roamed recklessly through the realm of poesy. Every style seemed his—blank verse and rhyme, ode and epic, lyrical and tragical, satiric and elegiac, sacred and profane, sublime and ridiculous, he was equally good at all. His poetry might not perhaps have stood a very strict classification, but he produced a fair, marketable sample, which deserved (his friends thought) to be quoted at as liberal figures ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... the present world, crowded for time and crowded for space. "Telegraph!" To the nine Muses the order flies. One can hear it on every side. "Telegraph!" The result is symbolism, the Morse alphabet of art and "types," the epigrams of human nature, crowding us all into ten or twelve people. The epic is telescoped into the sonnet, and the sonnet is compressed into quatrains or Tabbs of poetry, and couplets are signed as masterpieces. The novel has come into being—several hundred pages of crowded people in crowded sentences, jostling each other ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... my friend, irreverently. "In Shakespeare's day he might have sputtered out some high-cockalorum nonsense of that sort, because in those days they ordered ham and eggs in blank verse and discharged the cook with an epic. But not for B'way ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... nothing wanting but the 'frame' in which he could paint it all, and this is what he hoped, from day to day, to find. As I grew tired of waiting for it, I set about trying to find the longed-for frame for him myself. He evidently wished to evolve an epic poem on a large scale, in which to embody the views he had acquired. As he had once alluded to Dante's luck in finding a subject like the pilgrimage through hell and purgatory into paradise, it occurred to me to suggest, for the desired ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... 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 Nature ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... alternating periods of Activity and Inactivity in some one particular Universe, amidst the Infinite Universality. You will find a mention of these periods of Activity and Inactivity in the "Bhagavad Gita," the great Hindu epic. The following quotations, and page references, relate to the edition published by the Yogi Publication Society, which was compiled and adapted by the writer of these lessons. In that edition of the "Bhagavad Gita," on page 77, you will find these words attributed ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and dithyrambic poetry, and the greater part of the music of the flute and of the lyre, are all, in general, modes ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... and the form which he has given to the telling makes the tale his own, even tho' the original story had been the same. But this proves, however, that Homer taught Virgil to design; and if invention be the first virtue of an epic poet, then the Latin poem can only be allow'd the second place. Mr. Hobbes, in the preface to his own bald translation of the Ilias (studying poetry as he did mathematics, when it was too late)—Mr. Hobbes, I say, begins the praise of Homer where he should have ended ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Oudinot, Duchess of Reggio, a lady of the highest rank, who joined a large heart to a firm mind. Attached, through her family, to the religious and monarchical principles of the old regime, by her marriage to the glories of the imperial epic, she represented at the court the ideas of pacification and fusion that inspired the policy of Louis XVIII. Born in 1791, of Antoine de Coucy, captain in the regiment of Artois, and of Gabrielle de Mersuay, she was but two years old when her father and mother were thrown into the ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... which we must be directed in the 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, ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... metal bedrooms. I hear the bridges rumble underneath the wheels, and they are part of me. I see tall cities looking down from out the sky and know that I have given a rib to make those giants. I am a part of all I see, and life takes on an epic grandeur. I have done the best I could to ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... word-pictures describing the life and character of the parts of Italy he had visited. Apart from his world-famous fairy tales, by which he set no great store, being ambitious of fame as a novelist, he wrote several successful plays, epic poems and novels. His fairy tales have been translated practically into every language. Hans Andersen died at the age of seventy, in Copenhagen, on August ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... at the Arrakan Pagoda to-day, but a pleasant looking man came on board with a chitsaya harp; I had to try and make a jotting of him. G. and Captain Turndrup brought him. He sat and played tunes for hours—epic tunes, which I'd have given anything to remember. His boat-shaped harp of thirteen strings was tuned in minor thirds, so you could readily pick out Celtic tunes on it. I am told Sir Arthur Sullivan came here ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... rightly to appreciate "The Invasion of the Crimea," we must look upon it as a great prose epic; its argument, machinery, actors, episodes, subordinate to a predominant ever present hero. In its fine preamble Lord Raglan sits enthroned high above generals, armies, spectators, conflicts; on the quality of his ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... we can discern the first notes of that great cult of the seven- hilled city which made Virgil write his epic and Livy his history, which found in Dante its highest exponent, which dreamed of an Empire where the Emperor would care for the bodies and the Pope for the souls of men, and so has passed into the conception of God's spiritual empire and the universal brotherhood ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... memorable defeat, and the causes which led to it. The design of the Author was, if possible, to apprize his readers, at the outset, of the date of his Story, and to prepare them for the manners of the Age in which it is laid. Any Historical Narrative, far more an attempt at Epic composition, exceeded his plan of a Romantic Tale; yet he may be permitted to hope, from the popularity of THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, that an attempt to paint the manners of the feudal times, upon a broader scale, and in the course of a more interesting ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... as any rover described in gay, romantic screeds, but, when my fitful life is over, no epic will narrate my deeds. Condemned to silent heroism, I go my unmarked way alone, and no one hands me prune or prism, as token that my deeds are known. But yesterday my teeth were aching, and to the painless dentist's lair I took my way, unawed, unquaking, and sat down in the fatal chair. He ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... through stormy seas. Can 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 drops from ...
— An Ode • Madison J. Cawein
... of the extent of principalities. Many of the poorer amongst the nobility 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, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the Epic from the shelf, Engravings rare surveyed— The Artist seemed a higher self, Who knew and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... helpless cry of anguish. But despair seems to cure the poet rather than drown his faith in hopelessness. As a critic, he encourages every initiate of the cause. As a "soldier of the verse," he himself fights his battles of song in every field. In short story, in drama, in epic poetry, and above all in lyrics, he creates work after work. From the Songs of my Country, the Hymn to Athena, the Eyes of my Soul and the Iambs and Anapaests, he rises gradually and steadily to the tragic drama of the Thrice Noble-One, to the epic of The King's Flute, and to the splendid ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... stopped to pother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature—art can go no further. So the cunning son of Jupiter and Callisto built the old Arcadia; and in this, as in ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... contemplation of aesthetic beauty in temples, in statues, and in pictures; and the great artist was rewarded with honors and material gains. The love of art is easier kindled than the love of literary excellence, and is more generally diffused. It is coeval with songs and epic poetry. Before Socrates or Plato speculated on the great certitudes of philosophy, temples and statues were the pride and boast of their countrymen. And as the taste for art precedes the taste for letters, so it survives, when the literature has lost its life and freshness. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... of the various spheres of German society is therefore not dramatic, but epic. Each of them begins to be self-conscious and to press its special claims upon the others not when it is itself oppressed, but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation, create a sociable foundation from which it can on its part practise ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... between the novels of Rousseau and those of Hugo is great; but yet it is a difference merely of degree. Les Miserables is the consummation of the romantic conception of fiction which Rousseau had adumbrated half a century before. In that enormous work, Hugo attempted to construct a prose epic of modern life; but the attempt was not successful. Its rhetorical cast of style, its ceaseless and glaring melodrama, its childish presentments of human character, its endless digressions and—running through all this—its evidences of immense and disordered power, make the book perhaps the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the mountainside. With intense energy men and machines do their task, the white men supervising matters and handling the machines, while the tens of thousands of black men do the rough manual labor where it is not worth while to have machines do it. It is an epic feat, ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... projects after his return from Italy; drafts of "Paradise Lost" among them; the poem originally designed as a masque or miracle-play; commenced as an epic in 1658; its composition speedily interrupted by ecclesiastical and political controversies; Milton's "Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes," and "Considerations on the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church"; Royalist reaction in the winter ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... time that "Paradise Lost," the one matchless epic of English literature, was conceived. Rough jottings were made as to divisions and heads, and a few stanzas were written of the immortal poem that was not to be completed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... undertaken to organise a new variorum version of the Plays of SHAKSPEARE, with the assistance of Mr. LOONEY, the writer of the recently-published and final work on the authorship of the plays. MILTON will be presented in both verse and prose, Mr. MASEFIELD having promised to re-write his epic in six-lined rhymed stanzas, shorn of Latinisms; while a famous novelist, who does not wish her name to appear at present, has consented to recast it in the form of a romance under the title ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... bring to their homesick chief a drink from the well of Bethlehem; the story of Bathsheba and Uriah—lust, treachery, and murder; the prophet's rebuke; the years declining under heavy shadows. How full of lifeblood it all is! Every chapter is an idyl, an epic, or ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... of 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. Johnson's efforts as a biographer. Consequently, we cannot be ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... epic verse, my pet production, which I deemed Sufficient to advance me to the highest peak Of difficult Parnassus, goal of which I've dreamed For many a weary year, came back to me last week. The Editor I cursed, that he should stand between ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... really. Probably it was only his intense anxiety to communicate all, struggling with his sense of his lack of language—a privilege enjoyed by guv'nors. But Rosalind feels the earnestness of his brief epic. He winds ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... compare that period with the present. The later empire referred to was an empire only in the old sense of a collection of vassal states. Turning back to the hoary past, in which many Indians, even of education, imagine there was a golden Indian empire, we can trace underneath the ancient epic, the Ramayan, a conquering progress southward to Ceylon itself of a great Aryan hero, Ram. But of any Indian empire founded by him, we know nothing. "One who has carefully studied the Ramayan will be impressed with the idea that the Aryan conquest had spread over parts of Northern India only, at ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... sympathies with some form of dualism which was already developing in the later days of the Upani@sads, as evidenced by the dualistic tendencies of such Upani@sads as the S'vetas'vatara, and the like. The epic S'a@mkhya was also the result of ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... They nearly all need study and comment, and at times help from a good teacher, before they yield up their secret. And the Poetics cannot be accounted an exception. For one thing the treatise is fragmentary. It originally consisted of two books, one dealing with Tragedy and Epic, the other with Comedy and other subjects. We possess only the first. For another, even the book we have seems to be unrevised and unfinished. The style, though luminous, vivid, and in its broader division ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... work commenced by Hutton and continued 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 ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... his heart seemed to be light and attuned to a rollicking air. I have known many a man to breathe a delicious thrill in an atmosphere of peril, to feel a leap of the blood, a gladness, but it was at a time of intense excitement, a sort of epic joy; but how could a man, lying in the dark, waiting for he knew not what—how could he put down a weighty care and take up a ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... the Homer of Persia, who wrote the history of that country, in his celebrated epic entitled the "Shah-nama," ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... encouragement, as we shall see, Harrington was urged to complete his version of the Orlando Furioso, and she willingly accepted in the year 1600 the dedication of Fairfax's admirable translation of the great epic of Tasso. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin |
