"Idyllic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that Mary Ann should be unable to maintain herself—or be maintained—at this idyllic level. But her fall was aggravated by two circumstances, neither of which had any particular business to occur. The first was an intimation from the misogamist German Professor that he had persuaded another of his old pupils to include a prize symphony by Lancelot in ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... read and admired through all of South America. It would be difficult to find an educated South American who is not familiar with this idyllic story.—Judge JOSE ALFONSO, Chilian ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... landscape. It was idyllic, poetical, and it inspired me. I felt good and noble. I felt I didn't want to be sinful and wicked any more. I would come and live here, and never do any more wrong, and lead a blameless, beautiful life, and have silver ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... he actually lived on a farm, Howard especially emphasized that composting must be sanitary and odorless and that flies must not be allowed to breed in the compost or around the work cattle. Country life can be quite idyllic—without flies. ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... again, it is a benediction that breathes into our minds somewhat of its own spirit of calm and content. The storm and stress of life is forgotten; all is holiday humor. We are in the midst of a Shakespearian comedy, with its alternations of humor and sentiment, its joyous atmosphere, its idyllic simplicity; the forest of Arden has come to us. It was written to celebrate his engagement to the Countess Therese. In it he is inspired by the very genius of happiness. It is as if, having obtained his heart's desire, he invites us to partake with him the joy ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... A highly idyllic picture of work in one of these miniature factories, which we may amuse ourselves by applying to Thomas Paycocke's, is contained in Deloney's Pleasant History of Jack of Newbery. Jack of Newbury was an historical character, a very famous clothier named John Winchcomb who died at Newbury only a ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... lasted till the end of June, 1771—a period of some ten months. Of this period the first half would seem to have been passed by both in idyllic oblivion of consequences; during the second there came painful awakening to realities on the part of one of the lovers. As they lived in his memory, those first months that Goethe spent in intercourse ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... dew-drenched barley and folded poppies, to a farmhouse overshadowed by four spreading pines. Exceedingly soft and grey, with rose-tinted weft of steam upon its summit, stood Vesuvius above us in the twilight. Something in the recent impression of the dimly-lighted supper-room, and in the idyllic simplicity of this lantern-litten journey through the barley, suggested, by one of those inexplicable stirrings of association which affect tired senses, a dim, dreamy thought of Palestine and Bible stories. The feeling ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... certainly the best, protest against some modern fashions in shooting is to be found in "The Moors." In the same series, the visit to the hill cottage, preceding that to the still, has what it has since become the fashion to call the idyllic flavour, without too much of the rather mawkish pathos with which, in imitation of Mackenzie and the sensibility-writers of the last century, Wilson is apt to daub his pictures of rural and humble life. The passages on Oxford, to go to a slightly different but allied subject, in "Old North and Young ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... a man for this, and had too much of his life and work behind him, when he made his permanent home in "Dickens-land". And Gadshill was too near to the bustle and stir of Chatham to furnish a purely idyllic environment or entirely unsophisticated rusticity. But it is not unduly fanciful to discover the influence of Kentish scenery, with its bright, clear atmosphere, its undulating slopes of green woodland and green hop fields, pink-and-white orchards, and golden harvests—the ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... no!" And Sylvie smiled, but there was a look of pain in her eyes, "He has an idyllic house buried in the Foret St. Germain, and he wants me to take possession . . . you know the rest! He is a villain? Yes—he is like Miraudin, who has a luxurious flat in Paris and sends each lady of his ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... terraces, in a perfectly beautiful intimacy such as they would certainly never enjoy in the existing conditions of their own society. But that mattered little. The wooing, the winning and the marrying of the exquisite girl were to make up Orsino's life, and fifty or sixty years of idyllic happiness were to be the reward of their mutual devotion. Had she not spent twenty such years herself? Then why should not all ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... bronze Thinker is here. The "Portal of the Past," taken from a Nob Hill residence after the fire of 1906, is seen in idyllic whiteness against a clump of Irish yews across the luminous water of a lake that picks up their outline like a Renaissance picture. Statuary, classic and modern, arrests interest at every turn in the park. Among the figures and busts are those of Junipero ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... was lost as they turned away. Clyde waited until they were out of sight, and then descended. The morning adventure had given her food for thought. Until then she had been deceived by the smooth current of life at Chakchak. It had seemed an idyllic, carefree existence. Although she had known of the trouble, it had seemed far in the background; it was a skeleton which had not obtruded itself. Now, by accident, she had surprised it stalking abroad in the ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... "romance" and the "heroic romance" seems immaterial, since Professor Thorndike uses one term as synonymous with the other. He gives "the most noticeable characteristics of the romances": "A mixture of tragic and idyllic events, a series of highly improbable events, heroic and sentimental characters, foreign scenes, happy denouements." This definition is elaborated in connection with the ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... castle came to the cloth. Here was a genuine case of true idyllic boy and girl love, that had strengthened and ripened with mature years. Annie had no more given me a thought—what an ass, what an idiot I am! But really, I think Catherine's cruelty has turned my brain. I am become ready ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... pledged for the time to tell him nothing, and she told him nothing. The princess looked curiously at her, for Liana exactly resembled the princess's younger sister, the philanthropic Idoine, who devoted herself to the idyllic happiness of her peasantry in the Arcadian village that it was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... sun in their flight." Crevecoeur had by this time returned to France, and was never more to ply the avocations of the American farmer. In the interval, much had happened to this victim of both the revolutions. Though the Letters are distinguished by an idyllic temper, over them is thrown the shadow of impending civil war. The Farmer was a man of peace, for all his experience under Montcalm in Canada (and even there his part was rather an engineer's than a combatant's); he long hoped, therefore, that peaceful counsels would prevail, and that England ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... in the Scriptures are almost idyllic in their simplicity and beauty. There is more than flippancy in the remark that Adam's fall was a fall upward. The statement is literally true. The fall was no fiction, but a condition of enlightenment and growth. The exit ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... of the primitive life of man—that of the herdsman or the tent liver—as something idyllic. The picture is as far as possible from the truth. Those into whose lives economics do not enter, or enter very little—that is to say, those who, like the Congo cannibal, or the Red Indian, or ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... was unique. When people in Brooklyn became tired of the rush and bustle of life they returned to Clinton Avenue. It was an idyllic village in the heart of the city. The front yards were as large as farms. New Yorkers described this locality as "Sleepy Hollow." On this account, during my absence, there had developed in the neighbourhood some opposition ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... world, to retire into the solitude of religious meditation, and to abandon the art which he had practised with such success. He was not yet forty, his genius was apparently still developing, but his great career was at an end. Towards the close of his life he produced two more plays—Esther, a short idyllic piece of great beauty, and Athalie, a tragedy which, so far from showing that his powers had declined during his long retreat, has been pronounced by some critics to be the finest of his works. He wrote no more for the stage, and he died eight years later, at the age of sixty. It is ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Cigarette in such an idyllic frame of mind. He waxed positively lyrical in praise of country scenes. I was little less exhilarated myself; the mild air of the evening, the shadows, the rich lights and the silence, made a symphonious accompaniment about our walk; and ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the hatreds and agitations of the time—she gave a refuge to the souls that could accept it—an "Ideal of calmness and innocence and reverie." "La Petite Fadette" and "Le Meunier d'Angibault" reveal her fascinating intelligence and her idyllic imagination. "Le Meunier d'Angibault," she tells us, was the result of a walk, a meeting, a day of leisure, an hour of far niente, followed by Reverie, that play of the imagination which, clothes with beauty and perfects, and interprets, the isolated and small events and facts ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... asked himself if he should not look on what had happened as a signal interposition of Heaven in his favor. A quiet life, a comfortable home, the love of friends and of a pretty woman, certainly deserved some thanks. He however was soon hurried from this idyllic existence by the ardor of his youth, and the prospect of an adventurous career. To some men a peaceable life does not seem existence. They are like certain birds, which show themselves only ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... The place is extremely quiet, and people live very simply, though not cheaply, for prices are high, and domestic service so dear and scarce as to be almost unprocurable. Every one is above poverty, but still further removed from wealth. It looks, and one is told that it is, the most idyllic community in Africa, worthy to be the capital of this contented and happy State. No great industries have come into the Free State to raise economic strife. No capitalists tempt the virtue of legislators, or are forced to buy off ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... external nature tended to produce a much less austere spirit—a spirit less sharply monotheistic, if I may use the expression, which imprinted a charming and idyllic character on all the dreams of Galilee. The saddest country in the world is perhaps the region round about Jerusalem. Galilee, on the contrary, was a very green, shady, smiling district, the true home of the Song of Songs, and the songs of the well-beloved.[1] ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Well, what can I really tell you? Mere words fail to tell you of the completeness of our happiness. It is idyllic—that is all I ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... this most idyllic of all Shakespeare's comedies, the Forest of Arden is not merely the setting; it is the central force of the play, the power which brings laughter out of tears and harmony out of discord. It reminds us of Sherwood forest, the home of Robin Hood and his merry men; but it is more than this. Not only ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... of Josepha and Jenny Cadine, capable of playing any trick on a paying adorer; yet she was a good comrade, dreading no power on earth, accustomed as she was to see the weak side of the strong and to hold her own with the police at the scarcely idyllic Bal ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... to prepare dainty and tempting dishes wholesomely, and then to serve your guests with such beauty of manner, such graciousness of courtesy, that they will remember the meal they have taken with you as idyllic in its simplicity, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... idyllic there—until the house door opened and a line of men filed out, bringing to his shameful end a human creature who shambled with the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... unlike anything in Mark Twain's former work. It was pure romance, a beautiful, idyllic tale, though not without his touch of humor and humanity on every page. And how breathlessly interesting it is! We may imagine that first little audience—the "two good-mannered and agreeable children," ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Gardener's Channel. I have visited Mr. Duncan's wonderful settlement at Metlakahtla, and the interesting Methodist Mission at Fort Simpson, and have thus been enabled to realise what scenes of primitive peace and innocence, of idyllic beauty and material comfort, can be presented by the stalwart men and comely maidens of an Indian community, under the wise administration of a judicious and devoted Christian Missionary. I have seen the Indians in all phases of their existence, from the ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... idyllic spot, as I soon discovered, of fine rolling country, well wooded and watered, the road of macadam, rising slowly from the entrance gates, turning here and there through a succession of natural parks, along the borders ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... the additional offence Of being now a sort of dazed idyllic bard That poses in a window, contemplating thence The silly noon-day ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... Choate proceeds to define and to discuss Nationality. We heartily agree with him in all he says in its praise, and draw attention, in passing, to a charming idyllic passage in which he speaks of the early influences which first develope in us its germinal principle. But when he says, that the sentiment of a national life, once existing, must still be kept alive by an exercise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... Capri was an idyllic place for holiday-making. The beautiful climate, perfect at this season of the year, made living out of doors a delight. Every day the various friends met together, and either went for excursions or passed happy hours in each other's gardens. The Camerons had several young people staying ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... melodrama or farce. This has often been done upon deliberate theory, in the belief that no play can exist, or can attract playgoers, without a definite and more or less exciting plot. Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic picture of rural life, entitled Shore Acres, a melodramatic scene in a lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play. The dramatist who knows any particular phase of life so thoroughly as to be able to transfer its characteristic incidents ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Mr Pease—a degenerate sort of pirate who made his living by half bullying, half swindling lonely white men on small islands out of their coconut oil, and unarmed merchantmen out of their stores—came to Apia in an armed ship with a Malay crew. From that moment Hayes' life became less idyllic. Hayes and Pease conceived a most violent hatred of each other, and poor old Mr Williams was really worried into an attack of elephantiasis (which answers to the gout in those latitudes) by his continual efforts to prevent the two desperadoes from flying at each other's ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... elaborate this idyllic portrayal, I may merely note, briefly and sympathetically, how this rural joy was troubled by the passing away of a dear woman friend who resided with them, and then by the death of his esteemed and careful consort. He laid these dear remains ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... despite his practical aberrations from them, he yet intensely worshiped, had, in his conception of them, little connection with the activities of life: truth, simplicity, order, purity and peace were ideas that occupied his soul only to fill it with a horror of reality, with yearnings for an idyllic repose, with dreams of a state which he persuaded himself had been the original condition of the race, in which virtue and right must prevail through the mere absence of occasion for wrong or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... in the open air. Here one may slumber at ease, fanned by the wings of cockchafers and soothed by an unseen choir of frogs. There are drawbacks, of course. Mr. Waddell one evening spread his ground-sheet and bedding in the grassy meadow, beside a murmuring stream. It was an idyllic resting-place for a person of romantic or contemplative disposition. Unfortunately it is almost impossible nowadays to keep one's favourite haunts select. This was evidently the opinion of the large water-rat which Waddell found ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... usual plan, whereby a heavy book was followed by a light one, La Terre was succeeded by Le Reve, a work at the other extreme of the literary gamut. As La Terre is of the earth, earthy, so is Le Reve spiritual and idyllic, the work of a man enamoured of the refined and the beautiful. It has indeed been described as the most beautiful work written in France during the whole ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... This idyllic love of nature, this marked preference for the country over the city, however peculiar in a highway robber, are characteristics of Shakespeare from youth to age. Not only do his comedies lead us continually ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... in Cleversulzbach, a secluded little village, nestling among the Suabian hills. Here the poet, with his mother and sister, lived an idyllic existence, his most frequent visitor the Muse. Ill health forced him to resign in 1843, and Moerike once more became a wanderer. During these years love again crossed his path, and to be able to marry—his ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... Sommers and Alves would be the first to leave the Keystone. Although the sultry June weather made them think longingly of the idyllic days at Perota Lake, the journey to Wisconsin was out of the question. Struggle as he might, Sommers was being forced to realize that they must give up their modest position in the Keystone. And one day the proprietor hinted broadly that she had other uses for their room. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... They know no alteration. The brogue of the people is strange but rhythmic, and, though pleasant to hear, very hard for ordinary mortals to understand. The fisherfolk, with their strapping and stalwart forms, their bronzed and weather-beaten features, their dark, idyllic eyes, their tanned and swarthy skins, their odd and old-world garb, together with their general air of being the daughters of the ocean and the sons of the storm, seem to be a race by themselves. ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... desperately constructing a bridge to escape to the other side of the river. The land beyond is like a landscape seen from a hill, a scene of woods and waters, of fields and hamlets—everything seems peaceful and idyllic there. He wants the wings of a dove, to flee away and be at rest. It is the same feeling which makes people wish to travel. When you travel, the new land is a spectacular thing—it is all a picture. It is not that you crave to live in a foreign land: you merely ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Ploen, charmingly situated upon the shore of the Ploener Lake in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein, to superintend the tuition of his two oldest sons, Crown-Prince Wilhelm and Prince Eitel Friedrich. Full of happy anticipation of a quiet and restful evening of life in one of the most idyllic parts of Germany, Frommel entered upon his new and honorable duties with a truly youthful vigor and enthusiasm, but alas—after a few months' stay at Ploen, owing to an old ailment which had reappeared under more alarming symptoms than ever before, he had to submit to a ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... household, as the old man unfolds it to his listeners, is one of almost idyllic beauty. There was the white-pillared "big house" in a grove of white oaks on the brow of a hill with a commanding view of the whole countryside. A gravelled driveway led down to the dusty public road where an occasional stagecoach rattled by and which later echoed with ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... transformed by the imagination of the crowd. The transformation occasionally takes place within a few years. In our own day we have seen the legend of one of the greatest heroes of history modified several times in less than fifty years. Under the Bourbons Napoleon became a sort of idyllic and liberal philanthropist, a friend of the humble who, according to the poets, was destined to be long remembered in the cottage. Thirty years afterwards this easy-going hero had become a sanguinary despot, who, after having usurped power and destroyed liberty, caused the slaughter of three ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... title of the poem, it is Auburn in its pristine condition that remains in our memories. The dominant thought expressed is the virtue and the happiness that belong by nature to village life. Crabbe saw that this was no less idyllic and unreal, or at least incomplete, than the pictures of shepherd life presented in the faded copies of Theocritus and Virgil that had so long satisfied the English readers of poetry. There was no unreality in Goldsmith's design. They were not fictitious and "lucrative" ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... of marriage. Certain social abuses and false standards of morality are attacked with great vigor, yet the plot is so interesting for its own sake that the book gives no suspicion of being a problem novel. The descriptions of natural scenery are idyllic in their charm, and form a fitting background for ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... name Robert and I have both of us been ungrateful enough to forget—we have turned our brains over and over and can't find the name anyhow—and who, indeed, deserves to be remembered, who writes some fresh and charmingly simple idyllic poems, one called, I think, 'Primel et Nola.' By that clue you may hunt him out perhaps in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes.' There's no strong imagination, understand—nothing of that sort! but you have a sweet, fresh, cool sylvan feeling ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... sort of thing, you know. These imaginary pictures were of different kinds according to the advertisements which he came across, but for some reason in every one of them he had always to have gooseberries. He could not imagine a homestead, he could not picture an idyllic ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... in simple idyllic fashion. Another party is neglected, and even a German passed by, to the great astonishment of Marcia. She has called home several times, but they have been out, not always together, though she chooses to think ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... idyllic existence, in which, as I have said, there is no ambition, several other ills are also wanting. There is, for instance, no News in the village. The village is without the pale of intelligence. This must indeed be bliss. Just fancy, dear Vanity, a state of existence in which there are ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... the tea, and sets the table, and brings out her pistolets, and offers them to Monsieur, and it is all very simple and idyllic. So is the scene where Crimsworth, without our knowing exactly how he does it, declares himself to Frances. The dialogue is half in French, and does not lend itself to quotation, but it compares ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... the song of the Sibyl, and Gudrun's story to Theodoric, or dialogues like those of Helgi and Sigrun, Hervor and Angantyr. Before any adequate large rendering had been accorded to those tragic histories, the Northern poetry, in its impatience of length, had discovered the idyllic mode of expression and the dramatic monologue, in which there was no excuse for weakness and tameness, and, on the contrary, great temptation to excess in emphatic and figurative language. Instead of taking a larger scene and a more complex and longer ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... as was the Calvert policy, did not altogether escape Indian troubles. She had to contend with no such able chief as Opechancanough, and she suffered no sweeping massacres. But after the first idyllic year or so there set in a small, constant friction. So fast did the Maryland colonists arrive that soon there was pressure of population beyond those first purchased bounds. The more thoughtful among ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... us certain epochs of upheaval which were as lacking in idyllic tranquillity as is our own, but which the gravest events did not prevent from being gay. It even seems as if the seriousness of affairs, the uncertainty of the morrow, the violence of social convulsions, sometimes became a new source of vitality. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... was like a bomb in the idyllic village. Plans were made of the wedding date and elaborate ceremony. The village Luga had never witnessed yet a marriage ceremony of this magnitude. The American bride was like a fairy princess of some ancient times. Petka was like one in a trance. But Vasska, the blacksmith, opposed ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... called talent compared with his own. Just fancy, she is usually up all night, fearing to sleep lest he should need something; and then when he comes out, and is made comfortable on the garden-seat, he tells her to go and have an hour if she likes at her 'idyllic pastimes,' as he calls her writing; and if he mentions her literary work at all, he speaks of it just as another person would of a little piece of crochet-work or netting, or something ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... action of the Legislature," he said, following his modest custom of disclaiming foreknowledge of the events he shaped; "but in my opinion any measure which ignores the legitimate expectation of patronage on the part of the party in power is too idyllic ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... your pardon—Rivers, or whatever your real name may be," he began slowly. "Sadie Collinson, the mistress of Judge Godfrey Chivers, formerly of Kentucky, was good enough company for you the day you dropped down upon us in our little house in the hollow of Galloper's Ridge. We were living quite an idyllic, pastoral life there, weren't we?—she and me; hidden from the censorious eye of society and—Collinson, obeying only the voice of Nature and the little birds. It was a happy time," he went on with a grimly affected sigh, disregarding his companion's impatient ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... operation, and Dora is giving all her love and time toward making his convalescence as pleasant as it can be. In fact, her description of their life in the pretty chateau they have rented outside of Paris is quite idyllic. When her father is able to travel they are going to Algiers for the winter, and will return to New York about next May. Dora says she never intends ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... and the bitter principle "acorin." Some of the root may be habitually chewed for the relief of chronic indigestion. The odorous delights of a pastoral time passed near these sweetly-fragrant plants have been happily alluded to in the well-known lines of idyllic verse:— ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... is not to be compared with {414} that of the novel, the music to which Massenet has set it is so marvellously adapted to its lyric and idyllic qualities, that one is inclined to forget its deficiencies while listening ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... prophetic of all poets, in whose epic the panorama of medieval life, of feudalism at its best and Christianity at its best, stands, as in a microcosm, transfigured, judged, and measured. To most men, the "Paradise Lost," with all its mighty music and its idyllic pictures of human nature, of our first-child parents in their naked purity and their awakening thought, is a serious and ungrateful task—not to be ranked with the simple enjoyments; it is a possession to be acquired only by habit. The great religious poets, the imaginative ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... was gratified, not completely, but enough to remove grounds for lover's fretfulness. He passed idyllic days in halcyon weather. Often she would send her gondola to fetch him from the Grand Hotel, where he was staying. Now and then, most graciously audacious of princesses, she would come herself. On such occasions he would sit awaiting ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... It surely was an idyllic picture that the dear old lady drew, and I have often wished myself amid the rush and roar of modern life, that we might go back to the simpler ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... raise an occasional can of tomatoes. I dream sometimes of getting milk fresh from the pump, instead of twenty-four hours after it has been drawn, as we do here. In my musings it seems to me to be almost idyllic to have known a spring chicken in his infancy; to have watched a hind-quarter of lamb gambolling about its native heath before its muscles became adamant, and before chopped-up celery tops steeped in vinegar were poured upon ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... revolutionary enthusiasm in France, and was converted by the sight of the 'hunger-bitten' peasant girl—the victim of aristocratic oppression. 'It is against that,' said his friend, 'that we are fighting,' and so far Wordsworth was a convert. The revolution, therefore, meant to him the restoration of an idyllic state, in which the homely virtues of the independent peasant should no longer be crushed and deprived of reward by the instruments of selfish despotism. The outbreak of war put his principles at issue with his patriotism. He suffered keenly ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... another idyllic evening had begun. Phoebe "had not intended to come," but was there notwithstanding, persuaded by Ursula, who, glad for once to escape from the anxieties of dinner, had celebrated tea with the children, to their great delight, though she was still too dreamy and pre-occupied to respond ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... An idyllic peace would settle down upon the nations, contentedly possessing each in its own share of the good things of life, and no questionable ambitions would be allowed to disturb the buying and selling of the smaller and ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... in it but the splendid figure of this man it would be notable. But when the Girl comes to his "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole being realizes that this is the highest point of life which has come to him—there begins a romance of the rarest idyllic quality. ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... of this last sentence in my mind, I think, that sharpened my sentimental sympathy as we went through the straggling village street and across the trim green on our way back to London. It seemed that afternoon the most tranquil and idyllic collection of creeper-sheltered homes you can imagine; thatch still lingered on a whitewashed cottage or two, pyracanthus, wall-flowers, and daffodils abounded, and an unsystematic orchard or so was white ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... tragedy introduced. The Incarnation of God stirs the diabolic powers, the rulers of "this darkness" to excited activity. The companion picture of the Nativity, of the Holy Child lying in Mary's arms, of the wondering shepherds, of the Magi from a far country,—the shadow of all this idyllic beauty is the massacre of the Innocents, the wailing of Rachel for her children. It is, as it were, the opening of a new stage in the world-old conflict where the powers of evil appear to have the advantage and can show the bodies of murdered infants ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... the possible, any wish to follow out the chain of events. He learned from Gabriel that Nick was still away, and he then felt he could almost submit to instruction, to initiation. The loose charm of these days was troubled, however—it ceased to be idyllic—when late on the evening of the second Sunday he walked away with Nash southward from Saint John's Wood. For then something ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... gentleman whose left hand appeared to be passed well into her arm while his right, behind him, made jerky motions with the stick that it grasped. Maisie's fancy responded for an instant to her friend's idea that the sight was idyllic; then, stopping short, she brought out with all her clearness: "Why ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... paradise. One riding by on the Old Germantown road, and seeing a young girl swinging in the hammock on the piazza and, intent upon some volume of old poetry or the latest novel, would no doubt have envied a life so idyllic. He could not have imagined that the young girl was reading a volume of reports of clinics ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... which darkened the subject-matter of Anatole France also darkened that of Ernest Renan. Renan also divided his hero's pity from his hero's pugnacity. Renan even represented the righteous anger at Jerusalem as a mere nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations of Galilee. As if there were any inconsistency between having a love for humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity! Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with even thinner and weaker ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... condition, living under a patriarchal rule, originally ignorant of all metals save gold, but possessing weapons and implements of stone,[1] and worshipping as their chief god the open heaven. We must not regard them as an idyllic and peaceable people: on the contrary, they were the fiercest and most conquering tribe ever known. In mental power and in plasticity of manners, however, they probably rose far superior to any race then living, except only the Semitic nations ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... hold, lifts the hair, and disposes the drinker to anecdote and hilariousness. There is no deception about it: it tastes of tannin and spruce and creosote. Everything, in short, has the flavor of the wilderness and a free life. It is idyllic. And yet, with all our sentimentality, there is nothing feeble about the cooking. The slapjacks are a solid job of work, made to last, and not go to pieces in a person's stomach like a trivial bun: we might record on them, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of feeling. With the fourth variation there enters that spirit of playfulness so characteristic of Beethoven—the movement being, in fact, a miniature Scherzo. The fifth and last variation is an idyllic revery in which the composer reviews and amplifies the many beautiful fancies which his imagination has conceived, and closes with a coda, based on the motive of the main theme, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... the kitchen of her parents' modest white cottage in a lovely country village! I never felt a more uncanny, nerve-irritating atmosphere than in Palladino's squalid quarters, and I do not remember more idyllic, peaceful surroundings than when I sat between Beulah and her sister through bright sunny mornings in their mother's home with their cat beside them and the pet lamb coming into the room from the meadow. There everything suggested fraud, and when ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... world-spirit who delights in making human affairs go wrong. He is, therefore, hardly a realist, but rather a man blinded by pessimism; and his novels, though generally powerful and sometimes fascinating, are not pleasant or wholesome reading. From the reader's view point some of his earlier works, like the idyllic love story Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), are the most interesting. Hardy became noted, however, when he published Far from the Madding Crowd, a book which, when ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... live in idyllic happiness in a charming old ivy-grown manor house in Sussex, with level lawns and shady rose arbours, they still retain that old cottage at Idsworth, where a plausible excuse has been given to the country folk for "Mr. Maltwood" having been compelled to change his name. No pair in the whole of England ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... Prudence, and the splendid casket of liqueurs borrowed from a brother cure. Cathinelle (an unusual and pretty diminutive of Catherine) is an admirably told pendant to it; and I venture to think the "idyllic" quality of both at least equal, if not superior, to the best of George Sand. Le R. P. Colomban is, according to M. Fabre's habit, a sort of double-edged affair—a severe but just rebuke of the "popular preacher," and a good-humoured touch at the rebuker, Monseigneur ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... any woman. This anticipates, perhaps, the Divine Comedy, which was yet to be written, wherein Beatrice was his guide through Paradise and where he accords her a place higher than that of the angels. It may mar the somewhat idyllic simplicity of this story to add that Dante was married some years later to Gemma Donati, the daughter of a distinguished Florentine family, but such was the case. Little is known of her, however, as Dante never speaks of her; and while there is no reason to suppose ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... into this thundery atmosphere of coming conflict, of hopes and doubts, of sundering ties and fearful looking forward, that Richard and Katherine Hyde came, from the idyllic peace and beauty of their Norfolk house. But there was something in it that fitted Hyde's real disposition. He was a natural soldier, and he had arrived at the period of life when the mere show and pomp of the profession ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... and correct in metre. It is a relief to behold amidst the formless cacophony of modern poetry such a regular, old-fashioned specimen of the octosyllabic couplet. "Two Little Waterwheels", by Dora M. Hepner, is an exquisite idyllic sketch. In the second paragraph we read of a channel "damned" up by a projecting root of a tree; which somewhat surprises us, since we did not know that tree-roots are accustomed to use profane language. Perhaps the author intended to ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... idyllic, their little love affair—their big love affair, if one judged by their measure. It was tender, sweet, and because it was their secret, because there was no word of doubt or of distrust from those who were older ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... metallic tint which distinguishes the flora of northern climes. Through the centre of this Eden ran the wide main street, fringed with poplars and elms and chestnuts. No polluting brewery or smoky factory, with its hideous architecture, marred the idyllic beauty of the miniature town—for everything which is not a city is a town in New England. The population obviously consisted of well-to-do persons, with outlying stock-farms or cranberry meadows, and funds snugly ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Mr. Heard use florid and sentimental language like this. The soft light, the reposeful surroundings, the homelike influence of the Villa Mon Repos—all had conspired to put him into an uncommonly idyllic mood of mind. He felt disposed to linger with the kindly stranger who seemed so much more communicative and affable than on the occasion of those theatricals. He lit a cigarette and watched, for a while, the flow of life through that gateway. Its passage ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... These idyllic relations continued unruffled for some days, until a letter arrived from the eminent novelist to whom, with Doria's approval, Jaffery had ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... where the fisherman is now sitting at home with his family, putting his tackle in order for the winter fishing; for in Nordland the summer is more beautiful than in any other place, and there is an idyllic gladness and peace over Nature, which is to be ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... Gissing returned in 1888 to the more sentimental and idealistic palette which he had employed for Thyrza. Renewed recollections of Tibullus and of Theocritus may have served to give his work a more idyllic tinge. But there were much nearer sources of inspiration for A Life's Morning. There must be many novels inspired by a youthful enthusiasm for Richard Feverel, and this I should take to be one of them. Apart from the idyllic purity of its tone, and its sincere idolatry ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... the great green van rolled forth upon the country roads, bound for an idyllic spot by the river where Diane had planned to camp a week, two men appeared upon the wide, white-pillared Sherrill porch, smoking and idly admiring the bluish hills and the rolling meadowlands below bright with morning sunlight. To the east lay the silver glimmer of a tree-fringed lake; beyond, ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... the ground, and the cotton of the early everlasting drifts upon the air." For several days there was but little change. "Getting toward the high tide of summer. The air well warmed up, Nature in her jocund mood, still, all leaf and sap. The days are idyllic. I lie on my back on the grass in the shade of the house, and look up to the soft, slowly moving clouds, and to the chimney swallows disporting themselves up there in the breezy depths. No hardening in vegetation yet. The moist, hot, ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... against the blue light of the sky, each lithe figure, gilded by the morning sun, has a statuesqueness and a luminosity impossible to paint in words. These bodies seem to radiate color; and the azure light intensifies the hue: it is idyllic, incredible;—Coomans used paler colors in his Pompeiian studies, and his figures were never so symmetrical. This flesh does not look like flesh, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... casually, "that although those poor people meet here in this public way, their gathering is really quite a homely pastoral and a national custom; and these girls are all honest, hardworking peons or servants enjoying themselves in quite the old idyllic fashion." ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... skies, and a depressing, heavy climate, will, for an indefinite period, suffice to repress it altogether. It is not, therefore, surprising that the greater number of these dreams, and, especially, the most vivid, detailed and idyllic, have occurred to me while on the continent. At my own residence on the banks of the Severn, in a humid, low-lying tract of country, I very seldom experience such manifestations, and sometimes, after a prolonged sojourn at home, am tempted to fancy that the dreaming gift has left me never to return. ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... better returns and makes the husbandman rich enough to support a protector, patriarchal life disappears. The fixed occupation of land turns a tribe into a state. Plato has given the classic account of such a passage from idyllic to political conditions. Growth in population and in requirements forces an Arcadian community to encroach upon its neighbours; this encroachment means war; and war, when there are fields and granaries to protect, and slaves and artisans to keep at their domestic labours, means fortifications, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and attractive character, and not wanting in the flavor of that romance which all good novels must possess—the romance of love.... The book is written with knowledge and power, and has the idyllic flavor."—BOSTON BEACON. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... to Naples during the early days of May is idyllic. In the smiling sunshine they rushed on through wide meadows covered with luxuriant verdure and vineyards flushed with delicate greens. After they had passed Capua, which is magnificently situated on a wide plain,—amphitheatre-like within ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... whimsicality. But the dialogue between "the Moniment and the Bridge," "Jonathan to John," and above all, the tenth number, "Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly," show the full sweep of Lowell's power. Here are pride of country, passion of personal sorrow, tenderness, idyllic beauty, magic of ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... of exhilaration and beauty, Alsace offers attractions innumerable, sites grandiose and idyllic, picturesque ruins, superb forests, old churches of rare interest and ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and really beautiful are the conditions of life among these people may be seen from the idyllic record of the Zuni Indians given by Mr. Cushing.[62] He describes how the Zuni girl, when taking a fancy to a young man, conveys a present of thin hewe-bread to him as a token, and becomes his affianced, or as they say "his-to-be." He then sews ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... all, Bethurum made eleven visits to Aura's scow. Each time they'd sit and talk. Bethurum told her about the earth and she told of the idyllic, Shangri-La type planet of Clarion—a yet undiscovered planet which is ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... honest with you, so you mustn't think that my two years of married life were by any means idyllic. They were not. The man I married was a failure, but I loved him, and because I loved him I followed him to the world's end. We were engaged two years before we married. My father disapproved; but when he died I was left lonely, so I followed ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... "do you not see that that is impossible? It is daylight; is, then, the carriage to open and the empress to alight with one slipper on her feet, to be triumphantly conducted into the house? Ah, my friend, all Europe would smile at the idyllic empress who accompanied her husband on his journey in ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... the path of fruitful progress. The intimate connection of man with his native soil presents a modern artistic problem which can be solved neither by the experimental method, according to which naturalism investigated the milieu as a causal factor, nor by the amateurishly descriptive processes of idyllic poetasters and local favorites, but must be intuitively grasped by the penetrating eye ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... relations with her father are idyllic. She is more necessary to him than Eppie to Silas Marner; she is a continual negotiator of peace in his divided house, and 'in this she could not have displayed more courtier-like sagacity had she been an old-world changeling with centuries of experience respecting ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... amiable, athletic, presentable and brave, who shall complain if, after confessing in a manly way and being put into a state of thorough repair, he found happiness in the end? Miss MARGARET MACAULAY tells her story in a pleasant enough way, and describes with some skill its idyllic setting (for Mr. Powell was first a country squire, and only secondly a manufacturer); but since she neither indulges in satire, social and economic speculation, nor any pretence of subtlety in psychological probings, there is a curiously old-fashioned air about her novel. And when I mention ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... confluent and have one bed above Balstad. They have taken up rivers and lakes in their waters. Do but visit this place! here are pictorial riches to be found; the most picturesque landscapes, dizzyingly grand, smilingly pastoral—idyllic: one is drawn onward up to the very source of the elv, the bubbling well above Finman's hut: one feels a desire to follow every branch of the stream that the ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... profiles that delight while they bewilder the eye. Yosemite has much greater simplicity, and is much nearer the classic standard of beauty. Its grand and austere features predominate, of course, but underneath these and adorning them are many touches of the idyllic and the picturesque. Its many waterfalls fluttering like white lace against its vertical granite walls, its smooth, level floor, its noble pines and oaks, its open glades, its sheltering groves, its bright, clear, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... bore neither name nor initials, but almost every page was marked. As it happened, most of them were favourite passages of her own. "How idyllic!" she mused; "a pair of young lovers reading Rossetti on a hill-top in Spring! Could anything be more pastoral? I'll take it back to the house and tell about ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... the most fashionable seaside resorts as an idyllic honeymoon setting. The journey was not long, only long enough to enjoy the amenities of luxurious travelling. Rokeby had seen to the tea-basket and the foot-warmers, as he had to the magazines. Marie repeated what she had ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... course, could be more desirable than the planting in South Africa of a large body of honest, hard-working English settlers with their wives and families. But there are many difficulties to be overcome before the idyllic picture of the reservist surrounded by the orchards and cornfields of his upland farm can be realised in actual fact. The Dutch farmers of South Africa are as a rule very poor. They rise up early and take late rest, and eat the bread of carefulness, but their life ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... quasi-religious dramas of "The Ape Sun Wu Kung" and "Notscha," or the weird sorceries unfolded in "The Kindly Magician." Delightful ghost stories, with happy endings, such as "A Night on the Battlefield" and "The Ghost Who Was Foiled," are paralleled with such idyllic love-tales as that of "Rose of Evening," or such Lilliputian fancies as "The King of the Ants" and "The Little Hunting Dog." It is quite safe to say that these Chinese fairy tales will give equal pleasure to the old as well as the young. They have ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... were, stretch out feelers towards one another, but the pastoral of tradition lies in its essence as far from the human document of humble life as from a scientific treatise on agriculture or a volume of pastoral theology. Thus the tract which lies before us to explore is equally remote from the idyllic imagination of George Sand, the gross actuality of Zola, and the combination of simple charm with minute and essential realism of Mr. Hardy's sketches in Wessex. Nor does the adoption of the pastoral label suffice to bring within the fold the fanciful animalism of Mr. Hewlett. By far the most remarkable ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... child, I know well that the ductile artistic nature takes shape very early. The coloring of childhood stains every painter's canvas who paints from the heart. You can never call any other place home, Giotto, but this idyllic corner of the world!" ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... pavement, in front of him the domed mass of the Manchester Exchange, and on all sides he had to push his way through a crowd of talking, chaffering, hurrying humanity. Presently he stopped at the door of a restaurant bearing the idyllic and altogether remarkable name—there it was in gilt letters over the door—of the 'Fruit and Flowers Parlour.' On the side post of the door a bill of fare was posted, which the young man looked up and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has great virtues, but he has the defects of his virtues, and his home life is far from idyllic. He is laborious, shrewd, enduring, frugal, self-reliant, sober, honest and capable of intense self-control for a distant reward; but that reward is property in land, in pursuit of which he may become as ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... Moore, who had played together for so many years, were idyllic lovers, though he had a wife in America, and she a husband who had gone his ways. To them there were no further stages of love than those which are shown to the Anglo-American public. For them there were but Romeo and Juliet at the ball with no contending houses to plague them. They lived ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... All-round idyllic peace did not reign at Kwang-tung-hsien, where I rested over Sunday. Contacts in social conditions gave rise inevitably ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... as true to nature as it is artistically effective. For it is known that violent emotion irresistibly compels us to heap together similar sounds. Several subtle and probably unconscious instances of it are given by Peile from the Idyllic poets; but as a rule it is true of Greek as it is of English, French, and Italian poetry, that when metre, caesura, or rhyme, hold sway, alliteration plays an altogether subordinate part. It is otherwise in Latin poetry. Here, owing to the fondness for all that is old, alliteration ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Little Red Riding-Hood on the way or come on Snow White and her seven dwarfs, that is only because you must have taken the wrong turning after you came through the kissing-gate at the bottom of Lovers' Lane. I am a native of Cotterham, and in my more reflective moments I wonder why such an idyllic place should have produced anything so unromantic as myself, His Majesty's Deputy Assistant Acting Inspector for All Sorts of Unexpected Explosives. Cotterham still has a large place in my affections, and it gave me a considerable shock ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... passed in recent times, thought that a place which was good enough for Benedictine monks to walk in might, with a little fresh masonry, be made fit for pigs to feed and sleep in. But an end had come to this idyllic state of things. The cloisters of Carennac had just been placed on the list of historic monuments. The adjoining church ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... they are romantic—romantic like a gentle poem, like an idyllic tale; but I deny that they are romanticistic. Their whole lives deal with realities, the every-other-day as well as the every-day realities. But the lives of those others who make all life costly by refusing their share of its work dwell in a web of threadbare ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... existed between Katie and Marie for several years. About the time the girl went to Kenilworth and had her idyllic experience, Katie married. Nick was a good sort of a man, easy and happy, and a sober and constant labourer. Katie had saved some money, in her careful German way, had even a bank-account of several hundred dollars. It was not an exciting marriage; neither ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... skillful vendeuse in Paris, becomes radiant. "Listen, Madame," she says to you in that insinuating, confidential, yet humbly ingratiating manner of hers. "Let me explain, Madame,—the idea of dress this year is altogether idyllic! Never has there been such charming return to nature. The great originator of our house has taken his suggestion—but yes! from the little animals of the fields and woods—from Nature herself! Our dresses this year are intended to follow the example of all the little animals ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... she said, "is full of idyllic and magnetic influence—and see, when you look behind you at the front of the schloss how all its windows flash and twinkle with that silvery splendor, as if unseen hands had lighted up the rooms ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... lyrical and other non-dramatic poetry belongs almost wholly to the first period. It consists mainly of short pieces scattered through the idyllic tales and saga-plays that nearly make up the sum of his activity in its purely creative and poetic phase. Some of these lyrics strike the very highest and purest note of song, and have secured lasting lodgment on the lips of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... away and descended with a sweet murmur to the river, making a narrow bed in the clayey ground which it watered. Such was the modesty of its course that a little brighter green and fresher grass a few feet away from it were the only indications of its presence. Nothing was wanting to make this an idyllic place for a rendezvous, neither the protecting shade, the warbling of birds in the trees, the picturesque landscape surrounding it, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of every tenement and allows our curious glances to take in the whole interior. This is perhaps the best proof of their power. Finally, the picture- gallery opens with a series of weird and striking adventures and shows as a tail-piece, an idyllic scene of love and wedlock in halls before reeking with lust ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... can read these two poems, and 'Bishop Blougram's Apology', and 'The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church', and not admit that Browning is a master of blank verse in its most difficult form—a form far more difficult than that of the epic blank verse of Milton, or the Idyllic blank verse of Tennyson, argumentative and freighted with thought, and, at the same time, almost chatty, as it is, and bearing in its course exquisitely poetical conceptions. The same may be said of much ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... a strangely peaceful, idyllic day—all save its ending. Looking back on it, I know that the sun which set that evening went down on the last of my happiness. But ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole sound, healthy, large outdoor being realizes that this is the highest point of life which has come to him—there begins a romance, troubled and interrupted, yet of the rarest idyllic quality. ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... erotic romances of Zamacois and the late enormously popular Felipe Trigo. Few Spaniards who write today but have written novels. Yet the gesture of the grand style of Valera is palsied, except, perhaps, for the conservative Quixote, Ricardo Leon, a functionary in the Bank of Spain, while the idyllic method lingers fitfully in such gentle writers as Jose Maria Salaverria, after surviving the attacks of the northern realists under the lead of Pereda, in his novels of country life, and of the less vigorous ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... It was idyllic. But not to the Countess. Her face burned, her temples throbbed, her fingers gripped the side of the boat in the vain attempt to steady her pulses. The packet within her dress scorched her. The great city and its danger, Tavannes and his faith in her, the need of action, the irrevocableness ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... In the good old idyllic days it had been possible for romantic youth to get married as easily as to get dinner—and as hard to get unmarried as to get wings. Couples who spooned too long at seaside resorts and missed the last train home could wake up a preacher and be united in indissoluble bonds ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... should he ever atone for such an unwarrantable action? Had it been the outcome of any ordinary flirtation, he would have felt no such scruples, but the encounter, though short, had been one of singular idyllic charm until he had by his own rash act spoilt it. A few minutes passed thus in self contemplation appeared like ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... to the idyllic peace of all about them, the terrors of war seemed more dreadful. That men who went to war should be killed and wounded, bat though it was, still seemed legitimate. But his driving home of an attack upon a city all unprepared, upon the many non-combatants who ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston
... of 1840 was spent between the Admiralty and Putney House, which the Mintos had taken. Lady Fanny's description of Putney sounds to us now improbably idyllic: ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... certain young lady by the name of Grace Sheraton, very far away. And you were conveniently lost—very conveniently—and you found each other's society agreeable. You kept away for some weeks or months, both of you forgetting. It was idyllic—ideal. You were not precisely babes in the woods. You were a man and a woman. I presume you enjoyed yourselves, after a very possible little fashion—I do not blame you—I say I might have done the same. I should like to know it for a time myself—freedom! I do not blame you. Only," ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... Woodhouse, with a population of ten thousand people, and three generations behind it. This space of three generations argues a certain well-established society. The old "County" has fled from the sight of so much disembowelled coal, to flourish on mineral rights in regions still idyllic. Remains one great and inaccessible magnate, the local coal owner: three generations old, and clambering on the bottom step of the "County," kicking off the mass below. Rule ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... logical order, most of them cosy interior scenes, some of the faces five feet from chin to forehead in the more personal episodes, yet exquisitely fair. Fill in the out-of-door scenes and general gatherings with the appointments of an idyllic English fisher-village, and you will get an approximate conception of what we mean by the Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture, or the Intimate Picture, as I generally ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... was a breach of etiquette to decline to eat it. This custom was strictly observed all over the continent and in the West India Islands, and was often remarked upon by the early discoverers, in whose minds it was apt to implant idyllic notions that were afterward rudely disturbed. The prevalence of hospitality among uncivilized races has long been noted by travellers, and is probably in most cases, as it certainly was in ancient America, closely connected ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske |
