"Lyric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thoughts. Its workings are submitted to his observation and experiment as a part of the world of knowledge; he sees its operation in individuals, social groups, and nations, and sets it forth in the action of the lyric, the drama, and the epic as the law of life. In its sphere is the higher unity of plot by virtue of which it integrates many lives in one main action. Such, then, is the nature of plot as intermediary between man and his environment, but deeply engaged in the latter, and not to be freed from ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... February's few flowers, Ere March came in with Marlowe's rapturous rage: Peele, from whose hand the sweet white locks of age Took the mild chaplet woven of honoured hours: Nash, laughing hard: Lodge, flushed from lyric bowers: And Lilly, a goldfinch in a twisted cage Fed by some gay great lady's pettish page Till short sweet songs gush clear like short spring showers: Kid, whose grim sport still gambolled over graves: And Chettle, in whose fresh funereal verse Weeps Marian yet on ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... habit of stewing themselves down to some ferocious or jocular three-line comment. He may yearn desperately to compose a really thrilling poem that will speak his passionate soul; to churn up from the typewriter some lyric that will rock with blue seas and frantic hearts; he finds himself allaying the frenzy with some jovial sneer at Henry Ford or a yell about the High Cost of Living. Poor soul, he is like one condemned to harangue ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... supposed, at Westminster School, whence he removed to Cambridge, and after taking his M.A. degree in 1620, left Cambridge. He afterwards spent some years in London in familiar intercourse with the wits and writers of the age, enjoying those "lyric feasts" which are celebrated in his "Ode ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... conveying the charm of immaterial, aerial, lucid beauty, the feeling of purity and aloofness from sordid things, conveyed by the fine touch on all our senses of light, colour, form, and air, and motion, and rare tinkling sound. The magic is like a spirit mood of Shelley's lyric verse. And, what is perhaps most wonderful, this delicate delight may be enjoyed without fear in the coldest weather. It does not matter how low the temperature may be, if the sun is shining, the air dry, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... pessimist and master of cadenced lyric prose, urged young writers to lead ascetic lives that in their art they might be violent. Chopin's violence was psychic, a travailing and groaning of the spirit; the bright roughness of adventure was missing from his quotidian existence. The tragedy was within. One recalls Maurice Maeterlinck: "Whereas ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... cannot be reckoned, seemed for a time to be drunk with pride. Even Boileau, hurried along by the prevailing enthusiasm, forgot the good sense and good taste to which he owed his reputation. He fancied himself a lyric poet, and gave vent to his feelings in a hundred and sixty lines of frigid bombast about Alcides, Mars, Bacchus, Ceres, the lyre of Orpheus, the Thracian oaks and the Permessian nymphs. He wondered whether ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Poletiss sang, "And a life that was wild and free, free, free, And a life that was wild and free." To this charming lyric there was a chorus of, "Then hurrah for the pirate bold, And hurrah for the rover wild, And hurrah for the yellow gold, And hurrah for the ocean's child!" the mild enunciation of which highly moral ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... summoned myself as a witness I take the stand once more to confess that Alan Seeger's lofty lyric, 'I have a rendezvous with Death' has a diminished appeal because of the foreign connotations of 'rendezvous'. The French noun was adopted into English more than three centuries ago; and it was used as a verb nearly three centuries ago; it does not interfere with the current of sympathy when I ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... we are indebted for the connection of a national error, and for the cure of our Pindaric madness. He first taught the English writers that Pindar's odes were regular; and though certainly he had not the lire requisite for the higher species of lyric poetry, he has shown us that enthusiasm has its rules, and that in mere confusion there is neither grace ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... we are. Old rivals too, In commerce and adventure the world over. From JOHN THE GREAT'S time to the present, you In Africa have been a daring rover; "The Rover's free"! Ah! that's good lyric brag— He is not free to trample on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... on the field of Goito; it was won. It was won against odds. At Pastrengo they witnessed an encounter; this was a battle. Vittoria perceived that there was the difference between a symphony and a lyric song. The blessedness of the sensation that death can be light and easy dispossessed her of the meaner compassion, half made up of cowardice, which she had been nearly borne down by on the field of Pastrengo. At an angle on a height off the left wing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... development of the religious sentiment being the same as in Helene, I at first missed the lyric effusion of that work, which seems to me more and more beautiful, as I think of it more. This, however, was a mere prejudice, of course, as the thought here is poured into a quite different mould, and I was not troubled by it ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of antient Sages; his who bred Great Alexander to subdue the world, Lyceum there, and painted Stoa next: There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power Of harmony in tones and numbers hit By voice or hand, and various-measur'd verse, Aeolian charms and Dorian Lyric Odes, And his who gave them breath, but higher sung, Blind Melesigenes thence Homer call'd, Whose Poem Phoebus challeng'd for his own. 260 Thence what the lofty grave Tragoedians taught In Chorus or Iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight receiv'd ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... can haf all your wishes," asserted the Professor, still in the German lyric strain over his triumph. "It iss the box of enchantments. You haf but to will the change you would haf taig place—it iss done. The substance of ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of Verona, is the greatest lyric poet of Roman literature. One hundred and sixteen of his ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... The business was to show a number of pretty scenes, and noble ladies, and to give them a chance of exhibiting their clothes, and their voices. The last gave Jonson his chance; the fine Horatian workman that he was could always produce a lyric that would fit any situation and give some dignity to any trivial personage. But the taint of vanity and fashion, pomp and externality, inevitably clung to the whole thing. Too many personages were introduced, probably because in such plays there were always a ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... song going—a matter of some seventy-nine verses. Seventy-eight were quite unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cowpunchers monstrously. They, knowing him to be a singular man, forebore ever to press him, and awaited his own humor, lest he should weary of the lyric; and when after a day of silence apparently saturnine, he would lift his gentle voice ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... lyric is perhaps the happiest of all those poems in which Schiller has blended the classical spirit with the more deep and tender philosophy which belongs to modern romance. The individuality of the heroes introduced is carefully preserved. The reader is every where reminded of Homer; and yet, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... I was, to think The printed poems fair, When close within my arms I held A living lyric there! ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... larks trilled high in the heavens; his heart was lyric with joy; He plucked a posy of lilies; he sped like a love-sick boy. He stole up the velvety pathway—his cottage was sunsteeped and still; Vines honeysuckled the window; softly he peeped o'er the sill. The lilies dropped from his fingers; devils were choking ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... ardent, more expansive, wholly given up to rapture, an impassioned painter of crude and dazzling pictures, a lyric prose-writer, omnipotent in laughter and tears, plunged into fantastic invention, painful sensibility, vehement buffoonery; and by the boldness of his style, the excess of his emotions, the grotesque familiarity ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... youth; this was the basis of nearly all novels and of most short stories; its presence was demanded for either primary or secondary interest in the drama; and it was the chief source of inspiration for the lyric. But within the last thirty years all sorts of other subjects have been opened up. To-day the writer's difficulty is, not that he is restricted by literary convention in his choice of material, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... man in the moon we mean none other than that illustrious personage, whose shining countenance may be beheld many a night, clouds and fogs permitting, beaming good-naturedly on the dark earth, and singing, in the language of a lyric bard, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... specially attracted by "The Buffalo Battery," a rollicking lyric known to all Anglo-India from Peshawur to Tuticorin. The air is the familiar one of the "Hen Convention," and the opening ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... how the mysteries of being are shared by the commonest lives; the short lyric "Wages" condenses into a few lines the strongest proof of the life to come; and "Crossing the Bar" has borne many a spirit in peace ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... and Mary Gray, which records a piece of Scottish news of no importance whatever, has become an English nursery rhyme. In Jamie Douglas an historical fact has been interwoven with a beautiful lyric. Indeed, the chances of ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... fashionable poetry on the other hand there was no lack at least of scholars, who exerted themselves to emulate the Alexandrian masters. With true tact the more gifted of the Alexandrian poets avoided larger works and the pure forms of poetry—the drama, the epos, the lyric; the most pleasing and successful performances consisted with them, just as with the new Latin poets, in "short- winded" tasks, and especially in such as belonged to the domains bordering on the pure forms of art, more especially to the wide field intervening between narrative and song. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... assemblies and councils of the Roman people is defaced by the inconsiderate levity of a few, who never recollect where they have been born, but who fall away into error and licentiousness, as if a perfect impunity were granted to vice. For as the lyric poet Simonides teaches us, the man who would live happily in accordance with perfect reason, ought above all things ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... English that, in spite of them, I was an artiste. I longed to bring them to my feet, as Jupiter did the Titans. So I ordered from one of those poetasters to be found in every land, a sort of libretto called, in theatrical parlance, a lyric drama; and to the words of this monstrosity I arranged the very finest airs of my several operas. When I had completed this musical kaleidoscope I called it 'Pyramus and Thisbe.' I dished up my olla ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... their heads to look at her. She has the appeal of a folk-song And her cheap clothes are always in rhythm. When the strike was on she gave half her pay. She would give anything—save the praise that is hers And the love of her lyric body. ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... morn Still lingers in the valley; but the bee With restless passion hovers on the wing, Waiting the opening flower, of whose embrace The sun shall be the signal. Poised in air, The winged minstrel of the liquid dawn, The lark, pours forth his lyric, and responds To the fresh chorus of the sylvan doves, The stir of branches and the fall of streams, The harmonies ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... then that Pushkin is, he is accordingly at his best only in his lyrics. But the essence of a lyric is music, and the essence of music is harmony, and the essence of harmony is form; hence in beauty of form Pushkin is unsurpassed, and among singers he is peerless. His soul is a veritable olian harp. No sooner does the wind begin to blow ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... scriptorium? Was he some 'Frenchman' imported from sunny Champagne, where Thibaut, the mawkish singer was making verses which his people loved to listen to? Did he teach the young novices French as well as writing? Did he touch the lute himself on Feast-days, and charm them with some new lyric of Gasse Brusle, or delight them with one of Rutebeuf's merry ditties? France was all alive with song at this time, and princes were rivals now for poetic fame. It may be that this 'foreigner' brought in a taste for light literature as well ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... travelled about the country gathering them together by ear and word of mouth, and, having weeded out the repetitions, he edited the famous epical Kalevala, and later collected quantities of other lyric ballads from the heathen times, and published them as Kanteletar. Thus much ancient music and verse was revived that had almost been forgotten. But of this we must speak in ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you think he puts such a ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... ringing true. Look, for example, at the work of those two whom we could so ill spare—Synge and St. John Hankin. They were as far apart as dramatists well could be, except that each had found a special medium—the one a kind of lyric satire, the other a neat, individual sort of comedy—which seemed exactly to express his spirit. Both forms were in a sense artificial, but both were quite sincere; for through them each of these two dramatists, so utterly dissimilar, shaped forth the essence of his broodings and visions ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... recovered by Barnes, who understood his humour, when, after engaging in close colloquy with the schoolmaster of Moffat, respecting a disputed quantity in Horace's 7th Ode, Book ll., the dispute led on to another controversy, concerning the exact meaning of the word Malobathro, in that lyric effusion. His second escapade was made for the purpose of visiting the field of Rullion-green, which was dear to his Presbyterian predilections. Having got out of the carriage for an instant, he saw the sepulchral monument of the slain at the distance of about a mile, and ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... The eloquence of his mute attitudes, his physical mastery of the conditions, his strength repressed, tied to my silly freaks and subject to my commands, while his thoughts roamed free! That was the beginning. It lasted through a week of starlight and a week of moonlight—lyric nights with the hot, close days between; and each night an increasing interest attached to the moment when he was to put me on my horse. I make no apology for myself ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... a well-known lyric composition of the late Marquis, which, with a slight alteration, might be addressed either to a ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of the poems of the elder Timrod are the following. Washington Irving said of these lines that Tom Moore had written no finer lyric:— ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... Decadence,' and at 'To Julia in Shooting Togs.' But, after all, Mr. Seaman's masterpiece up to date is certainly 'To the Lord of Potsdam.' ... This will live, or we are greatly mistaken, among the most effective examples of historical satire-lyric."—The ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self,—the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sounds, the song of crickets, coming in full choir upon the wind, and fancied that, if moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that. Finally, he took a draught at the Shaker spring, and, as if it were the true Castalia, was forthwith moved to compose a lyric, a Farewell to his Harp, which he swore should be its closing strain, the last verse that an ungrateful world should have from him. This effusion, with two or three other little pieces, subsequently written, he took the first opportunity to send, by one of the Shaker brethren, to Concord, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Miss Catherine H. Waterman, under which name she wrote the popular and beautiful lyric, "Brother, Come Home!" has in press a collection of her writings, under the title of The Broken Bracelet and other Poems, to be published by ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... rhythm. It may even be suggested that his little poems are less artificial than most French verse; they are the result of a less obvious effort. He lisped in numbers; and with him it was rather prose that had to be consciously acquired. His lyric note, although not keen and not deep, is heard again and again in his novels, and it sustains some of the most graceful and tender of his short stories,—"The Death of the Dauphin," for instance, and the ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... various kinds of literature are often treated in the mass with little attempt at discrimination between them, regardless of the fact that the problems of the translator vary with the character of his original. Tytler's book, full of interesting detail as it is, turns from prose to verse, from lyric to epic, from ancient to modern, till the effect it leaves on the reader ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... severity would have been unpleasing, had not he qualified them, by adopting the extravagant humour of Lueian and Rabelais—Prior, lively, familiar, and amusing—Rowe, solemn, florid, and declamatory—Pope, the prince of lyric poetry; unrivalled in satire, ethics, and polished versification—the agreeable Parnel—the wild, the witty, and the whimsical Garth—Gay, whose fables may vie with those of La Fontaine, in native humour, ease, and simplicity, and whose genius for pastoral was truly ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... without doubt, the most highly intellectual of our female poets.... The new poems, while not inferior to the others in point of literary art, have in them more of fervor and of feeling; more of that lyric sweetness which catches the attention and makes the song sing itself over and over afterwards in the remembering brain.... Some of the new poems seem among the noblest H. H. has ever written. They touch the high-water mark of her intellectual ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... fate and foreknowledge in "Religio Laici," or lashes Shaftesbury in the "Medal," or pours a torrent of contempt on Shadwell in "MacFlecknoe," or describes the fire of London in the "Annus Mirabilis," or soars into lyric enthusiasm in his "Ode on the Death of Mrs Killigrew," and "Alexander's Feast," or paints a tournament in "Palamon and Arcite," or a fairy dance in the "Flower and the Leaf,"—he is always at home, and always aware that he is. His consciousness of his own ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... his heaviness in drama, Jonson had a light enough touch in lyric poetry. His songs have not the careless sweetness of Shakspere's, but they have a grace of their own. Such pieces as his {123} Love's Triumph, Hymn to Diana, The Noble Mind, and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... editions of the poets and romancists; and there are, and always will be, a distinguished minority, of which the selling prices may be expected to remain firm. Such men as Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, Massinger, and among the lyric group Barnfield, Watson, Constable, Wither (earlier works and Hallelujah), Carew, Herrick, Suckling, and Lovelace, are to be viewed ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... fermenting, formless design for the tragedy, The Vikings at Helgeland, transformed itself temporarily into the lyric ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... sees the apple fall and has the revelation of a universe moving in a symphony before which the mind stands mute and awestruck. The cook takes the pig from the stye and the apple from the tree and makes a pretty lyric for the dinner-table. The Great Adventure, in short, is just this passionate pursuit of the soul of harmony in things, great and small, spiritual and material. We are all in the quest and our captains are those who lead us to the highest peaks of revelation—Bach ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... customs arises is not valid, for customs ratified by Aristophanes, by Rabelais, by Shakespeare, have no right to change. If they have changed, let us try immediately to return from our disgraceful refinements to the nobler and more rarefied heights of lyric laughter, tragic intensity, and wit, for we cannot have the first two without the last. And anyhow, how can a social custom claim precedence over the undying material of the senses and the emotions of man, over the very ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... reached the height of their renown in music, as well as what might be termed their golden era, with the establishment of the Italian opera, in the seventeenth century. At this period all the stages of Italy were the scenes of the lyric triumphs of this otherwise unfortunate class, some of whom accumulated vast fortunes. In the following century, as has been seen, Clement XVI abolished the practice as far as the church was concerned, and in the present century the first Napoleon abolished the practice secularly and socially. ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Here you are, already twenty-one, and you have not yet written a dictionary. What will you do for fame? Eh? Nothing: you are intolerably lazy—and what is worse, it is your fate. Beginnings are insuperable barriers to you. What about that great work on The National Debt? What about that little lyric on Winchelsea that you thought of writing six years ago? Why are the few lines still in your head and not on paper? Because you can't begin. However, never mind, you can't help it, it's your one great flaw, and it's fatal. Look at Jones! Younger ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Lyric poetry is by its excellence the chief art of England, as music is the art of Germany. A book of poetry is almost sure of fair appreciation in the English press which does not trouble to notice a "Sartor Resartus" or the first essays of an Emerson. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... faculty are probably to be sought in that Shelleian treasury, Prometheus Unbound. It is unquestionably the greatest and most prodigal exhibition of Shelley's powers, this amazing lyric world, where immortal clarities sigh past in the perfumes of the blossoms, populate the breathings of the breeze, throng and twinkle in the leaves that twirl upon the bough; where the very grass is all a-rustle with lovely spirit-things, ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... Diomede and Menelaus, and conduct their own horses in the rapid career. [41] Ten, twenty, forty chariots were allowed to start at the same instant; a crown of leaves was the reward of the victor; and his fame, with that of his family and country, was chanted in lyric strains more durable than monuments of brass and marble. But a senator, or even a citizen, conscious of his dignity, would have blushed to expose his person, or his horses, in the circus of Rome. The games were exhibited at the expense of the republic, the magistrates, or the emperors: ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... by sacrifice, Samuel opposes the great principle which was the special message committed to every prophet in Israel, and which was repeated all through its history, side by side with the divinely appointed sacrificial system. In the intensity of his spiritual emotion, Samuel speaks in lyric strains, in the measured parallelism which was the Hebrew dress of poetry, and gives forth in words 'which will live for ever' the great truth that God delights in obedience more than in sacrifice. Whilst, on ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... selected it for applause. It is now what Shelley's 'Cloud' was for many years, a comfort to those who do not like to deny altogether the genius they cannot understand. Yet I am certain that, in the long run, his grotesque plays with their lyric beauty, their violent laughter, 'The Playboy of the Western World' most of all, will be loved for holding so much of the mind of Ireland. Synge has written of 'The Playboy' 'anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... Matron (who is listening, with her eyes devoutly fixed on the Libretto of "The Mountebanks," under the firm conviction that she is in direct communication with the Lyric Theatre.) I always understood The Mountebanks was a musical piece, my dear, didn't you? and even as it is, they don't seem to keep very close to the words, as far as I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... you listen to that?" cried Solling, amid the hearty laughter of the others. "Simsen's so lyric, he certainly must be drunk. I must have ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... religion, morality, or good manners, or to the disturbance of the state, an absolute government will certainly more effectually prohibit them from, or punish them for publishing such thoughts, than a free one could do. But how does that cramp the genius of an epic, dramatic, or lyric poet? or how does it corrupt the eloquence of an orator in the pulpit or at the bar? The number of good French authors, such as Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, and La Fontaine, who seemed to dispute it with the Augustan age, flourished under the despotism ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... A lyric conception—my friend, the Poet, said—hits me like a bullet in the forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... you will understand, Dispenser of a Thousand Mercies, why at first blush Islam and the lyric stage should ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... of MacDowell make an important section of the catalogue of his works, and are chiefly notable for their beauty and tenderness of expression, and he was at his very best when writing in the pure lyric form. His efforts comprising Ops. 56, 58 and 60 are of a rare and expressive order. He also composed a number of fine part-songs for male-voice choruses. Most of his best vocal works are set to his own verses, as he could seldom satisfy ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... to Queen's Gate!" said Alexander, when Piers began to look at his watch. "No hurry, my boy! The night is young! 'And'"—he broke into lyric quotation—"'haply the Queen Moon is on her throne, clustered around with all her starry fays.'—I shall never forget this dinner; shall you, Biddy? We'll have a song when ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... Alfieri in the light of mere meretricious gewgaws, which took away from the interest of dramatic action without affording him any satisfaction in return. As it was with metre and metaphor and description, so it was also with the indefinable something which we call lyric quality: the something which sings to our soul, and which sends a thrill of delight through our nerves or a gust of emotion across our nature in the same direct way as do the notes of certain voices, the phrases ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... it with care, from the adorably finished prologue—it is the disgrace of our Navy that we cannot produce a commissioned officer capable of writing one page of lyric prose—to the eloquent, the joyful, the impassioned end; and my first notion was that I had been cheated. In this sort of book-collecting you will see how entirely the bibliophile lies at the mercy of ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... satisfactorily what the "pea-vine" was. His "Ring around and shake a leg, ma lady," was a triumph in the lyric line. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... of the countryside. "The Passing of the Gael" is known wherever there are Irish emigrants, but there are other verses of "Ethna Carberry" (Mrs. Anna Johnstone MacManus) that are as fine as this. Mrs. Dora Sigerson Shorter is a balladist of stark power, and Miss Eva Gore-Booth a lyric poet whose natural lilt no preoccupation with mysticism can for ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... choice that the teacher need not resort to the questionable device of giving children fragments and bits of verse and prose to commit to memory. One of the greatest services we can do the young mind is to accustom it to the perception of wholes, and whether this whole be a lyric or a narrative poem like Evangeline, it is almost equally important that the young reader should learn to hold it as such in his mind. To treat a poem as a mere quarry out of which a particularly smooth stone can ...
— Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading - Selected from English and American Literature • Horace Elisha Scudder, editor
... a pity we have let the gift of lyric improvisation die out. Sitting islanded on some gray peak above the encompassing wood, the soul is lifted up to sing the Iliad of the pines. They have no voice but the wind, and no sound of them rises up to the high places. But the ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... were well known to the Greeks, they associated Music with Medicine as an attribute of Apollo.[178:1] Chiron the centaur, by the aid of melody, healed the sick, and appeased the anger of Achilles. By the same means the lyric poet Thales, who flourished in the seventh century B. C., acting by advice of an oracle, was able to subdue a pestilence ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... all only about thirty thousand lines; but it includes epic, lyric, didactic, elegiac, and allegorical poems, together with war-ballads, paraphrases, riddles, and charms. Of the five elegiac poems (Wanderer, Seafarer, Ruin, Wife's Complaint, and Husband's Message), the Wanderer ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... of Burns it will ever be of prime interest from the fact that its air, as played by Miss Jessie Lewars to the poet only a few days before his death, supplied the hint for his most tender and touching lyric, "O Wert them in the Cauld Blast." ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... Homer and Virgil is counselled by Quintilian as the best way of informing youth and confirming man. For, besides that the mind is raised with the height and sublimity of such a verse, it takes spirit from the greatness of the matter, and is tinctured with the best things. Tragic and lyric poetry is good, too, and comic with the best, if the manners of the reader be once in safety. In the Greek poets, as also in Plautus, we shall see the economy and disposition of poems better observed than in Terence; ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... out of print and I hold the copyright. The three poems following these originally appeared in my second volume, "The Falconer of God and Other Poems." For permission to reprint a few of the remaining poems I have to thank the editors of Reedy's Mirror, The Bang, The Lyric, The Madrigal, The Sun Dial (New York Evening Sun), Everybody's Magazine, The Century Magazine, and "Books and the Book World" (New York Sunday Sun). For the group, "The Long Absence" in the section entitled, "After," I owe thanks ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... wine-press to change it into perfumed wine. Listen! there is, a dozen hours from Alexandria, towards the west, not far from the sea, a nunnery, the rules of which, a masterpiece of wisdom, deserve to be put in lyric verse and sung to the sound of the theorbo and tambourines. It may truly be said that the women who are there, submissive to these rules, have their feet upon earth and their faces in heaven. They desire to be poor, that Jesus may love them, modest, that He ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... the earth And those who saw it wept with joy and fright. "Thou art Apollo, than the sun more bright!" They cried. "Our music is of little worth, But thrill our blood with thy creative mirth Thou god of song, thou lord of lyric might!" ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... exclaimed, looking at Martin Cosgrave with some disapproval. "Well, he has attempted something anyway. He may not have, succeeded, but the artist is in him somewhere. He has created a sort of—well, lyric—in ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... Director Holtei, thanks to a magnanimous oversight on the part of Franz Listz. The preference of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. for church scenes contributed to secure him eventually his important position at the greatest lyric theatre in Germany, the Royal Opera of Berlin. For he was prompted far less by his devotion to the dramatic muse than by his desire to secure a good position in some important German city, when, as already hinted, through Liszt's recommendation he was appointed ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Speeches and Essays, which, with his poetical compositions, were printed by Alderman Barber in 1723. in two splendid 4to volumes. The first volume containing pieces in most species of poetry, the epic excepted, and also imitations from other authors. His Grace wrote some Epigrams, a great number of lyric pieces, some in the elegiac strain, and others in the dramatic. Amongst his poems, an Essay on Poetry, which contains excellent instructions to form the poet, is by far the most distinguished. He wrote a play ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... Cowper's poetry lacked the true note of passion, that there was an absence of the "lyric cry." I protest that I find the note of passion in the "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture," in his two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce not less marked than I find it in other great poets. I find in The Task and elsewhere in Cowper's works a note ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... I cared, Mike!" Margaret's words poured from her lips. Ordinary as they were, they were a love-lyric to his ears. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... night, when he was boiling maple-sap in the sugar-bush with little Ovide Rossignol (who had a lyric passion for holding the coat while another man was fighting)—"no, for what shall I fight with Raoul? As boys we have played together. Once, in the rapids of the Belle Riviere, when I have fallen in the water, I think he has ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... Ross I 'll daily sing, With vocal note and lyric string, And duly, when I 've drank the king, He 'll be my second toss. May Heaven its choicest blessings send On such a man, and such a friend; And still may all that 's good attend ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... much afraid 'I say') that so 'great a slip' might be attended with 'still greater' and 'worse': for 'your' Horace, and 'my' Horace, the most charming writer that ever lived among the 'Pagans' (for the 'lyric kind of poetry,' I mean; for, the be sure, 'Homer' and 'Virgil' would 'otherwise' be 'first' named 'in their way') well observeth (and who understood 'human nature' ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... during the month of May one of these handsome fellows was busy in my garden, diligently picking the potato bugs from the young vines, stopping now and then, especially in his morning visits, to pour out a happy, ringing lyric and to show his handsome plumage. On one occasion he took a couple of potato bugs in his "gros" beak as he flew to the nearby woodland, probably a tempting morsel for his spouse's breakfast. A bird that can sing better than ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... Flacci . . . Od in locos communes ad lyric poseos studiosorum utilitatem digest. Studio & oper Josephi Langii. Hanovi, typis Wechelianis, apud Claudium Marnium & heredes Joannis Aubrii, ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... dignity of certain groves—these are but ingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre. The place is sanative; the air, the light, the perfumes, and the shapes of things concord in happy harmony. The artist may be idle and not fear the "blues." He may dally with his life. Mirth, lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment are of the very essence of the better kind of art; and these, in that most smiling forest, he has the chance to learn or to remember. Even on the plain of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Rocky Mountain cabin in that stormy night it was in every respect the climax of his life. As he sat in the doorway, looking at the fire and over into the storm beyond, he realized that he was shaken by a wild, crude lyric of passion. Here was, to him, the pure emotion of love. All the beautiful things he had ever heard or read of girlhood, of women, of marriage, rose in his mind to make this night an almost intolerable blending of joy and ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... specimen of Pushkin's lyric productions which we shall present to our countrymen, "done into English," as Jacob Tonson was wont to phrase it, "by an eminent hand," is a production considered by the poet's critics to possess the very highest degree of merit in its peculiar style. We have mentioned some details respecting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... you would like, in spite of your caveat for the Gracioso. I have not wholly dropt the two Students, but kept them quite under: and brought out the religious character of the Piece into stronger Relief. But as I have thrown much, if not into Lyric, into Rhyme, which strikes a more Lyric Chord, I have found it much harder to satisfy myself than with the good old Blank Verse, which I used to manage easily enough. The 'Vida es Sueno' again, though blank Verse, has been difficult ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... seek the musing May, She is deep in the wood, Viewing and pursuing The beautiful and good. Where the grassy bank receding, Spreads its quiet couch for reading The pages of the sages, And the poet's lyric lay— We shall find ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... Gipsy lyric then came another to which the captain especially directed my attention as being what Sam. Petalengro calls 'The girl in the red chemise'—as well as I can recall his words. A very sweet song, with a simple but ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... have told before, we have to stop and talk with the men before they will let us pass. For example, one afternoon I was waylaid on my way to the women by the head of the household I was visiting, a fine old man of the usual type, courteous but opposed. He asked to look at my books. I had a Bible, a lyric book, and a book of stanzas bearing upon the Truth, copied from the old Tamil classics. He pounced upon this. Then he began to chant the stanzas in their inimitable way, and at the sound several other old men ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... incompleteness of Mr. Wilde's Life of Dante. Mr. Wilde, more than a year before his death, informed us that his work was nearly ready for the printer; and at the same time he confided to us for perusal his admirable translations of specimens of Italian Lyric Poets. We hope the descendants of our learned and ingenious friend will place these works, so creditable to his temper, scholarship, and genius, before ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... social exhilaration. Thumbelina in her Cradle, Thumbelina and the Toad, Thumbelina and the Swallow and Thumbelina as Queen of the Flowers—these at once suggest a cradle rhythm, a toad rhythm, the flight of birds, and a butterfly dance. Because the rhythm is a lyric form it must be remembered that the part of a story suited to a rhythm play is always a part characterized by a distinct emotional element. In the performance of rhythm plays the point is to secure the adjustment of ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... Now, what do you think, there was a waiter in this very hotel, but, alas! he is now gone, who sang (from morning to night, as my informant said with a shrug at the recollection) what but 'S IST LANGE HER, the German version of Auld Lang Syne; so you see, madame, the finest lyric ever written will make its way out of whatsoever corner of patois ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... woman, lapsing, as she occasionally did lapse, into the easy Italian of the lyric stage. "She ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... strange circumstance and characters; but his composition and his style illuminate the characters, order the circumstances, and render clear, as, for example, in the Sonnets, the subtleties of his thought. A great artist, by his comprehensive grasp of the main issue of his work, even in a short lyric or a small picture, and by his luminous representation of it, suggests, without direct expression of them, all the strange psychology, and the play of character in the situations. And such an artist does this excellent thing by his noble composition, and by his lofty, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... mongrel forms of epic should be included the half descriptive, half lyric poems which were popular among the English, dealing chiefly with nature, the seasons of the year, etc. There belong also to this division numerous didactic poems in which a prosaic content is dressed up in poetic form, such as compendiums of physics, astronomy, and ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... possessed natural taste, and had cultivated the same without judgment. His intricate disposition and extreme sensitiveness frightened him away from much effort at self-expression; yet not a few trifling scraps and shreds of lyric poetry had fallen from his pen in high moments. These, when the mood changed, he read again, and found dead, and usually destroyed. He was more easily discouraged than a child who sets out to tell its ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... "tone" of the light that was gradually waning. So satisfied was he with that distant pulse of harmony that he began weaving some verses in his head to "His Absent Lady,"—and succeeded in devising quite a charming lyric to her whose honour and renown he was ready to kill. So complex, so curious, so callous, yet sensuous, and utterly egotistical was his nature, that had Angela truly died under his murderous blow, he would have been ready now ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... trio! The event of the evening! General Hardshell Jackson, Senor Lupe de Tamale, and the renowned lyric barytone, James Russell Lowell Mason, will combine in a grand farewell concert. Ascend the platform, Senor!" he cried to the Mexican lad, who stood, wide-eyed, in a corner. Then he gestured ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field |
