"Lyric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lyric Poetry? It is the oldest kind of poetry, and was originally intended to be sung to ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... 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 it found ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... some occurrence or other, and are impromptu songs readily set to the music of wind or string instruments, so that any one who is not cognisant of their gist cannot appreciate the beauties contained in them. So you are not likely, I fear, to understand this lyric with any clearness; and unless you first peruse the text and then listen to the ballad, you will, instead of pleasure, feel as if you were chewing wax (devoid of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... I have some slight control, But deem her of a feeble soul That doth not love my naked sword Above my sweetest lyric word," ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... cynic rather than a poet, and his natural dryness and sarcastic 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 original. Dr. Bentley stood ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Man of 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... an introduction to the reading and study of French lyric poetry. If it contributes toward making that poetry more widely known and more justly appreciated its purpose ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... the loser. Not in its relations with the world, fair or ill—such, like all external things, are important only as we take them: but in its diminished capacity to feel greatly and tenderly, in its added numbness, in its less noble beat. It was thus that the cor cordium lost what no lyric passion, no triumphant exultation of success, could ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... of the soul. The voice of the two Pitts was the same voice, we have been told—a deep, rich, cultivated lyric-barytone. It was a trained voice, a voice that came from a full column of air, that never broke into a screech, rasping the throat of the speaker and the ear of the listener. It was the natural voice carefully developed by right use. The power of Pitt lay in his cold, calculating ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... "blotted out all joy from his life and made him long for death, in spite of his feeling that he was in some measure a help and comfort to his sister." Under the influence of this great sorrow he wrote The Two Voices, Ulysses, "Break, Break, Break," and began that exquisite series of lyric poems, afterwards joined together in the In Memoriam. His friendship for Hallam remained throughout life with him as one of his most ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... orchises. Climbing the staircase paths beside the falls in morning sunlight, or stationed on the points of vantage that command their successive cataracts, we enjoyed a spectacle which might be compared in its effect upon the mind to the impression left by a symphony or a tumultuous lyric. The turbulence and splendour, the swiftness and resonance, the veiling of the scene in smoke of shattered water-masses, the withdrawal of these veils according as the volume of the river slightly shifted in its fall, the rainbows shimmering on the silver spray, the shivering ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... say nothing of "Fidelio," or "Oberon," or "Freischuetz," they have not the organization for it, have not the chorus, the secondary singers, the artists who know and love the music; it will not pay, and so forth. Our Academies must justify their name and be domestic institutions, permanent lyric organizations, before we can call in singers to illustrate an opera, instead of worn-out operas to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... and critics have been unanimous in their praise of this exquisite lyric, which, had she written nothing more, would alone have been amply sufficient to vindicate Aphara Behn's genius and immortality. It was a great favourite with Swinburne, who terms it 'that melodious and magnificent song'; Mr. Bullen is warm in its praise, whilst Professor ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... a perfect harmony of the two; in him alone do we find a grace of language like the beauty of a Greek statue, in which there is nothing to add or to take away; at least this is true of single plays or of large portions of them. The connection in the Tragic Choruses and in the Greek lyric poets is not unfrequently a tangled thread which in an age before logic the poet was unable to draw out. Many thoughts and feelings mingled in his mind, and he had no power of disengaging or arranging them. ...
— The Republic • Plato
... a large district in the south of Invernesshire, having Ben Nevis and other Grampian heights within its compass. It is a classic name in Scottish literature owing to Allan Ramsay's plaintive lyric, 'Lochaber no more.' ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... turn 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
... only scholar questioning the basis of the canon; indeed, revisionism is fast becoming one of the more ingenious—and useful—parlor games among academics. Modern readers are no longer so squeamish about obscenity nor so uncomfortable with the purely personal lyric as were the editors at the end of the eighteenth century. And we are hardly likely to find poetry written by women objectionable on that score alone. In short, the anthologies we depend upon are ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... like Barty to begin a lyric that will probably last as long as the English language with an innocent jingle worthy of ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... in a new walk of poetry; but in the then barbarous state of our Theatre, such a performance as Gorboduc must have been hailed as not only a novelty but a wonder. It was the first piece composed in English on the ancient tragic model, with a regular division into five acts, closed by lyric choruses. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... 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
... 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 PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... and helped to confuse one another. He might be compared to a builder engaged in some great design, who could only dig with his hands because he was unprovided with common tools; or to some poet or musician, like Tynnichus (Ion), obliged to accommodate his lyric raptures to the limits of the tetrachord ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... the style of his letters and prose compositions, which have the air of being uttered from the heart. The excellences and defects of his poetry, soaring to the height of song and sinking into frigidity or baldness when the lyric impulse flags, reveal a similar quality. In conduct this spontaneity assumed a form of inconsiderate rashness, which brought him into collision with persons of importance, and rendered universities and Courts, the sphere of his ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Yes, yes, Vera. You bring back my sunnier self. I must be a pioneer on the lost road of happiness. To-day shall be all joy, all lyric ecstasy. [He takes up his violin.] Yes, I will make my old fiddle-strings burst with joy! [He dashes into a jubilant tarantella. After a few bars there is a knock at the door leading from the hall; their ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... The grey and sparkling crags. The breath of 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, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... I slipped once more From lyric dawn through dreamland's open door, And there was God, Eternal Life that sings, Eternal joy, brooding all mortal things, A nest ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... lyric, recalling Pindaric days, has sprung up lately in Athens. His rendering of the dramas of Sophocles into modern Greek for the stage in Athens and Constantinople, is said to have ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... a trifle shaken by reason of the sudden tensity which had crept into the atmosphere, she repeated the brief lyric: ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... is Our purpose to inflame Our soldiers' arteries with lust of fame; To give them something in the lyric line That shall be tantamount to fumes of wine, Yet not too heady, like the champagne (sweet) That lately left them dormant in the street, So that the British, coming up just then, Took them for swine and not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... and extremely healthy. They should have music always at their meals. The theatre, entirely remodelled and reformed, and, under a minister of state, should be an important element of education. I should not object to the recitation of lyric poetry. That is enough. I would not have a book in the house, or even see ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... are my bread and honey, set among A grove of spice; An ever brimming cup; a lyric sung ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... point unguarded, never allows himself to be caught in undress. Thoreau spurns this punctiliousness, and thus impairs his average execution; while for the same reason he attains, in favored moments, a diction more flowing and a more lyric strain than his teacher ever allows himself, at least in prose. He also secures, through this daring, the occasional expression of more delicate as well as more fantastic thoughts. And there is an interesting passage in these letters where he rather unexpectedly recognizes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... "he's a daisy," and remarks, appropriately enough, "that this was well enough for 1898; but we would now be more inclined to render it 'he's a peach.'" Again, Peck renders "illud erat vivere" by "that was life," but, in the words of our lyric American jazz, we would be more inclined to render it "that was the life." "But," as Professor Gaselee has said, "no rendering of this part of the Satyricon can be final, it must always be in ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and lyric. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... 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
... 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
... us follow him as he rides thither on his bob-tailed mule (Sat. I, vi, 104), the heavy saddlebags across its loins stored with scrolls of Plato, of the philosopher Menander, Eupolis the comedian, Archilochus the lyric poet. His road lies along the Valerian Way, portions of whose ancient pavement still remain, beside the swift waters of the Anio, amid steep hills crowned with small villages whose inmates, like the Kenites of Balaam's rhapsody, put their nests in rocks. A ride of twenty-seven miles ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... welcome to those who never saw him in his modest kurtka of 1814. These and those will be surprised in the botanizing, circumnavigating—the once well-appointed Royal Prussian officer, in the historiographer of the illustrious Peter Schlemihl, to discover a lyric whose poetical heart is rightly fixed, whether he ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... 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 ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with "One Thousand and One Afternoons." The prefacer confesses failure. It is the turn of the reader. He may welcome the sketches in book form; he may turn scornfully from them and leave them to moulder in the stock-room of Messrs. Covici-McGee. To paraphrase an old comic opera lyric: ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Poetry was therefore concerned in early times entirely with things of the spirit. It dealt with persons, and with them alone. It celebrated epic actions, recorded sagacious judgments, or uttered in lyric song emotions primarily felt by an individual, yet interpreting the common lot of man. But there has occurred a great change in poetry too, a change notable during the last century but initiated long before. Poetry ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... legends in praise of their deeds. As the hymn developed, the chorus and strophe were dropped, and the narrative only was preserved. The word "epic" was used simply to distinguish the narrative poem, which was recited, from the lyric, which was sung, and from ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... This admirable lyric seemed to have perfect success, if one were only to judge from the thundering of voices, hands, and drinking vessels which followed; while a venerable, gray-haired sergeant rose to propose Mr. Free's health, and speedy ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... age of Italian poetry, which now followed at the end of the fifteenth century, as well as the Latin poetry of the same period, is rich in proofs of the powerful effect of nature on the human mind. The first glance at the lyric poets of that time will suffice to convince us. Elaborate descriptions, it is true, of natural scenery are very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age, the novels and the lyric or epic poetry had something else to deal with. Bojardo ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... day. Take Tennyson's "Idyls of the King," and see what beautiful beadrolls of names he can string together from the rough Cornish and Devon coasts. Only out of a poetic-hearted people are poets born. The peasant writes ballads, though scholars and antiquaries collect them. The Hebrew lyric fire blazed in myriad beacons from every landmark. The soil of Palestine is trodden, as it were, with the footsteps of God, so eloquent are its mountains and hamlets with these records of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... of its literature shows more striking proof of the common life and interests of Mediaeval Europe than does the lyric poetry of the period. In Northern France, in Provence, in all parts of Germany, in Italy, and a little later in Spain, we see a most remarkable outburst of song. The subjects were the same in all the countries. Love-the love of feudal chivalry—patriotism, ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... apparent sincerity that it is impossible to tell in what direction his genius will develop. In whatever style he writes,—the mystical, the historical-dramatic, the impassioned description of natural beauty, the ballad, the love lyric,—he has the peculiarity of seeming in each style to have found the ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... soul, no talent acquired by loving exertion, but something extrinsic, unavoidable, and unmeritorious. Why was it so? Why should fate treat Milly like a godchild? Why should she have prettiness, and adorableness, and the lyric gift, and such abounding confident youth? Why should circumstances fall out so that she could meet her unacknowledged lover openly at all seasons? Leonora's eyes wandered to the figure of Ethel reclining with shut eyes in the arm-chair. Ethel in her graver and more diffident ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... lyric poet, born in Paris, the son of a shoemaker; gave offence by certain lampoons ascribed to him which to the last he protested were forgeries, and was banished; his satires were certainly superior to his lyrics, which ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... as I remember it, a most exquisite night—a white poem, a frosty, starry lyric of light. It was one of those nights on which one might fall asleep and dream happy dreams of gardens of mirth and song, feeling all the while through one's sleep the soft splendour and radiance of the white moon-world outside, as one hears soft, far-away music ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... poetry of this opera is not much above that ordinary kind, to which music is so often doomed to be wedded—making up by her own sweetness for the dulness of her help-mate—by far the greater number of the songs are full of beauty, and some of them may rank among the best models of lyric writing. The verses, "Had I a heart for falsehood framed," notwithstanding the stiffness of this word "framed," and one or two other slight blemishes, are not unworthy of living in recollection with the matchless air to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... ominous hum from the operating-rooms, the 1921 "Literary Digests," and the silent, sullen, group of waiting patients, each trying to look unconcerned and cordially disliking everyone else in the room,—all these have been sung by poets of far greater lyric powers than mine. (Not that I really think that they are greater than mine, but that's the customary form of excuse for not writing something you haven't got time or space to do. As a matter of fact, I think I could do it much better than it ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... self-reliant force By which his way he told, Nor of the Midas-touch that turn'd All enterprise to gold, And made the indignant River yield Unto the ozier'd plain,— For these would ask a wider range Than waits the lyric strain: ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Fair," and "The Devil is an Ass," which was written too late. It included likewise a book of some hundred and thirty odd 'Epigrams', in which form of brief and pungent writing Jonson was an acknowledged master; "The Forest," a smaller collection of lyric and occasional verse and some ten 'Masques' and 'Entertainments'. In this same year Jonson was made poet laureate with a pension of one hundred marks a year. This, with his fees and returns from several noblemen, and the small earnings of his plays must have ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... an outlander—with the hate of an Italian for a woman who works with her brain—with the hate of an Italian who sees another taking the bread out of his mouth. All this, coupled with the fact that your Italian is a natural-born hater, may indicate that the life of Mary Gowd had not the lyric lilt that life is commonly reputed to have ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... but for the elevation of these into the realm of magic, into the upper air of spontaneous spiritual activity, his imagination has, for the romantic imagination which it is, a trifle too much self-possession—too much sanity, if one chooses. He has the ambitions, the faculties, of a lyric poet, and he gives us ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... lyric poet, was born about 560 B.C., at Teos, an Ionian city on the coast of Asia Minor. Little is known of his life, except a few scattered notices, not in all cases certainly authentic. He probably shared the voluntary exile of the mass of his fellow-townsmen, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was so prodigal of bon-mots; or that the opposite party had right or justice on their side, whose pleadings were as uninteresting as a sermon. But Beaumarchais was not the only author who owed his notoriety to his legal proceedings. One of the great lyric poets of France, who is placed by his countrymen upon the same level as Pindar—Denis Leonchard Lebrun—was the town-talk for several years, during his action against his wife for the restitution of conjugal rights. And as his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... Carols separately. I ought to admit here that the confidence with which I claimed, in my Third Series, a place on the roll for The Jolly Juggler, has abated, and I now consider it to be no more than a narrative lyric without ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... his song," {0f} by adopting "a diversity of structure in the metre;" for the lyric comes in occasionally to relieve the solemnity of the heroic, whilst at the same time the latter is frequently capable of being divided into a shorter verse, a plan which has been observed in one of the MSS. used on the present occasion; e. g. the ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... 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
... all in all to him; until the very streets are his chums and certain buildings and corners his best friends. Then he is hopeless, and to live elsewhere would be death. The Bowery will be his romance, Broadway his lyric, and the Park his pastoral, the river and the glory of it all his epic, and he will look down pityingly on all the rest ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... would hold a second place. They already have their reward, and I say no more of them; but there are other worthy deeds of which no poet has worthily sung, and which are still wooing the poet's muse. Of these I am bound to make honourable mention, and shall invoke others to sing of them also in lyric and other strains, in a manner becoming the actors. And first I will tell how the Persians, lords of Asia, were enslaving Europe, and how the children of this land, who were our fathers, held them back. Of these I will speak first, and ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... only half-humorously disclaims the capacity for lofty themes, but, especially as he grows older and more philosophic, and perhaps less lyric, half-seriously attributes whatever he does to ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... the parts of this delightful pastoral had been in unison with its many innocent scenes and sweet lyric intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to vie with Comus or the Arcadia, to have been put into the hands of boys and virgins, to have made matter for young dreams, like the loves of Hermia and Lysander. But a spot is on the face of this Diana. Nothing short ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Love's iteration Seems to warble and to rave; Letters where the pent sensation Leaps to lyric exultation, Like a song-bird ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... The Lyric Poems are almost all of the light and airy kind, such as trip lightly and nimbly along, without the load of any weighty meaning. From these, however, "Rural Elegance" has some right to be excepted. I once heard it praised by a very learned ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... the shadows lifted from her eyes; and Maurice ceased to remember that he had made a mess of his affairs. But the very next one failed—as far as Louise was concerned—to reach the same level: it was like a flower ever so slightly overblown. The lyric charms that had so pleased her—the dewy freshness of the morning, the solitude, the unbroken sunshine—were frail things, and, snatched with too eager a hand, crumbled beneath the touch. They were not made to stand the wear and tear of repetition. It was also impossible, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Greek literature dawned upon Europe, the soil had been in some measure prepared for it. But, to get rid of the details of history, which are always wearisome and usually inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been due to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... Kentucky birth, and came a child to Ohio; but William H. Lytle, dear to lovers of poetry as the author of the fine lyric, "Antony and Cleopatra," was born in Cincinnati, of the old Scotch-Irish stock, in 1826. He had everything pleasant in life and he enjoyed his prosperity, but when the war came he met its call halfway. At Chickamauga he fell, ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... chief French lyric poet of the sixteenth century, whose sonnets had considerable ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... There was a difference now—a difference which their discovery by an outsider had made unpleasantly manifest. De Folligny's appearance at Verneuil had made Markham thoughtful, but Olga's intrusion now had paraphrased their pastoral lyric into unworthy prose. Parnassus wept with them, but no amount of weeping could destroy the ugly doggerel as Olga had written it. Their idyl was smirched, the fair robe of Euterpe was trialing in ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... a great English poet had rushed down on Venice like a raven on a corpse, to croak out in lyric poetry—the first and last utterance of social man—the burden of a de profundis. English poetry! Flung in the face of the city that had given birth to Italian ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... seemed an odd result of fortunate love that the artist, though in every other respect a better man than before, should have become, to all appearances, less zealous, less efficient, in his art. Had Rosamund Elvan the right influence on her lover; in spite of Norbert's lyric eulogy, had she served merely to confuse his aims, perhaps to bring him down to a lower level ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... herself "en rapport" with those around her. Books were her world from her earliest years; in them she literally lost and found herself. She was eleven years old when the War of Succession broke out, which inspired her first lyric outbursts. Her poems and translations written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were collected, and constituted her first published volume. Crude and immature as these productions naturally were, and utterly condemned by the writer's later judgment, they are, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... melancholy beauty of the autumn woods, the loveliness of quiet waters under fading skies, the sapphire and emerald glories, or the ominous chantings, of the sea, the benign and mysterious majesty of summer stars, the lyric sweetness of a meadow: these things urged him to musical transcripts, notations of loving tenderness and sincerity. His music is redolent of the breath and odour of woodland places, of lanes and moors and gardens; or it is saturated with salt spray; or it communicates the incommunicable ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... to devote his life to philosophy, again retarded his poetic development. Certainly it held him in leash during the years of adolescent enthusiasms when he might have become a lyric poet of the neoteric school. A Catullus or a Keats must be caught early. Indeed the very dogmas of the Epicurean school, if taken in all earnestness, were suppressive of lyrical enthusiasm. The Aetna shows perhaps the worst effects of Epicurean doctrine in its scholastic ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... The song was a lyric of merit. The words were non-sense, as befitted the play, but the music was worthy of something better. Delmars struck into it in a rich tenor that owned a quality that ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... after all his Aholibah, his first love. A crowd gathered. He asked for a doctor. A dozen students ran in a dozen different directions. The tired horse stamped its feet impatiently, and once it whinnied. The coachman lighted his pipe and watched his dying fare. Some wag sang a drunken lyric, and Ambroise repeated ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with such an idea as that expressed in ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... poems of shipwreck or of mental conflict, we can only wonder at the gift of vivid imagination by which this recluse woman can delineate, by a few touches, the very crises of physical or mental struggle. And sometimes again we catch glimpses of a lyric strain, sustained perhaps but for a line or two at a time, and making the reader regret its sudden cessation. But the main quality of these poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor sometimes exasperating, ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... mean, in a work of art considered not as a moral or theological document but as a work of art,—an aesthetic flaw. I add the word 'considerable' because we do not regard the effect in question as a flaw in a work like a lyric or a short piece of music, which may naturally be taken as expressions merely of a mood or a subordinate ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... are absorbed in their own thoughts; they stand isolated apart, as though the painter wishes to intensify the mood of dreamy abstraction. Nothing disquieting disturbs the scene, which is one of profound reverie. All this points to Giorgione being a man of moods, as we say; a lyric poet, whose expression is highly charged with personal feeling, who appeals to the imagination rather than to the intellect. And so, as we might expect, landscape plays an important part in the composition; ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... that I first came upon Les Aventures d'Adhelmar de Nointel. This manuscript dates from the early part of the fifteenth century and is attributed—though on no very conclusive evidence, says Hinsauf,—to the facile pen of Nicolas de Caen (circa 1450), until lately better known as a lyric ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... haul the frozen cod-lines are mostly aliens. The pride that once broke into singing has turned harsh and silent. "Labor" looms vast upon the future political and social horizon, but the songs of labor have lost the lyric note. They have turned into the dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed with the swift and fierce insistence of the short story, illustrated by the Kodak. In the great agricultural sections of the West and South the old bucolic sentiment still ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... works to be native to India. Although this discussion does not bear directly upon the {14} origin of our numerals, yet it is highly pertinent as showing the aptitude of the Hindu for mathematical and mental work, a fact further attested by the independent development of the drama and of epic and lyric poetry. ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... the gate, and walked rapidly in the direction of the Washington monument, which lifted a splendid silhouette against a deep blue background of sky. It was one of those soft, opal-tinted February days which fall like a lyric interlude in the gray procession of winter. The sunshine lay like flowing gold on the pavement; and the breeze that stirred now and then in the leafless boughs of the trees was as roving and provocative as the air of spring. In the winding brick walks of ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... other intuitions there is no trace of such a mixture, which proves that it is not necessary. The impression of a moonlight scene by a painter; the outline of a country drawn by a cartographer; a musical motive, tender or energetic; the words of a sighing lyric, or those with which we ask, command and lament in ordinary life, may well all be intuitive facts without a shadow of intellective relation. But, think what one may of these instances, and admitting further that one may maintain that the greater part of the intuitions of civilized ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... the works in which he was engaged, particularly 'The Irish Minstrel,' and 'Select Melodies.' Smith was a man of modest worth and superior intelligence; peculiarly delicate in his taste and feeling in everything pertaining to lyric poetry as well as music; his criticisms were strict, and, as some thought, unnecessarily minute. Diffident and retiring, he was not got acquainted with at once, but when he gave his confidence, he was found a pleasant companion ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... classic art. Why should the several literary species be impounded each in its separate paddock? Let them mingle at the pleasure of the artist's genius; let the epic and the drama catch what they can of the lyric cry; let tragedy and comedy meet and mix. Why remain in servitude to the models of Greece and Rome? Let all epochs and every clime contribute to the enrichment of art. The primitive age was above all others the age of poetry. The great Christian centuries ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow passengers, the less I was tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my imaginations, for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which, can never be recaptured. Take a few typical instances. Coleridge lost the poetical gift altogether when he left his youth behind; Wordsworth wrote all his best poetry in a few early years; Milton lost his pure lyric gift. But the most salient instance of all is Tennyson; in the two earliest volumes there is a perfectly novel charm, a grace, a daring which he lost in later life. He became solemn, mannerised, conscious of responsibility. Sometimes, as in some of the lyrics of ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Lyric Hall lies just this side of the Forty-second Street station along the line of the Sixth Avenue Elevated road, and you can look into its windows from the passing train. It was after one o'clock when ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... or no space to the specific discussion of epic and drama, as these types are adequately treated in many books. Our own generation is peculiarly attracted by various forms of the lyric, and in Part Two I have devoted especial ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... are concerned now only with the play as Da Ponte and Mozart gave it to us. In the dramatic terminology of the eighteenth century "Don Giovanni" was a dramma giocoso; in the better sense of the phrase, a playful drama—a lyric comedy. Da Ponte conceived it as such, but Mozart gave it so tragical a turn by the awful solemnity with which he infused the scene of the libertine's punishment that already in his day it was felt that the last scene as written and composed to suit the ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... investigation), to put my reader in possession of the facts so unfamiliar to the modern oracles of classical mythology! Briefly, it appears that in the best period of ancient Greece nine Muses were recognised, namely, Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry; Euterpe, of lyric poetry; Erato, of erotic poetry; Melpomene, of tragedy; Thalia, of comedy; Polyhymnia, of sacred hymns; Terpsichore, of choral song and dance; Clio, of history; and Urania, of astronomy. The last two seem to have very little in common with the addiction to singing and dancing characteristic ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... science of music. The eunuchs 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 ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... faithful reproduction of the intention of both poet and composer. This reproduction includes the revelation of the characteristics of the poem itself, whether lyric, dramatic, or in other ways distinctive. It also reveals the musical significance of the composition to which the words are set. The melodic, rhythmic, and even harmonic values must be made clear to the hearer. But interpretation includes ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... of the new sufferings of an ancient people was the Russian satirist, Shchedrin-Saltykov, and he poured forth his, sentiments in the summer of 1882, after the completion of the first cycle of pogroms, in an article marked by a lyric strain, so different from his usual style. [1] But Shchedrin was the only Russian writer of prominence who responded to the Jewish sorrow. Turgenyev and Tolstoi held their peace, whereas the literary celebrities ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow |
