"Odyssey" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from a line in Pope's "Odyssey," which is itself probably from one in Maynwaring's First Book of ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... moon gleamed faintly on the waters. We saw fires afar off in the bay, some twinkling on the coast, others upon the waves, and heard the murmur of voices; for the night was still and solemn, like that of Cajetas's funeral. I looked anxiously on a sea, where the heroes of the Odyssey and AEneid had sailed in search of fate and empire, then closed my eyes, and dreamed of ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... that the secretary had seen a Jack with his eyes moist; a Jack pasty-faced, hollow-cheeked; and, in what was a revolutionary outburst for a unit in the offices, Peter Mortimer had put his arm around the boy in a cry for the success of the Odyssey for health which the heir was about to begin. And Mortimer's words were sweet, while the words of the farewell from the other side of the glass-paneled door marked "Private" were acrid with the disappointed ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... same line, with "soul" for "heart," occurs in the translation of the Odyssey, book xiv. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... narrowness of mediaeval notions of outdoor life, inherited together with mediaeval subjects by the poets even of the sixteenth century, must be referred the curious difference existing between the romance poets of antiquity, like Homer in the Odyssey, and the romance poets—Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Camoens—of modern times, in the matter of—how shall I express it?—the ideal life, the fortunate realms, the "Kennaqwhere." In Homer, in all the ancients, the ideal country ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... than he had found himself since entering the territories of the ancient Gauls. The breakfast, as we hinted in the conclusion of the last chapter, was admirable. There was a pate de Perigord, over which a gastronome would have wished to live and die, like Homer's lotus eaters [see the Odyssey, chap. ix, where Odysseus arrives at the land of the Lotus eaters: "whosoever of them ate the lotus's honeyed fruit resolved to bring tidings back no more and never to leave the place, but with the Lotus eaters there desired to stay, to feed on lotus and forget his ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... hurried on by her passions, resolved to write to Sarpedon an avowal of her love: she sneezes in the most tender and impassioned part of her letter. This is sufficient for her; this incident supplies the place of an answer, and persuades her that Sarpedon is her lover. In the Odyssey, we are informed that Penelope, harassed by the vexatious courtship of her suitors, begins to curse them all, and to pour forth vows for the return of Ulysses. Her son Telemachus interrupts her by a loud sneeze. She instantly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by, as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is Homer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey," "whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"—the gift of conferring good or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung as they were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Bacon's interpretation, "the Sirens, or pleasures," which has become universal since his time, is opposed alike to Plato's meaning and Homer's. The Sirens are not pleasures, but Desires: in the Odyssey they are the phantoms of vain desire; but in Plato's Vision of Destiny, phantoms of divine desire; singing each a different note on the circles of the distaff of Necessity, but forming one harmony, to which the three great Fates put words. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... information, given casually by a chance acquaintance, and John believed that it was true. It was in the region of Salzburg that his great Odyssey had begun, and now it seemed that chance, after many a curve through the smoke of battle, was taking ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... grate, where smoked and smouldered a pile of black turf from the bog—a deal table without a piece of baize to cover it, yet fraught with things not devoid of interest: a Bible, given by a mother; the Odyssey, the Greek Odyssey; a flute, with broad silver keys; crayons, moreover, and water colours, and a sketch of a wild prospect near, which, though but half finished, afforded ample proof of the excellence and skill of the boyish hand now occupied ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... best type of mind—which prefers Euripides to Sophocles, and Heine to Schiller, prefers also Emily Bronte to Charlotte Bronte, and Oliver Onions to Compton Mackenzie. Given the mind that in compiling such a list would at once drag in The Odyssey and The Psalms, and run hastily on to Sir Thomas Browne and Charles Lamb, we are instinctively conscious that when it reaches, with its arbitrary divining rod, our own unlucky age, it will skip quite lightly over Thackeray; wave an ambiguous hand ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... And you could not come to dine with us? Well, sit down, both of you, and relate to me the Odyssey of the traveller," and, turning toward Maitland, who had followed her into the salon with the insolent composure of a giant and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... sun all tracks and ways In darkness lay enshrouded. And e'en thus The utmost limit of the great profound At length we reach'd, where in dark gloom and mist Cimmeria's people and their city lie Enveloped ever.—ODYSSEY (MUSGROVE) ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... combatants were soon separated; the actors and their antagonists fell on each other's necks, and a Homeric poet, who had compiled an elegy for the evening on the "Gods coerced by the hosts of the new superstition," made up simply of lines culled from the Iliad and Odyssey, seized this favorable opportunity. He had begun to read it at the top of his voice, screaming down the general din, when everything was forgotten in the excitement caused by the entrance of a procession which was the successful result of many raids ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... wonderful promise even in those years of childhood. At the Kreuzschule, where his education began, he developed an ardent love for the Greek classics, and translated the first twelve books of the Odyssey, outside of school hours. He devoured all stories of mythology he could lay hands on, and soon began to create vast tragedies. He revelled in Shakespeare, and finally began to write a play which was to combine the ideas of ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... most beautiful of the old Greek myths woven into the story of the Odyssey make this book a good introduction to the glories of the Golden Age. "A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with pictures by ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... feeling,' she said, 'that it is a bracing place; that Homer—isn't it a funny name for a woman, it was her surname, and the boys used to call her all manner of nonsense because of it—"Iliad" and "Odyssey" of course,—I've a feeling that Homer wrote something about moors and fresh air. ...
— The Girls and I - A Veracious History • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... my desire for your society." Two longer letters are written to his young friend Lollius (Ep. I, ii, xviii). The first is a study of Homer, which he has been reading in the country. In the "Iliad" he is disgusted by the reckless selfishness of the leaders; in the hero of the "Odyssey" he sees a model of patient, wise endurance, and impresses the example on his friend. It is curious that the great poet of one age, reading the greater poet of another, should fasten his attention, ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... demons, but, different from the nations around them, considered the demons to be well-intentioned. Homer (c. 1000 B. C.) speaks frequently of demons, and in one instance in the Odyssey tells of a sick man pining away, "one upon whom a hateful demon had gazed." Empedocles (c. 490-430 B. C.) taught that demons "were of a mixed and inconstant nature, and are subjected to a purgatorial process which may ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... accomplish, and each night brings me rest, and the sweet thought that I am a little nearer to my goal than ever before. My Greek progresses finely. I have finished the ninth book of the "Iliad" and am just beginning the "Odyssey." I am also reading the "Aeneid" and the "Eclogues." Some of my friends tell me that I am very foolish to give so much time to Greek and Latin; but I am sure they would not think so, if they realized ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... and will: for this would be to deny the difference between intellect and sense, with which position Aristotle reproaches (De Anima iii, 3) those who held that "such is the will of man, as is the day which the father of men and of gods," i.e. the sun or the heavens, "brings on" [*Odyssey xviii, 135]. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the example, it has been the manifest destiny of every enterprising journalist to take an occasional trip across the continent, and personally inspect his subscribers. The latest overland Odyssey of this kind—transacted by three silent editors and one very public Speaker—is recorded in Mr. Bowles's new book; which proceeds, as one may observe, from his own publishing office and bindery, and may therefore almost claim, like the quaint little books presented by the eccentric Quincy Tufts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... compares the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," which he believed to be the poems of one poet, Homer, with the Old Testament writings, and observes that "Homer can never be put into competition with the Scriptures as touching the great fundamental, invaluable code of truth and hope;" but he shows how one may in a sense be supplementary ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... silent, prisoner to himself, walled in with his own thoughts. A moment passed and the clouds rolled away; the delight faded, and this artist among gamblers for whom speculation possessed harmony and color and form, and whose life had been an Odyssey of Stocks, recovered ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... of yourself and of me: you have fulfilled your promise, and satisfied my desires. Yet your liberality is still imperfect: with Homer you should have given me yourself; a guide, who could lead me into the fields of light, and disclose to my wondering eyes the spacious miracles of the Iliad and Odyssey. But, alas! Homer is dumb, or I am deaf; nor is it in my power to enjoy the beauty which I possess. I have seated him by the side of Plato, the prince of poets near the prince of philosophers; and I glory in the sight of my illustrious ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... exclamations and expressions of regret, as though it had been some dear friend that had been stricken to the heart. This was the culminating point that Rougon had aimed at, the denouement of his wonderful Odyssey. A loud hubbub of voices filled the yellow drawing-room. The visitors were repeating what they had just heard, and every now and then one of them would leave a group to ask the three heroes the exact truth with regard to some contested incident. The heroes ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... and hired the Kestrel, my old friend of the Cretan days, and I decided to follow the track of Ulysses in his return to Ithaca from Troy. Beginning at Santa Maura we examined every point in the Ionian Islands to which any illusion is made in the "Odyssey" as far as Cerigo and Cerigotto, meeting a storm off the former island which might well have ended our trip. A well-found Greek brig foundered only a short distance from us in the gale, and we drifted all day and till early in ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... wrecked his fortune and his own follies wasted his substance and delivered the home of his glorious youth into alien hands, he could turn from troubles that would have broken the spirit and cracked the heart of a less heroic fighter, to find solace and consolation in the golden music of the "Odyssey" and the majestic cadences ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 1855; "Thirty Poems" in 1866; and in 1876 a complete illustrated edition of his poetical writings. To the honors which these volumes brought him he added fresh laurels in 1870 and 1871 by the publication of his translation of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"—a translation which was highly praised both at home and abroad, and which, if not the best that the English language is capable of, is, in many respects, the best which any English-writing ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... easily distinguishable from other forms of literature; but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to build our definitions on some more fundamental ground then binding. Why, then, are we to add "in prose"? THE ODYSSEY appears to me the best of romances; THE LADY OF THE LAKE to stand high in the second order; and Chaucer's tales and prologues to contain more of the matter and art of the modern English novel than the whole ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she said, one day, while thus employed in the north room at Mrs. Marvyn's,—"do you know Burr told me that princesses used to spin? He read me a beautiful story from the 'Odyssey,' about how Penelope cheated her lovers with her spinning, while she was waiting for her husband to come home;—he was gone to sea, Mary,—her true ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... The bird, that most Delights itself in song.] I cannot think with Vellutello, that the swallow is here meant. Dante probably alludes to the story of Philomela, as it is found in Homer's Odyssey, b. xix. 518 rather than as later poets have told it. "She intended to slay the son of her husband's brother Amphion, incited to it, by the envy of his wife, who had six children, while herself had only two, but through mistake ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... parties from Astoria, both by sea and land, experienced on the way as many adventures, vicissitudes, and mishaps, as the far-famed heroes of the Odyssey; they reached their destination at different times, bearing tidings to Mr. Astor of the ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... but think that Achilles and Patroclus themselves prepared the entertainment, if only to do honor to the distinguished guests they received. Ordinarily the kitchen business was abandoned to slaves and women, as Homer tells us in Odyssey when he refers to the ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... have value. From Hertz my sympathies went over to Christian Winther, from Baggesen to Homer, Aeschylus, the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe. One of the first things I did as a student was to read the Bible through in Danish and the Odyssey in Greek. ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... be found, was strictly in accordance with the manners of the ancient Greeks, among whom piracy was so far from being looked upon in any other light than that of an honourable profession, that Nestor himself, in the third book of the Odyssey, asks his guests, Telemachus and Mentor, as an ordinary question, whether business or piracy was the object of their voyage. But the Bucoli (herdsmen or buccaniers,) over whom Thyamis held command, should probably, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... laugh at the nonsense of Zenodotus and Aristarchus the grammarians. I then asked him how he came to begin his "Iliad" with the wrath of Achilles; he said it was all by chance. I desired likewise to know whether, as it was generally reported, he wrote the "Odyssey" before the "Iliad." He said, no. It is commonly said he was blind, but I soon found he was not so; for he made use of his eyes and looked at me, so that I had no reason to ask him that question. Whenever I found him disengaged, I took the opportunity of conversing with him, and he ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... penalty that must be paid for this evanescent freedom, we may make the obvious remark that it is a morally dangerous freedom. As the Odyssey has it, "Wine leads to folly, making even the wise to love immoderately, to dance, and to utter what had better have been kept silent." Alcohol slackens the higher, more complicated, mental functions-our conscience, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Homer, in the Odyssey, describes Egypt "as a country whose fertile soil produces an infinity of drugs, some salutary and some pernicious, where each physician possesses knowledge ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... Now began a wonderful odyssey that, but for the dread of pursuit and capture would have seemed a journey in Fairyland to the re-united lovers. Indeed, as they travelled on day after day and danger seemed left behind, they forgot everything in the joy ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... son. Besides the usual accomplishments, French, music, dancing, and riding, she learned to read Virgil, Horace, Terence, Lucian, Homer, in the original. She appears to have read all of Terence and Lucian, a great part of Horace, all the Iliad, and large portions of the Odyssey. "Cursed effects," exclaimed her ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... velvet blackness. The air was dank and cold and presently obscene with the smell of bats, and alive with their wings, as they came sweeping about us, gibbering and squeaking. I thought of the rush of the ghosts, blown like dead leaves in the Odyssey. And then a small rock chamber branched off, and in this, lit by a bit of burning wood, we saw the bones of a holy man who lived and died there four hundred years ago. Think of it! He lived there always, with the slow ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... the greatest work does not stand at the end of a long period of development, but the first and oldest is the greatest. Nothing has ever been produced to equal the Iliad and Odyssey, written 900 B. C. We have epics that will always hold a prominent place in literature, Virgil's Aeneid, Milton's Paradise Lost, but neither these nor the many flights attempted into epic poetry before or since will be seriously considered as rivalling the rhapsodies ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... in rhyme of the fortunes of Helen, the theory that she was an unwilling victim of the Gods has been preferred. Many of the descriptions of manners are versified from the Iliad and the Odyssey. The description of the events after the death of Hector, and the account of the sack of Troy, is chiefly borrowed from ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... from the enlightened eyesight of the Greeks, and changed into space besprinkled with stars; when Zeus no longer held his divine court on its mystic summit; when oracles became mute and the fabled wonders of the "Odyssey" either vanished, or resolved themselves into prosaic commonplaces under the investigations of the skeptic or the accidental discoverer, the Church made a most strenuous protest against the destruction of ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... oir que nule autre') a chronicle of Venice. It is of the water, watery, Canale's chronicle, like Ariel's dirge; he has indeed, 'that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the elements which it contemplates.' Here is nothing indeed, of 'the surge and thunder of the Odyssey', but the lovely words sparkle like the sun on the waters of the Mediterranean, and like a refrain, singing itself in and out of the narrative, the phrase recurs, 'Li tens estoit clers et biaus ... et lors quant il furent en mer, li mariniers drecerent les voiles au vent, et lesserent ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... peninsula, or who clung with precarious footing to the sea-shore of Philistia and the rocky steeps of Tyre and Sidon,—these were seafarers. From them their Greek off-shoots, the Ionian islanders, inherited something of the maritime faculty. There are traces in the "Odyssey" of a nautical language, of a technology exclusively belonging to the world "off soundings," and an exceeding delight in the rush and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... for a big epic, it seems to me. By the way, what was the date that this religion was laughed away. I can remember perfectly the downfall of the Homeric deities—how many years there were when the common people believed in the divine origin of the Odyssey, while the educated classes were more or less discreetly heretical, until at last the whole Olympian outfit became poetic myths. But strangely enough I do not recall just the date when we began to demand a god of dignity ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... regard to rings, both in his Iliad and Odyssey, they were, notwithstanding, used in the time of the Greeks and Trojans; and from them they were received by several other nations. The Lacedemonians, as related by Alexander, ab. Alexandro, pursuant to the orders of ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... by a characteristic passion for strong, abnormal men. This type reappears in almost all his narratives. Here it is old Isergil, whose Odyssey of Love swells to saga-like magnitude. There we find the bold and fearless smuggler Chelkash, in the story of that name. Now it is the brazen, wanton, devoted Malva, who prefers the grown man to the inexperienced youth. Anon, the red Vaska, boots and janitor of the brothel. And there are numbers ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... Kidnapped) will take but lukewarmly to Catriona, having had five years in which to forget its predecessor. No: the title of the great story is The Memoirs of David Balfour. Catriona has a prettier name than David, and may give it to the last book of her lover's adventures: but the Odyssey ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Browning, Elizabeth B. Bryant. Byron. Burns. Campbell. Chaucer. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Coleridge. Cowper. Dante. Evangeline. Familiar Quotations. Favorite Poems. Goethe. Goldsmith. Hood. Hemans, Mrs. Homer's Odyssey. Homer's Iliad. Hiawatha. Holmes. Idylls of the King. In Memoriam. Kipling. Keble's Christian Year. Longfellow. Lady of the Lake. Lalla Rookh. Light of Asia. Lowell. Lucile. Marmion. Miles Standish, Courtship of Milton. Moore. Poe. Paradise ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... with greater probability, to their violent love of glory; for the truth of which, we have the authority of him who of all others saw farthest into human nature, and who introduces the heroine of his Odyssey, the great pattern of matrimonial love and constancy, assigning the glory of her husband as the only source of ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... mine to frame my Odyssey: Oh, little do they know My conquest and the kingdom that I keep! The meadows of the musk-ox, where the laughing grasses grow, The rivers where the careless conies leap. Beyond the silent Circle, where white men are fierce and few, I lord it, and I mock ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... their lives. In her they lived imaginatively, and in gossiping of her husband who drank, of her scandalous brother, of Lord William Bentley her friend, member of Parliament for the division, they had their own Odyssey enacting itself, Penelope and Ulysses before them, and Circe and the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... in the Odyssey who cared for hogs and cattle etc. were certainly in a better condition in many respects than the peasants of Attica, who were free, but buried in debt until the time of Solon. Concerning the mildness of the treatment of slaves in very early Roman times, see Plutarch, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... although she made fun of him as she did so, about that 'Odyssey' of the barricades and of the hulks which made up Bakounine's history, and which is, nevertheless, the exact truth; about his adventures as chief of the insurgents at Prague and then at Dresden; of his first death sentence; ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... his country home in Roslyn, Long Island, his old acquaintance with the Greek and Latin classics. From this continued study there resulted naturally in 1870 his elaborate translation of Homer's Iliad, which was followed by that of the Odyssey in 1871. These scholarly works, cast in strong and polished blank verse, won high praise from American critics, and even achieved a popular success, although they were not warmly acclaimed, in England. Among literarians they are still regarded as in a manner ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... that it became the usual metre for long poems of a reflective or descriptive cast. Professed imitations of Milton's verse were many; among them, Addison's Translation of a Story out of the Third Aeneid, Broome's experiment in the translation of the Eleventh Odyssey, Fenton's fragments of two books of the Iliad, and Christopher Pitt's paraphrase of Psalm cxxxix. In the first year of the eighteenth century John Philips showed, in his Splendid Shilling, how the style of Milton might be applied, for the purposes of burlesque, to humble subjects, a lesson ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... Iliad upholds the national mythology, or the only accredited religion; and by a bold fiction, bordering upon truth, displays in an Elysium and Tartarus, the eternal mansions of the good and bad, the strongest incentive to virtue and penalty to vice. Indeed, that both this and the Odyssey had a moral object, and that this object was recognized by the ancients, may be inferred from Horace, who says of Homer, in ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... say that the glorious old Sciote was a myth, and the Odyssey a magazine worked out by clever contributors. They might as well assert that all his marshals would have ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... he visualises or focusses his object. Does not that untranslatable liparos aither of Homer—the shining upper air—suggest not only the physical atmosphere breathed by the gods of Olympus and the great-hearted Odysseus, but also the poetic atmosphere of the Odyssey itself? ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... must work. Homer is Homer because he is so simply true alike to earth and sky,—to the perpetual experience and perpetual imagination of mankind. Had he gone working around the edges, following the occasional detours and slips of consciousness, there would have been no "Iliad" or "Odyssey" for mankind to love and for Pope to spoil. The great poets tell us nothing new. They remind us. They bear speech deep into our being, and to the heart of our heart lend a tongue. They have words that correspond to facts in all men and women. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... may believe that some human beings are gifted with second sight, we cannot accept as true the prophetic vision that came to Runolf, Thorstein's son; or that of Njal who, on the evening of the onslaught, like Theoclymenus in the Odyssey, saw the whole board and the meats upon it "one gore ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... Homer there truly begins to be himself. The battle of the Scamander, the funeral of Patroclus, and the high and solemn close of the whole bloody tale in tenderness and inexpiable sorrow, are wrought in a manner incomparable with anything of the same kind. The Odyssey is sweet, but there is nothing like this." About this time, prompted by Mrs. Gisborne, he began the study of Spanish, and conceived an ardent admiration for Calderon, whose splendid and supernatural ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... the story of the yellow horse. It finished its mysterious odyssey in the stables of Savoye-Rollin, where Licquet often visited it, as if he could thus learn its secret. For a doubt remained, and Real's suggestion haunted him: "If the horse had only served for Mme. Acquet's flight, they would not advise the strange precaution ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... is any poet who may safely be described as a classic, it is Sophocles; and yet Pater declares that the "Philoctetes" of Sophocles, if issued to-day, would be called romantic. And he points out—what indeed has been often pointed out—that the "Odyssey"[7] is more romantic than the "Iliad:" is, in fact, rather a romance than a hero-epic. The adventures of the wandering Ulysses, the visit to the land of the lotus-eaters, the encounter with the Laestrygonians, the experiences in the cave of Polyphemus, if allowance be ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... since George, though a most amiable boy, and ill of the same fever in another room, was left to get well in the usual way, by medicine and slops, without any thumping certainly, but also without any extra consolations from either Iliad or Odyssey. But what ministered perpetual fuel to the thumping-mania of Francis Coleridge was a furor of jealousy—strangely enough not felt by him, but felt for him by his old privileged nurse. She could not inspire her own passions into Francis, but she could point his ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... old English patent medicines reached a new point in their American odyssey. They had first crossed the Atlantic to serve the financial interests of the men who promoted them. During the Revolution they had lost their British identity while retaining their British names. The Philadelphia pharmacists, ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... eightieth year. Winckelmann, one of the most famous writers on classic antiquities, was the son of a shoemaker, and lived in obscurity and ignorance until the prime of life. Hobbes, the English philosopher, published his version of the Odyssey in his eighty-seventh year, and his Iliad one year later. Chevreul, the great French scientist, whose untiring labors in the realm of color have so enriched the world, was busy, keen and active when Death called him, ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... Carter, but I believe you will agree with me that a wife, and especially the wife of a clergyman and a scholar, should be able to read a page of Dr. Barrow's sermons without yawning, and should not drop Mr. Pope's Iliad or Odyssey in five minutes unless she happened to light upon some particularly exciting adventure. I therefore dismissed the thought of these young ladies, and the daughters of the surveyor were for the same reasons ineligible, with the added objection that if I chose one of them the squire and his ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... be made of Felix Weingartner, whose 'Genesius' (1892) and 'Orestes' (1902) are said to contain much fine music; of August Bungert, whose trilogy founded upon the Odyssey has been received with favour in Dresden, though it does not appear to have made much way elsewhere; and of Hans Pfitzner, whose 'Rose von Liebesgarten' (1901) is one of the most promising operas of ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... growing impatient of his uncle's cellar Odyssey and was calling aloud for a cigar, while he scoured ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... and some vague traditions. Mr M'Queen alledged that Homer was made up of detached fragments. Dr Johnson denied this; observing, that it had been one work originally, and that you could not put a book of the Iliad out of its place; and he believed the same might be said of the Odyssey. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... the oddest Odyssey on which ever mortals embarked. The man with the automobile, the corn-cure, and the baby grew to be legendary in the villages of Provence. When the days were fine, Jean in his basket assisted at the dramatic performance in the market-place. Becoming a magnet for the women, and ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... an enthusiastic admirer of the ancient classics—Homer and the Greek tragedians in particular. From the best translations of the ancient tragedies he selected for reading aloud the most striking passages, and Pope's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' he read several times to his family, in ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... blind bard who on the Chian strand, By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey Rise to the ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... swear They'd still be playing at leap-frog in the dark, And show no glimmer of sense. And yet—to hear Those wittols talk, you'd think you'd but to mix A bushel of good Greek letters in a sack And shake them roundly for an age or so, To pour the Odyssey out. At last, I told, Those disputants what my wife had said. One night When I was tired and all my mind a-dust With pondering on their atoms, I was called To supper, and she placed before me there A most delicious salad. 'It would appear,' I thought aloud, 'that if these pewter dishes, ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... when I had quite done, "this is a great epic, a great Odyssey of yours. You must tell it, sir, in a sound Latinity when your scholarship is riper; or in English if you please, though for my part I prefer the stronger tongue. You have rolled much; quae regio in terris—what parish in Scotland (to make a homely ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was no grain to be grinded, contrived to have a meeting with the goblin by watching in his mill till night. The ourisk then entered, and demanded the miller's name, and was informed that he was called Myself; on which is founded a story almost exactly like that of OUTIS in the "Odyssey," a tale which, though classic, is by no means an elegant or ingenious fiction, but which we are astonished to find in an obscure district, and in the Celtic tongue, seeming to argue some connexion or communication ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure. He looked wildly up, and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast; and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer's polypus in the Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts, over the edge of ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... the fire of Vesuvius. Above the trees of the garden shone white crags, unsubstantial, unearthly in the divine moonlight. There was no sound, yet to intense listening the air became full of sea-music. It was the night of Homer, the island-charm of the Odyssey. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... comparatively recent generations such an idea as that never had dawned on anybody's mind, and the story of the achievement of that progressive interpretation of history is one of the most fascinating narratives in the long record of man's mental Odyssey. In particular, the Christian who desires to understand the influences, both intellectual and practical, which are playing with transforming power upon Christianity today, upon its doctrines, its purposes, its institutions, and its ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... xith book of the Odyssey gives a very dreary and incoherent account of the infernal shades. Pindar and Virgil have embellished the picture; but even those poets, though more correct than their great model, are guilty of very strange inconsistencies. See Bayle, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... writing exactly in the spirit of the heroic ages, with no thought or feeling suggested by the experience of the last two thousand years, it will fully answer his expectations. The work is so far Greek as to read in many parts like Chapman's translation of the Odyssey; though it must be confessed that Homer is, if not a better Pagan, at least a greater poet than Mr. Morris. Indeed, it appears to us that Mr. Morris's success is almost wholly in the reflected sentiment and color of his work, and it seems, therefore, to have no positive value, and to add nothing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... action cannot be known. Of characters, either not yet introduced, or shown but upon few occasions, the full extent and the nice discriminations cannot be ascertained. The fable is plainly implex, formed rather from the Odyssey than the Iliad; and many artifices of diversification are employed, with the skill of a man acquainted with the best models. The past is recalled by narration, and the future anticipated by vision: but he has been so lavish of his poetical art, that it is difficult ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... all about your old Odyssey—your old Horace and all those things," she said threateningly. "I am not as ignorant as ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... preserved in Europe would add sundry volumes full of tales to those hitherto translated; and here the Wortley Montagu copy can be taken as a test. We may, I believe, safely compare the history of The Nights with the so-called Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, a collection of immortal ballads and old Epic formulae and verses traditionally handed down from rhapsode to rhapsode, incorporated in a slowly-increasing body of poetry and finally welded together about ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... dwarfing all others, is Homer,—"the Bible of the Greeks," as later ages will call it. Even in the small school we visit, several of the pupils can repeat five or six long episodes from both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," and there is one older boy present (an extraordinary, but by no means an unprecedented case) who can repeat BOTH of the long epics word for word.[] Clearly the absence of many books has then its compensations. ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... in the Ceres, however, to his sorrow, for the voyage home was a long and dreadful one. The record of those terrible fifty-eight days, carefully set down in his journal, reads like an Odyssey of misfortune and almost ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... accompany the intercourse of a higher with a lower civilization. The Phoenicians developed the institution into a great historic agency. Closely associated with piracy at first, their commerce gradually freed itself from this and spread throughout the Mediterranean lands. A passage in the Odyssey (Book XV.) enables us to trace the genesis of the Phoenician ...
— The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin • Frederick Jackson Turner
... to secure a furred pouch, which could have been ripped open without any attempt on the spring, reminded me of the verses in the Odyssey, where Ulysses, in a yet ruder age, is content to secure his property by casting a curious and involved complication of cordage around the sea-chest ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... O'Brien, O'Donnell, steps out of a past well-nigh co-eval with the heroisms and tragedies that uplifted Greece and laid Troy in ashes, and swept the Mediterranean with an Odyssey of romance that still gives its name to each chief island, cape, and promontory of the mother sea of Europe. Ireland, too, steps out of a story just as old. Well nigh every hill or mountain, every lake or river, bears the name today it bore a thousand, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... be satisfied with the antiquity of the dance, practically as we have it, from lines 187-8, Book VI. of the Odyssey: ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... let us consider its functions in those in whom it is unique. Fortunately scholars in every age have preserved important facts concerning the power of recollection. The classic orators contain repeated reference to traveling singers, who could recite the entire Iliad and Odyssey. In his "Declamations," speaking of the inroads disease had made upon him, Seneca remarks that he could speak two thousand words and names in the order read to him, and that one morning he listened to the reading of two hundred verses of poetry, and in the afternoon recited ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... tall. They even threatened the immortals, raising the din of tumultuous war on Olympus, and strove to set Ossa upon Olympus and wood-clad Pelion upon Ossa, in order to scale heaven. But Jove destroyed them both." Odyssey, xi. 306-317. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... mind—I passed on, without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice children's books as any of the others. Old Homer wrote admirably for little folk, especially in the Odyssey; a copy of which,—in the only true translation extant,—for, judging from its surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope to be,—I found in the house of a neighbour. Next came the Iliad; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... consideration are introduced either in the Iliad or Odyssey by their own name only, but their patronymic is given also. To this ceremonial I have generally attended, because it is a circumstance of my ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... among the idle questions, which were unworthy of wise men, the dispute whether Homer wrote both the Iliad and Odyssey, and in what countries Ulysses wandered. Notwithstanding the "Stoic's philosophic pride," these inquiries have still an interest to minds of the highest order—such is the homage which genius extorts from the remotest ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... Homer's life, there has been much difference of opinion about him among learned men. Many have believed that Homer never existed. Others have thought that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed not by one author, but by several. "Some," says the English poet, Walter Savage Landor, "tell us that there were twenty Homers, some deny that there was ever one." Those who believe that there were "twenty Homers" think ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... putting to an end The hunter's supper on his friend. 'Tis thus sage Pilpay's tale I follow. Were I the ward of golden-hair'd Apollo, It were, by favour of that god, easy— And surely for your sake— As long a tale to make As is the Iliad or Odyssey. Grey Rongemail the hero's part should play, Though each would be as needful in his way. He of the mansion portable awoke Sir Raven by the words he spoke, To act the spy, and then the swift express. The light gazelle alone had had th' address The hunter to engage, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... ought to be, a new Iliad or Odyssey; in other words, a poetic representation of a course of events consistent with the highest laws of moral government, whether it delineate the general history of a people, or narrate the fortunes of a chosen hero. If we pass in review ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... language before it had been perfected and adapted to literary purposes by an Ennius, a Virgil, and a Horace, and they are written in the old native Saturnian verse, into which Livius Andronicus, "the Father of Latin literature," translated the Odyssey. Consequently they show us the language before it had gained in polish and lost in vigor under the influence of the Greeks. The second of these two little poems is a finger-post, in fact, at the parting of the ways for Roman civilization. It was upon a tablet ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... Odyssey gives Homer the opportunity of setting forth the domestic character of Odysseus, in his profound attachment to wife, child, and home, in such a way as to adorn not only the hero, but his ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of course, is at the opposite pole of the poet's genius. A few plain verses of the Odyssey, almost bald in their reticence, are the point de repere of the most magical vision expressed in the most musical verse. Here is the languid charm of Spenser, enriched with many classical memories, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Pope's Third Book of the "Odyssey," deposited in the Museum, is written upon the back of a letter signed "E. Young," which is clearly the handwriting of our Young. The letter, dated only May 2nd, seems obscure; but there can be little doubt that the friendship he requests was a literary ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... would take Dante and Homer with me, instead of Mudie's Books, which I read through directly. I took Dante by way of slow Digestion: not having looked at him for some years: but I am glad to find I relish him as much as ever: he atones with the Sea; as you know does the Odyssey—these are ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... "The men and women of the Iliad and Odyssey are habitually religious. The language of religion is often on their tongues, as it is ever on the lips of every body in the East at this day. The thought of the gods, and of their providence and government ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop of a very ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the temple below. All the country round is famed in classic and poetic lore. The Promontory (once poetically the island) of Circe is still the Monte Circello: here was the region of the Lestrygons, and the scene of part of the AEneid and Odyssey; and Corinne has superadded romantic and charming associations quite as delightful, and ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... life of an anthropologist is no doubt filled much of the time with the monotonous routine of carefully assembling powdery relics of ancient races and civilizations. But White's lone Peruvian odyssey was most unusual. A story pseudonymously penned by one of the ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... the solemn and powerful interview of Hercules and Ulysses, see close of Odyssey XI. Wraith (Icel. vordhr, guardian) is here used for SHADE. In Scottish superstition it signifies the shadow of a person seen before death, as in 'Guy Mannering,' chap. x: 'she was uncertain if it were the gipsy, or her WRAITH.' The most notable use ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... vallee"! ["What is heard in the valley." Liszt's work bears the title "Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne" ("What is heard on the mountain.")] Preller [Friedrich Preller, the celebrated painter of the Odyssey pictures] has found beautiful trees in the Duchy of Oldenburg which serve him as a recovery of the "Recovery" [Or a "recreation of the Recreation." I do not know which is meant. The original is "qui lui servent d'Erholung von der 'Erholung.'"—Translator's note.]; ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... "Mark Twain" took its soundings! Then came a series of far greater books—"Roughing It," "Life on the Mississippi," "The Gilded Age" (in collaboration ), and "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn"—books that make our American "Odyssey", rich in the spirit of romance and revealing the magic of the great river as no other pages can ever do again. Gradually Mark Twain became a public character; he retrieved on the lecture platform the loss of a fortune earned by his books; he enjoyed his honorary ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... delight, he is cruel, vindictive, and incredibly deceitful. It is evident that successful beguiling, the power of telling an elaborate, plausible, and imperturbable lie on occasions, is an heroic quality in the Odyssey. Odysseus is not a man who scorns to deceive, or who would rather take the consequences than utter a falsehood. His strength rather lies in his power, when at bay, of flashing into some monstrous fiction, dramatising ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... from the books themselves showing similarities of style and method of treating subjects too great for us to admit non-identity in the writers. M. Reynaud lived at a time when it was all the fashion to suggest that old works that had come down to us, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even such national epics as the Cid and the Arthur Legends and the Nibelungenlied were to be attributed to several writers rather than to one. We have passed that period of criticism, however, and have reverted to the idea of single authorship for these works, and the same conclusion has ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... because it is believed to be unique: but many precedents for plunging the reader in medias res, as does the surviving text, might be found in the modern short story of the artist in style. As M. Boissier points out Varro might have cited the beginning of the Odyssey as ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... has been our aim in this book to reproduce the substance of Homer's Odyssey in simple modern English. We have not hesitated to omit and compress where we thought fit, but we have done our best to make a faithful translation within our limits, and to keep what we ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... So out comes the Odyssey, and a flower finds the place; he begins to read . . . but she responds not, again the dark deep eyes are off "upon their search." Well, if the books were not its goal, the statues must be—and they will surely bring the word he increasingly ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... did not expect so poetical an interruption; but since the memory of the Odyssey has been thus evoked, I shall ask the Chamber to kindly remember that Ulysses, though disguised as a beggar and loaded with insults, was yet able to string his bow and easily get the better of his enemies. [Violent murmurs from the Centre.] I vote for leave of absence for ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Celina suffered greatly, and indirectly, Aniela. My aunt was in a bad temper about the damage done to the park, and as usual, vented it on Chwastowski. The peppery old gentleman, who probably was caned often enough over his Homer, had evidently not forgotten the Odyssey, nor his ready speech either, for he replied to my aunt that if he were AEolus he would not serve her as agent, and bear with her unjust tantrums. My aunt gave way this time, merely because of the redoubled threats from the skies. It had grown very still all at once, ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... though the game must have originated with some person, perhaps Schatrenschar, yet it reached its present form and perfection only through many touchings and retouchings of men and generations. Pope's translation of the "Odyssey" has led many persons to think that chess was known to the ancient Greeks, because, in describing the sports of Penelope's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... are, it is whispered—by white-haired old men the memory of whose significant phrases awakes one in the middle of the night longing for the valley of Durance—that if a resolute, keen-eyed adventurer would traverse unostentatiously the route taken by Monticelli during his Odyssey the rewards might be great. It is an idea that grips one's imagination, but unfortunately it is an idea that gripped the imagination of others thirty years ago. Not an auberge, hotel, or hamlet has been left unexplored. The fine-tooth comb ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... government of Egypt under Pharaoh with that in China in the days of Confucius and with that of Greece in the days of the siege of Troy. Homer, Iliad and Odyssey; Life ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... Perhaps that was it—to barter his phantom greatness for money, to dazzle some rich fool of an American girl. In that case Karlov would be welcome. But wait a moment. The chap had come in from the west. In that event there should be an Odyssey of some kind tucked away in ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... of the time was of a purely decorative character, and was quite incapable of representing in any adequate way the vivid and lively imagination of the poets; and, for that matter, for many centuries after the date of the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey, Hellenic art made no attempt to cope with any so ambitious problems. Even when the art of sculpture had attained to a considerable degree of mastery over material and expression, we find its aims and conceptions lagging far behind those of the poet. This ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... Offices, Laelius, Cato Major, Paradoxes, Scipio's Dream, Letter to Quintus. Cicero On Oratory and Orators. Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, The Nature of the Gods, and The Commonwealth. Juvenal. Xenophon. Homer's Iliad. Homer's Odyssey. Herodotus. Demosthenes. 2 Vols. Thucydides. AEschylus. Sophocles. Euripides. 2 Vols. Plato ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... given out, that Homer had stolen from anterior poets whatever was most remarkable in the Iliad and Odyssey. Naucrates even points out the source in the library at Memphis in a temple of Vulcan, which according to him the blind bard completely pillaged. Undoubtedly there were good poets before Homer; how absurd to conceive that an elaborate poem could be ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... high-backed chair to the fireside, and allowed himself to forget the two volumes that had still to be struggled through, in a grateful sense of the portion that was achieved. In a few minutes it occurred to him that it would be delightful to read a scrap of the 'Odyssey'; he went to the shelves on which were his classical books, took the desired volume, and opened it ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... greatest, after Dryden, of all the second class poets of his country. His Rape of the Lock, the most original of his poems, established his fame. But his greatest works were the translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, the Dunciad, and his Essay on Man. He was well paid for his labors, and lived in a beautiful villa at Twickenham, the friend of Bolingbroke, and the greatest literary star of his age. But he was bitter and satirical, irritable, parsimonious, and vain. As a versifier, he has ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a weakness. Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more close to the form of Dante? ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... that Achilles was more really a Greek hero than any Greek who ever lived, because he was the apotheosis of Greek chivalry, and as such was the expression of the Greeks rather than merely a Greek. The Iliad and the Odyssey are not merely epics ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... narrative,' says Mr. T., 'consists in the minute description of the local domestic manners of the personages.' The charm consists, I think, in the blending of these manners with the beauty of Nature, and the ease and suitability of the versification. Voss's translation of the Odyssey is praised for being so perfect an imitation of the original. The Greek has been rendered, 'with a fidelity and imitative harmony so admirable, that it suggests to the scholar the original wording, and reflects, as from a mirror, every beauty and every blemish of the ancient poem.' ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... infant there are "as it were sparks of virtue"—half-unconscious principles of love and gratitude; and these germs bear fruit, as the child develops into the man. We have also an instinct which attracts us towards the pursuit of wisdom; such is the true meaning of the Sirens' voices in the Odyssey, says the philosopher, quoting from the poet ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... ISLAND has appeared? In the November number of Henley's Magazine, a capital number anyway, there is a funny publisher's puff of it for your book; also a bad article by me. Lang dotes on TREASURE ISLAND: 'Except TOM SAWYER and the ODYSSEY,' he writes, 'I never liked any romance so much.' I will inclose the letter though. The Bogue is angelic, although very dirty. It has rained - at last! It was jolly ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson |
