"Poetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... put all his emotions and ideas into being sheriff. I've read in books about men that was disappointed in these poetic and fine-haired and high-collared affairs with ladies renouncing truck of that kind and wrapping themselves up into some occupation like painting pictures, or herding sheep, or science, or teaching school—something to make 'em forget. ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... women we became friends. We had made her acquaintance at a poetic moment, under romantic circumstances. We were all three watching a sunset, under a pink sky; we were sitting far out on the grasses of the cliff. Her house was in the midst of the grasses, some little distance from the village, attached ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... his family and tenants. The children on his estate looked up to him with loving reverence, as to a superior being, from whom nothing but good and happiness were to be expected by the deserving. For them his youth, beauty, and elegance had especial poetic charms; their sweet, simple affection, their timid, grateful devotion, were laid at his feet,—so that when moving among them he trod on unseen flowers. They loved to hear and to tell of the grand and beautiful things at that fairy palace, the Castle,—a noble old edifice, with massive ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... not look so. The world, at times, seems to be playing at being poetic, mysterious, full of wonder and romance. I am writing, as usual, by my window, the moonlight brighter in its whiteness than my mean little yellow-shining lamp. From the mysterious greyness, the olive groves and lanes beneath my terrace, rises a confused quaver of frogs, and buzz and whirr of insects: ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... with a forced gaiety, "only one of his poetic fancies. He wanted so much to see Mr. Mellot photograph the waterfall. I hope he will be in time to ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... street—they say he cheats the poor with light bread. Make me a song of that, and I'll give you some breakfast. Or there's the magistrate at the top of the hill who made the girl drown herself last week. That's a poetic subject." ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... structure, the Motive, Phrase, Period, and so forth. Unlike the measures, which are defined by the accents at their beginning, these larger factors of form are defined chiefly at their end, by the impression of occasional periodic interruption, exactly analogous to the pauses at the end of poetic lines, or at the commas, semicolons and the like, in a prose paragraph. These interruptions of the musical current, called Cadences, are generally so well defined that even the more superficial listener is made aware of a division ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... their Influence on the English Race.—2. The Mythology.—3. The Scandinavian Languages.—4. Icelandic, or Old Norse Literature: the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Scalds, the Sagas, the "Heimskringla." The Folks-Sagas and Ballads of the Middle Ages.—5. Danish Literature: Saxo Grammaticus and Theodoric; Arreboe, Kingo, Tycho Brahe, Holberg, Evald, Baggesen, Oehlenschlaeger, Grundtvig, Blicher, Ingemann, Heiberg, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... appreciate that the simplest expressions of nerve response— the reflexes—are motor in character, but it is difficult to understand how such intangible reactions as love, hate, poetic fancy, or moral inhibition can be also the result of the adaptation to environment of a distinctively motor mechanism. We expect, however, to prove that so-called "psychic" states as well as the reflexes are products of adaptation; that they occur automatically in response to adequate ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... Crosspatch's temper and the scandal about Lady X. Little by little the absolute pettiness, the dense dulness, of woman's life, breaks on the disenchanted devotee. His deity is without occupation, without thought, without resources. He has a faint faith in her finer sensibility, in her poetic nature: he fetches his Tennyson from his carpet-bag, and wastes 'In Memoriam' on a critic ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... I found out where he got them, too. He let out that he bagged them all out by the Upper St. John's River, due west of here. He declared the birds were as thick as the stars at night, but I reckon some allowance has to be made for poetic license and the red ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... long, great poet, shall thy sacred lays Provoke our wonder, and transcend our praise? Can neither injuries of time, nor age, Damp thy poetic heat, and quench thy rage? Not so thy Ovid in his exile wrote; Grief chilled his breast, and checked his rising thought; Pensive and sad, his drooping Muse betrays The Roman genius in its last decays. Prevailing warmth has still thy mind ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... thought it might help me to give the reader a better picture of our hero and his surroundings. I should have preferred to leave the said Pennewip in undisturbed intercourse with the muses; but we shall have occasion later to refer to his poetic art, when we shall quote some poems by ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... may be read and discussed simply, especially the first sentence. The teacher must try to secure from his class, if possible, what Coleridge calls "that willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith." ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... four-pence, pocketed well, Thro' a thousand rectors' lives will tell. Then still continue, ye reverend souls, And still as your rich Pactolus rolls, Grasp every penny on every side, From every wretch, to swell its tide: Remembering still what the Law lays down, In that pure poetic style of its own. "If the parson in esse submits to loss, he "Inflicts the same ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... are frequently used as proper names by being personified; that is, the ideas are spoken of as residing in living beings. This is a poetic usage, though not confined ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... frivolity. Like every aspect of life, and like most persons, it is a hint and suggestion of something high and poetic. It is an oasis of repose in the desert of our American hurry. It is a ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... opinion was, or was not, well founded. A formidable competitor appeared in the person of Fray Domingo de Guzman, the third son of Garcilasso de la Vega. Though Guzman had not inherited his father's poetic gift, he had a turn for versifying, and his burlesque glosa of Luis de ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... that Ulysses sold Polyphemus. It is precisely because Hobbes used language in this way that his translation of Homer is so ludicrous. Wordsworth broke down in his theory, that the language of poetry should be the every-day speech of men and women, though he nearly succeeded in finally extirpating "poetic diction." We think the proper antithesis is not between prosaic and poetic words, nor between the speech of actual life and a conventionalized diction, but between the language of real life (which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... days after Jones' conversation with him he was silent and thoughtful at his work. Instead of making poetic memos, like Service, in his cage, he made note of the work he waded through, and tried to picture himself in a private office. That was going one further than Jones' imaginary desk with the telephone at one's elbow, but ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... that is overworked. The hours are long and holidays and vacations are few and far between. Mother gets a great deal of maudlin sympathy and not enough tangible aid, says a writer in the Housekeeper. Our poetic conception of the true mother is that her whole life is bound up in the welfare of her children and her family. At what age are her children not, for her, a matter of serious concern? She has ever had plenty of ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... poor partridges. I hear, have emptied London entirely, and yet Drury-lane is removed to the Opera-house. Do you know that Mrs. Jordan is acknowledged to be Mrs. Ford, and Miss Brunton(825) Mrs. Merry, but neither quits the stage? The latter's captain, I think, might quit his poetic profession, without any loss to the public. My gazettes will have kept you so much au courant, that you will be as ready for any conversation at your return, as if you had only been at a watering-place. In short, -a votre intention, and to make my letters as welcome as I can, I listen to ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... grammar to the vague suggestiveness of words that call up whole troops of ideas not contained in the simple idea for which a word stands. Specific idioms are themselves at variance with grammar and logic, and the grammarians are forever fighting them; but when we go into the vague realm of poetic style, the logical mind is lost at once. And yet it is more important to use words pregnant with meaning than to be strictly grammatical. We must reduce grammar to an instinct that will guard us against being contradictory or crude in our construction of sentences, and ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... the house had a profound influence on the inmates, one and all. The effect upon his hostess was startling. He drew forth her intellect, her sense of humour, her starved poetic sense; he probed down among the dust and rust of years, and rescued triumphantly the real woman, who was being stifled to death, with her ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... have no right to compare myself with flowers," answered the other pleasantly, for she always admired her friend's poetic ideas, although other people ...
— Dorothy Dale • Margaret Penrose
... will always find in them something old.' But to return to the question you have raised, there being then amongst us no stimulus to painstaking labour, whether in desire of fame or in pressure of want, such as have the poetic temperament, no doubt vent it in song, as you say the bird sings; but for lack of elaborate culture it fails of an audience, and, failing of an audience, dies out, of itself, amidst the ordinary avocations ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a sailing expedition with the strangers. Therein they explored much of the Evenlode, the hay-harvest breeze favoring them. Another day she went with them afoot to the Hinkseys. Certain moot points of poetic identification were hardly settled by that trip, so another followed. They came home ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... that his sister Dorothy stepped into his life and saved him.' 'She soothed his mind,' the same writer says again, banished from it both contemporary politics and religious doubts, and infused instead love of beauty and dependence on faith, and so she re-awoke craving for poetic expression.' ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... mountain, being one of the spurs of the greater Sonnstein, and rises precipitously, looming, massive and lofty, like a very fortress for giants, where it stands right across that road which, if you follow it long enough, takes you on through Zirl to Landeck—old, picturesque, poetic Landeck, where Frederic of the Empty Pockets rhymed his sorrows in ballads to his people—and so on, by Bludenz, into Switzerland itself, by as noble a highway as any traveller can ever desire to traverse on a summer's day. The Martinswand is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... red shirt might have remained in poetic uncertainty had it not been mentioned a few years ago in a volume of reminiscences published by an English naval officer. The men employed in the Saladeros or great slaughtering and salting establishments for cattle in the Argentine provinces wore scarlet woollen shirts; owing to the blockade ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... which were awakened in the poetic mind of the brilliant author of "Roughing it, in the Bush." Charles Dickens also had his say in this matter, on his visit to Quebec, in May 1842, where he was the guest of the President of the Literary and Historical ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... brought with me because in youth You showed great promise of poetic gifts. You were to see my bold and warlike deeds, So that when I, King Gandalf, old and gray, Sat with my warriors round the oaken table, The king's young scald might while away Long winter evenings with ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... well defined. The drift of Provencal ideas over the borders into Lombardy may or may not have given some impetus to the growth of certain forms in Tuscany and Umbria, but at any rate it is clear that the Italian form of "Sacre Rappresentazioni" grew chiefly out of the poetic form ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... determination to remain; at other times, he gave way to the yearnings for change and opportunity. But the lure of the palette and brush possessed him beyond resistance and his taciturnity melted, when in the painter's company, to a roughly poetic ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... cards? Yet upon these "bits of painted cardboard" there has been expended a greater amount of ingenuity and of artistic effort than is to be found in any other form of popular amusement. Pope's charming epic, "The Rape of the Lock," gives us, in poetic form, a description of the faces of the cards as known to him and to ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... speak impartially, has been attended with some advantageous circumstances, that should not be overlooked. For, Sir George, it must be confessed that, notwithstanding your narrow and stiff manner of education in Scotland, a spirit of manly learning, a kind of poetic liberty, as I may call it, has begun to exert itself in that part of the island. The blustering north—forgive me, gentlemen—seems to have hardened the foreheads of her hungry sons; and the keenness with which they set ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... in nature. Description, if done by a masterly hand, can, to an intelligent mind, convey as vivid an idea as reality. What is wanting is the enthusiasm which warms at the perception of the sublime and the beautiful, the poetic mind which seizes as by inspiration its characteristic features, and the pictorial eye which discerns the appearances they exhibit, and by referring to images known to all, succeeds in causing them to be generally felt by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Miss Beezley, for it was she. 'Curiously enough, the subject which we have just been discussing is one in which he takes, I think, a great interest. I was saying, Mr MacArthur, when you came in, that few of Tennyson's works show the poetic faculty which ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... happy choice of his theme, and by the comprehensive manner in which he has treated it, Milton has been enabled by his poetic genius to give to the world in his 'Paradise Lost' a poem which, for sublimity of thought, loftiness of imagination, and beauty of expression in metrical verse, is unsurpassed ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... hearing, last autumn, of the death of the warm-hearted and gifted friend whose name heads this article; for there was much in his character and genius to remind us of the gentle author of Elia. He had the latter's genial humor and quaintness; his nice and delicate perception of the beautiful and poetic; his happy, easy diction, not the result, as in the case of that of the English essayist, of slow and careful elaboration, but the natural, spontaneous language in which his conceptions at once embodied ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Furniture A Tale of Jerusalem The Sphinx Hop Frog The Man of the Crowd Never Bet the Devill Your Head Thou Art the Man Why the Little Frenchman Wears his Hand in a Sling Bon-Bon Some words with a Mummy The Poetic ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... fresh impulse and with the exuberance of true poetical genius, his verses on the Brussels martyrs had flowed forth spontaneously from his inmost soul. They were the first, so far as we know, that Luther had ever written, though he was now forty years of age. With the same poetic impulse he composed, probably shortly after, a hymn in praise of the 'highest blessing' that God had shown towards us in the ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... this connection means a wasp and not, as explained by Mallinatha in his commentary of the Kumarasambhava, a sacrificial platform. I would remark in passing that many of the most poetic and striking adjectives in both the Raghu and the Kumarasambhava of Kalidasa are borrowed unblushingly from the Ramayana and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... been affected, perhaps improved. You have mentioned on several occasions that you noted in my letters a new tenderness, a new kindness towards my fellow-creatures, less of criticism and more of sympathy, a new love; the "birth of my poetic sense" you also spoke of once; and I myself have long been aware of a thousand fresh impulses towards charity and tolerance that had, hitherto, at any rate, lain inactive in ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... superintendents can only watch the process of nature by listening outside the door to 'the inarticulate accents and indistinct rumblings' which proclaim a great metempsychosis. 'Is there not something fanciful and poetic in the notion of this change taking place mysteriously in the darkness, when all the doors are locked and barred—for the atmosphere about the vats is death—as if nature would suffer no idle prying ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... dipus, but under some restraints of prudence in making a publication of what so dreadfully affected the most powerful personage in the state. Perhaps, in the whole history of human art as applied to the evolution of a poetic fable, there is nothing more exquisite than the management of this crisis by Sophocles. A natural discovery, first of all, connects dipus with the death of Laius. That discovery comes upon him with some ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... slender she stood before the burly Mohammed, but his ardor was not cooled by the presence of so many witnesses. With a thud he dropped to his knees, wabbling for a moment in the successful effort to maintain a poetic equilibrium. Then he began pouring forth volumes of shattered French, English and Arabic sentiment, accompanied by facial contortions so intense that they were little less ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... sense, than anything the public has possessed. This is the portrait of a remarkably handsome man.... The head is magnificent, the eyes deep and generous, the mouth sensitive, the whole expression something delicate, tender, pathetic, poetic. This was the young man with whom the phantoms of romance dallied, the young man who recited poems and was fanciful and speculative, and in love and despair, but upon whose brow there already gleamed the illumination of intellect, the inspiration of patriotism. ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... worthlessness that he was so quickly adjusting himself to the conditions of rural life; and yet from such reflections his spirit quickly rebounded. In the very soil itself, he felt a kinship, born of a hidden, elusive, cramped vein of poetic feeling that lay deep in his nature. All life, he vaguely realized, is of a piece: man and the earth to which he is born respond to the same laws. He contemplated the wheatfield, tilled partly by his ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... of his own works in public by a great writer are, in point of fact, as old as literature itself. They date back to the very origin of polite letters, both prose and poetic. It matters nothing whether there was one Homer, or whether there may have been a score of Homers, so far as the fact of oral publication applies to the Iliad and the Odyssey, nearly a thousand years (900) before the foundation of Christianity. By the lips ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... strain quite poetic, Begged her gaze on the bow in the sky, She looked—said its curve was "aesthetic." But the "tone ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Warner's first epic poem, and although he had won the critical public with his songs of the Caribbean Sea and of Nevis, the island of his birth, it was this remarkable achievement, white-hot from first to last with poetic fire, replete with fascinating pictures and living tragedy, that gave him as wide a popularity as any novelist of the day. He had visited London immediately after, and, in spite of some good folk who thought ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... something about Browning you never knew—something you have always wanted to know,—but you will be hurt that he knew it. He may be the original Grammarian of "The Grammarian's Funeral" (whom Robert Browning took—and knew perfectly well that he took at the one poetic moment of his life), but his belonging to a Browning Club—The Enemy, that is—does not mean anything to you or to any one else nowadays—either ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... had given to his creatures—the purest and highest, the sweetest and best. But man had degraded and debased it, at the temptation of Satan and the lust of the world. The expulsion of our first parents from Eden was only the poetic figure of what had happened through all the ages. It was happening now—and London, the modern Sodom, would as surely pay its penalty as did the cities of the ancient East. No need to think of flood or fire or tempest—of ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... unknown authors of The Merry-Thought had some notion, however discontinuous, of parodying the nation's polite literature. Were not Pope and Swift famous for their distinguished miscellanies? What could be more amusing than a collection of poems that represented a different poetic ideal—a collection of verse with none of the pretensions to artistic merit claimed by the superstars of the poetic world—the spontaneous productions of nonpoets in moments of idleness or desperation. Apparently some ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... Spencer. His illustrations possess at times exceeding vividness and force; and from his style on such occasions it is to be inferred, that the ganglia of this Apostle of the Understanding are sometimes the seat of a nascent poetic thrill. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Ptolemy to the Kubla Kahn of Coleridge, ran rife over the four fountains out of which flowed the wonderful river. To Livingstone was reserved the supreme honor of settling for all time the secret of this most poetic river of mystery. Long ere this he had been honored with a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society. How futile must the bit of metal have seemed to this dark, silent man, whose mind had grown away from bauble and tinsel, and who had learned in the silences the real value ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... name for his inamorata than the "feminine devil" of Henry LXXII of Reuss. He called her the "Lovely Andalusian" and the "Woman of Spain." She also inspired him to fresh poetic flights. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... rack he surveyed the two men and boy, if not with indifference, at least with apathy. Just above his head swung the sign with its legend, "Slosson—Entertainment"; but if he were Slosson, one could take the last half of the sign either as a poetic rhapsody on the part of the painter, or the yielding to some meaningless convention, for in his person, Mr. Slosson suggested none of those qualities of brain or heart that trenched upon the lighter amenities of life. He was ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... this young man, his fluting accents, poetic eyes, and modestly ingratiating moustache, the preciosity of his taste in dress, assorted singularly with an austere devotion to duty ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... think such a course eminently proper and thrifty. I'm not finding fault with it in the least. They who do this are a little inconsistent, however, in shunning so carefully that ideal cottage, over which, as young ladies, they had mild and poetic raptures. Now, I can't associate this kind of thing with you. If you had 'drawings or leadings,' as Mrs. Yocomb would say, toward a Fifth Avenue mansion, you would say so in effect. I fear you are romantic, and are under the delusion that love ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... imagination of the reader to supply the omitted details of horror), is more effective to inspire sympathy than elaborate description. The very barrenness of the narration was hideously suggestive, and the girl felt her heart beat quicker as her poetic intellect rushed to complete the terrible picture sketched by the convict. She saw it all—the blue sea, the burning sun, the slowly moving ship, the wretched company on the shore; she heard—Was that a rustling in the bushes below her? A bird! How ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... chiefly in the evening for club meetings, plays, and other social and semi-social functions, was generally silent and deserted earlier in the day; and the quiet and the view over Paradise river from the west windows of the sanctum appealed to the poetic soul of the chief editor. Dorothy, who was a very practical person herself, had a vast admiration for Frances' dreamy, imaginative temperament, and enjoyed her work as business manager of the "Argus" chiefly because it brought her into close contact with Frances; ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... displayed their richest velvets, and the gossamer-like insects in the dreamy atmosphere performed dances and undulations full of grace and mystery. And all these marvelous changes imparted to love that sweet sadness which is beyond all words poetic ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp" does not purport to be an anthology of Western verse. As its title indicates, the contents of the book are limited to attempts, more or less poetic, in translating scenes connected with the life of a cowboy. The volume is in reality a by-product of my earlier collection, "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads." In the former book I put together what seemed to me to be the best of the songs created ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... of what a Revelation ought to be. Thus the capricious dictates of reason are made to decide the quality of revealed truth. Besides, wherever a mysterious account is contained in a book which in the main is accepted, such mystery is cast out as altogether unlikely, probably the poetic version of some early legend. A miracle is recounted; one of the best attested of all. "It could never have happened," the Rationalists say, "for Nature has ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... loss of dignity, and that wounded Titan, the late W. E. Henley, was another exception. Both he and Rossetti had the faculty of being foolish, or obscene, without impairing the high seriousness of their superb poetic gifts. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... Street, and travelled backwards and forwards by omnibus—children who had no other recreation than an occasional visit to the Zoological Gardens, or a somewhat sombre walk up to Hampstead to see their aunt; and I have often regretted that they never had any experience of those perfect poetic pleasures which the boy enjoys whose childhood is spent in the country, and whose home is there. A country boarding-school ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... prostitution, the refuge of despair, alternated in the camp of the Crusaders with fanatic visions of visiting archangels, of armed and shining knights descending the slopes of heaven in their defence. From such a phantasmagoria, surpassing in the historical records all the poetic imaginations of its famous chroniclers, only a few returned to tell the tale. Among these fortunate pilgrims was Guillaume of Gruyere, who, once more safe among his home mountains, ended his life with lavish gifts to the ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... a very fine treatise on military under the title Principles of Strategy in Relation to the Campaigns of 1796. These principles seem somewhat to resemble poetic canons prepared for poems already published. In these days we are become very much more energetic, we invent rules to suit works and works to suit rules. But of what use were ancient principles of military art in presence of the impetuous genius of ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... I stood, smiling and silent, while she spoke of Walter Butler, describing him vividly, even to his amber black eyes and his pale face, and the poetic melancholy with which he clothed the hidden blood-lust that smoldered under his smooth pale skin. But there you have it—young, proud, and melancholy—and he had danced with her at Niagara, too, and—if I knew him—he had not spared her hints of that impetuous ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... as explicit as possible in thus writing about Love. But the substance in which one works here is emotion that evades definition, poetic flashes and figures of speech are truer than prosaic statements. Body and the most sublimated ecstasy pass into one another, exchange themselves and elude every net ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... warm countries certainly possess powers of imagination superior to persons in colder climates. The following description of a small room will appear very poetic to an English reader: "I am now," says a Turkish spy, writing to his employers, "in an apartment so little, that the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... the most matter-of-fact tone, unaware of anything poetic in what he said. To him it was just common sense, and ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... gentleman, whose voice had proved so musical, and set forth for the drawing-room. Already on the stair, he was seized with some compunction; but when he entered the great gallery and beheld his wife, the Chancellor's abstract flatteries fell from him like rain, and he reawoke to the poetic facts of life. She stood a good way off below a shining lustre, her back turned. The bend of her waist overcame him with physical weakness. This was the girl-wife who had lain in his arms and whom he had sworn to cherish; there was she, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... writing was done for Madrid newspapers; he reported sessions of the Cortes, and wrote all sorts of general articles. During this period he wrote two poetic dramas, never performed. His failure to gain the stage turned him to the novel, and he did not again attempt drama till 1892. Dickens and Balzac most influenced his conception of the novel. His first book, ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... of the moment. They smoked between mouthfuls and laughed without restraint. Some of the men wore longish hair and the double tie of those who wish to be mistaken for dramatists. Others affected a poetic disarrangement of collar, and fantastic beards. There were others who had wandered over the border of middle age and who were bald and strangely adipose, with mackerel eyes and unpleasant mouths. They were with young girls, gaudily but shabbily dressed, shopgirls ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... waterfalls and the birds learned music from beardless boys and draggle-coated dominies with armfuls of books. However, it may have been with his Pegasus, his mount for the hunt was no laggard. He rode a knob-jointed, muscular brute, that carried him like poetic inspiration wherever it pleased. Though Pierre's right hand was busied upholding the hunters' flag, and he had but one arm to bow-string the broncho's arching neck, the half-breed poet kept his seat with the easy grace of the plainsman born ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... selected his place of retirement, and that, in so doing, the gallant of a stately court was not perhaps undesirous of securing at well-chosen moments a brief relaxation from the heavy honours of country homage; or that the patron and poetic admirer of the dreaming Spenser might have preferred, to all more gorgeous accommodation, the quiet and unseen egress to that sea and shore, which, if we may believe the accomplished Roman,* are so fertile in the ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... triumph for the moment, but in its very triumph is its death-knell; it cannot always prevail. God has so constituted the moral universe, has so planted in the human heart the sense of right, that ultimately justice is sure to be done. "Ever the Right comes uppermost," is no mere poetic fancy, but one of God's great laws. In the light of that law, I am hopeful. I know that things cannot go on as they are going on now, that the outrageous manner in which we are at present treated cannot always continue. It is bound to end ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... its makers made the story and the rich language and the elaborate and unrivalled metre for themselves. It does not lessen this achievement that the Homeric poems may have been the fine flower of a period of poetic growth; the work that went to form them was done by Greeks. But it needs imagination to appreciate the difficulty of the task which they undertook unconsciously and performed without theory or deliberate purpose by the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... place, and susceptible to the varied, enchanting loveliness of the scenes adjacent, on land and sea. He even expressed his feelings in verse, in the Childe Harold manner,—verse which does really show a poetic habit of feeling, with an occasional happiness of expression. At Boston he experienced the last extremity of want. Friendless and alone he wandered about the streets, seeking work and finding none; until, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... this case was of a gentle description; the clay image of Osiris sprouting all over with the young green blade was pathetically poetic; but, as has been suggested, bloodthirsty ceremonies were also common enough. Human sacrifices, it is said, had at one time been offered at the grave of Osiris. We bear that the Indians in Ecuador used to sacrifice men's hearts and pour out human blood on their fields when ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... was unusually tall and stately of figure, and from her curious golden skin and massive black hair, one judged her to be a Creole, possibly a Jamaican. Her face, which was rather heavily but finely moulded, wore an expression of somewhat poetic melancholy, a little like that of a beautiful animal, but readily lit up with a charming smile now and again at some sally of her companion, with whom she seemed to be on affectionate terms, and with whom, as the play proceeded, ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... one listens to it over the dinner-table, turns altogether on this business-like aspect of the question. Nobody takes the least interest in its romantic or poetic side, in the wonderful runs of luck or the terrible stories of ruin and despair which form the stock-in-trade of the novelist. The talk might be that of a conference of commercial travellers. Everybody has his infallible nostrum for breaking the bank; but everybody looks upon the prospect ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... "Nevertheless," I added, "you needn't be so scornful about the simian type in woman. It's a concentrated peril to mankind. I've seen trouble caused in this world by kitten faces, by pure, classic faces, by ox-eyed-Juno faces, by vivid blond faces, by dreamy, poetic faces, by passionate Southern faces, but for real power of catastrophe, for earthquake and eclipse, for red ruin and the breaking up of laws, commend me to the humanized, feminized monkey face. I'll wager that when Antony first set ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... many who had read Miss Barrett's poems, felt their genius, because he had genius in his own soul, and that person was Robert Browning. That she admired his poetic work was shown in Lady Geraldine's Courtship, when Bertram ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... said that if a thing is to be called poetic it must have great ideas in it, and must successfully express them. The idea that there is poetry in machinery, has to meet the objection that, while a machine may have great ideas in it, "it does not look it." The average machine not only fails to express the idea that it stands ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... for the literatures of Greece and Rome. Does it not follow a fortiori that to cram a young child, for the purposes of a formal examination, to cram him, year after year, with the idyllic stories of the New Testament and the poetic beauties of the Old, will in all probability go a long way towards blighting in the bud the child's latent capacity for responding to the appeal, not of the Bible alone, but of spiritual poetry ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... the Amphitheatre of the Albert Hall. But for a centre of adventure I choose the Long Walk; it beckoned me somewhat as the North-West Passage beckoned my seafaring ancestors—the buccaneering mariners of Elizabethan Devon. I sat down on a chair at the foot of an old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a utilitarian plate of galvanised iron. Two ancient ladies were seated on the other side already—very grand-looking dames, with the haughty and exclusive ugliness of the English aristocracy in its later stages. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... James, Jonson began his long and successful career as a writer of masques. He wrote more masques than all his competitors together, and they are of an extraordinary variety and poetic excellence. Jonson did not invent the masque; for such premeditated devices to set and frame, so to speak, a court ball had been known and practised in varying degrees of elaboration long before his time. But Jonson gave dramatic value ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... a "romance," the Author wishes to make sure of being indulged in the common privileges of the poetic license. Through all the disguise of fiction a grave scientific doctrine may be detected lying beneath some of the delineations of character. He has used this doctrine as a part of the machinery of his story without pledging his absolute belief in it ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... They tell us that Mr. Scott's monstrous vision of a mountain of sea-water rising in a solid dome, like the glass mountain in the fairy-tale, is actually a fact, and men still go back to the fairy-tale. To what towering heights of poetic imagery might we not have risen if only the poetizing of natural history had continued and man's fancy had played with the planets as naturally as it once played with the flowers! We might have ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... make fun of a poetic legend, Larry. You have to believe everything over here or you do not get the worth of your money," ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... and unattainable. He could sigh for her with longing and perfect safety. But as time went on, with that incapacity of any human emotion to stand still, but either to go on or to go back, his passion took on a more human and less poetic aspect. She satisfied him less, and he ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Pearl, thank the Lord! I never was very poetic, but I never see one of these desert nights sparkling with their big stars, twice as big as natural, that I ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... not grown beyond the rambling, mellow kind, that drowse in poetic languor amidst flowering vines and trees. These trees, that also line the streets, meeting in cathedral arches overhead, might be stately elms of New England, poplars of the middle-west, or live-oaks of the south; ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... was so-so, and Coleridge drew a blank, or thought he did, which was the same thing; for as a man thinketh so is she. The thought of a lifetime on the banks of the Susquehanna with a woman who was simply pink and good, and who was never roused into animation even by his wildest poetic bursts, took all ambition ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... little, perhaps; but they have not so much goodness as to overcome the badness of the blasphemy of Aeschylus.' The volume, which was published anonymously, received two sentences of contemptuous notice from the 'Athenaeum,' in which the reviewer advised 'those who adventure in the hazardous lists of poetic translation to touch anyone rather than Aeschylus, and they may take warning by the author ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... of the Ode, we here quote certain passages from it, we do so because, like many similar things, it has fallen a victim to the intellectualism of our time in being regarded merely as a piece of poetic fantasy. We shall take the poet's words as literally as he himself uttered ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... in the Bird Guide or some similar book. How much actual information did Bryant have about the bird? Compare the amount of bird-lore given here with that of Shelley's or Wordsworth's "To a Skylark." Which is more poetic? ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... events which it creates. Such, then, may the real Hercules have been,—a Dorian, a Theban, or an Argive hero, whose feats of strength lived in the traditions of the people, and whom national vanity raised to the rank of a son of Zeus [Jupiter], and poetic fancy, as geographic knowledge extended, sent on journies throughout the known world, and accumulated in his person the fabled exploits of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... a death that always prowled about old people, she said, watching for the fire to go out. Many of the Celts are by nature poets, and mistress Conal often spoke in a manner seldom heard from the lips of a lowland woman. The common forms of Gaelic are more poetic than those of most languages, and could have originated only with a poetic people, while mistress Conal was by no means an ordinary type of her people; maugre her ill temper and gruffness, she thought as well as spoke ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... for the future, so long as the recital moved amid details of fortune and her position in society—that is, so long as her vanity was interested; but I began to observe with pain that her thoughts never rested on tender domesticities and poetic anticipations. This vexed me more and more. The very spell which she exercised over me made her want of tenderness more intolerable. I yearned for her love—for some sympathy with the vehement passion which was burning within me; and ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... The Campaign, which has received the fitting name of the Rhymed Despatch. Eulogistic of Marlborough and descriptive of his army manoeuvres, its chief value is to be found in its historical character, and not in any poetic merit. It was a political paper, and he was rewarded for it by the appointment of Commissioner of Appeals, in which post ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... at the beginnings of human civilisation show that women were equal, if not superior, to men in productive poetic activity. To a large extent men first learned from women the elements of the various handicrafts. I have already referred to this fact in the historical section, where we see the reasons whereby women lost their early control over the industrial arts. I wish to refer to a point of ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... of His Majesty." There are also accounts of rejoicings at Newport, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, and other places. Nor was the Muse silent on such an auspicious occasion: four adventurous flights in successive numbers of the Magazine attest the loyalty, if not the poetic genius of Colonial bards; and a sort of running fire of description, narrative, and anecdote concerning the important event is kept up in the numbers for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... is the oldest form of literary expression, but it is the expression of the oldest literary ideas, for, even when the epic is not at all primitive in form, it deals essentially with elemental moods and ideals. Epical poetry is poetic not because it is metrical and conformative to rhythmical standards,—though it usually is both,—but it is poetry because of the high sweep of its emotional outlook, the bigness of its thought, the untamed passion of its language, and ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... town, Gaius Lutorius Priscus,[4] a knight, who took great pride in his poetic talents and had composed a notable funeral oration over Germanicus for which he had received considerable money, was charged with having composed a poem upon Drusus also, during the latter's illness. For this he was tried in the senate, condemned and put to death. ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause; but in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men's bonds and mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me, consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... to his child-wife was one of the most beautiful features of his life. Many of his famous poetic productions were inspired by her beauty and charm. Consumption had marked her for its victim, and the constant efforts of husband and mother were to secure for her all the comfort and happiness their slender means permitted. Virginia died January 30, 1847, when but twenty-five ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... they impress us even if we know that they are not exactly true. She has pleasure in lively discussion, in which she willingly takes a playful, sometimes a familiar, tone; but always shows herself equal to the subject. From Elizabeth also we have some lines in verse, not exactly of a poetic strain, not very harmonious in expression, but full of high thoughts and resolves. Her letters are skilful but, owing to their allusions and antitheses, far from perspicuous products of reflection, although ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... astuteness with his scruple, of egoistic policy with his stiffness for doctrine, gave him an advantage over Danton, that made his life worth exactly three months' more purchase than Danton's. It has been said that Spinozism or Transcendentalism in poetic production becomes Machiavellism in reflection: for the same reasons we may always expect sentimentalism in theory to become under the pressure of action a very self-protecting guile. Robespierre's mind was not rich nor flexible enough for ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... I to myself, leaning forth from my chamber window into a fragrant summer night radiant with an orbed moon. But for once I was heedless of the ethereal beauty of the scene before me and felt none of that poetic rapture that would otherwise undoubtedly have inspired me, since my vision was turned inwards rather than out and my ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... of this bloody insurrection spread beyond the Old Dominion, and for years afterward, in nearly every Southern State the whites lived in a state of dread. To every dealer in flesh and blood the "Nat. Turner Insurrection" was a stroke of poetic justice. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... attention; Mark, supposing her to be on the verge of a poetic frenzy, was glad to leave her in that wicker alcove under the tulip tree and to follow Sir ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... countrymen. Their power over the public mind even rivalled that of the priests themselves, to whom indeed they bore some resemblance; for they never wore arms, were initiated into their order by secret and mystic solemnities, and homage was rendered to their Awen, or flow of poetic inspiration, as if it had been indeed marked with a divine character. Thus possessed of power and consequence, the bards were not unwilling to exercise their privileges, and sometimes, in doing so, their manners frequently ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... sustaining power, another, which we painters call "passion"—I don't know what the philosophers call it; we know it makes people red, or white; and therefore it must be something, itself; and perhaps it is the most truly "poetic" or "making" force of all, creating a world of its own out of a glance, or a sigh: and the want of passion is perhaps the truest death, or "unmaking" of everything;—even of stones. By the way, you were all reading about ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... in the year 1760, published, by the house of B. Mecom in Boston, a 72 page brochure entitled "The Rudiments of Latin Prosody with a Dissertation on Letters and the Principles of Harmony in Poetic and Prosaic Composition, collected from some ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... of nature is quite irrespective of social condition. All classes feel its force, and freely indulge the feeling. Poor as well as rich, low as well as high, contrive to gratify their poetic instincts for natural scenery. As for flowers, especially tree flowers, or those of the larger plants, like the lotus or the iris, the Japanese appreciation of their beauty is as phenomenal as is that beauty itself. Those who can afford the luxury possess the shrubs in ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... in that drama of the House Divided before the curtain fell! And there would be a sort of grim, poetic justice in it, a temptation almost to let the play work itself out to its own inevitable conclusion, only—Jimmie Dale, the final touches given to his features, stood up, and his hands clenched suddenly, fiercely—it was not just the man higher up alone, there were ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... She had never heard one before, and the idea of listening to one roused visions of poetic tenderness in her heart. A nightingale! That is to say, the invisible witness of the lover's interview which Juliette invoked on her balcony[2]; that celestial music which is attuned to human kisses; that eternal inspirer of all those languorous ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... married Charlotte Francis in 1798, wasthe author of "The Letters of Simpkin the Second, poetic recorder of all the proceedings upon the trial of Warren Hastings, Esq., in Westminster Hall," published by Stockdale, 1789. These letters, which had already appeared separately in "The World," form, as the title implies, a burlesque report of the ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... so dear to the hearts of the generations on whose lips they were fashioned, and to all who care for the fresh note, the direct word, the unrestrained emotion, rarely touch the highest points of poetic achievement. Their charm lies, not in their perfection of form, but in their spontaneity, sincerity, and graphic power. They are not rivers of song, wide, deep, and swift; they are rather cool, ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... imagine you are therefore exempt from the tenderness of Love, it rather seems you were on purpose form'd for that Soft Entertainment, such an Agreement there is between the Harmony of your Soul and your Person, and sure the Muses who have so divinely inspir'd you with Poetic Fires, have furnisht you with that Necessary Material (Love) to maintain it, and to make it burn with the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... dropped; but it was renewed again on the 20th of February by Lord Brougham, who urged upon the house the propriety of immediately emancipating the negro apprentices. His speech on this occasion gained for him the golden opinions of the good and the wise. He commenced by painting in poetic language the "delicate, calm, and tranquil joy" which pervaded the Antilles on the day when slavery ceased to exist. He continued to show that the predictions of those who had declared that labour would ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... becomes a poet, and as such is exempt in some degree from the conventional restraint imposed on those who aspire to polite society. All these well-chosen characters are made to serve the author's purpose as channels for poetic utterance that might otherwise seem irrelevant. The extent to which this is done may be seen from the way in which Hamsun lets a character in one book enter upon a theme which later becomes the subject ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... indifference, and went on with his foolish reproof—unworthy of record except for Gibbie's following behaviour. Beaten down by the suddenness of the storm, Donal had never risen from his chair, but sat glowering into the fire. He was annoyed, vexed, half-ashamed; with that readiness of the poetic nature to fit itself to any position, especially one suggested by an unjust judgment, he felt, with the worthy parson thus storming at him, almost as if guilty in everything laid to their joint charge. Gibbie on his feet looked the minister straight ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... enjoyed a terrible revenge, for as poetic justice narrowly missed having it, the extent of her advance publicity and the beauty of her clothes proved to be the rocks she went aground on. Only a lucky wave came along and floated ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Inge, and yet she had earnestly endeavored to marry her brother to a girl whom she could not consent to see the wife of her own son. Verily, when human friendships are analyzed, it seems a mere poetic ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... the beau ideal of a book for a present to an intelligent boy or girl. * * * Mr. Sidney Lanier, in editing a boy's version of Froissart, has not only opened to them a world of romantic and poetic legend of the chivalric and heroic sort, but he has given them something which ennobles and does ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... our duties, inspired by the knowledge that we were guided and assisted by the loved ones gone before. After living on the flat-as-pan-cake plain of N—— for three years, again was I disenchanted; all the poetic illusions of farm life vanished, all the oxygen seemed to be exhausted from the air, the romance of raising potatoes at a cost of five dollars a peck disappeared, the old farm hung like a millstone round my neck, we sold it and hired a pretty cottage ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... Acton was extremely fond of mathematics. He asked himself whether it could be that he was in love with her, and then hoped he was not; hoped it not so much for his own sake as for that of the amatory passion itself. If this was love, love had been overrated. Love was a poetic impulse, and his own state of feeling with regard to the Baroness was largely characterized by that eminently prosaic sentiment—curiosity. It was true, as Acton with his quietly cogitative habit observed to himself, that curiosity, pushed to a given ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... reader, art one of those who have been warmed with poetic fire, I reverence thee as my judge; and whilst others tax me with vanity, I appeal to thy conscience whether it be more than such a necessary assurance as thou hast made to thyself in like undertakings? For when I observe that writers have many enemies, such inward assurance, methinks, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... these semi-poetic honors adapted to the imaginations of the year VIII, take the positive honors adapted to the imaginations of the year XII, and the following years, brevets and grades, decorations of the Legion d'Honneur, the titles of chevalier, baron, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... himself goes quietly away into deeper solitudes. As this desire of his is much stronger than your mere idle curiosity to see something new, you rarely see Mooween even where he is most at home. And that is but another bit of the poetic justice which you stumble upon everywhere in the ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long |
