"Sonnet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was sure that Peter's love for his wife, though perhaps that of a primitive man, was of the true Portuguese stamp, and with this view composed the following pleasing Sonnet: ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... Angelo: his enemy doubtless fell crushing through the roof and so downwards. He is as natural as blank verse—that bronze angel-set, rhythmic, grandiose. You'll see, some day or other, he's a great sonnet, sir, I'm sure of that. Milton wrote in bronze; I am sure Virgil polished off his Georgics in marble—sweet calm shapes! exquisite harmonies of line! As for the Aeneid; that, sir, I consider to be so many bas-reliefs, mural ornaments ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... recitation): Every poet that ever lived has put that thought into a sonnet. He must: he can't help it. (He looks to her for assent, and notices her absorption in the poker.) Haven't you been listening? ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... if you have it with you. A taste for literature is in the family. Once a second cousin of ours—you never knew him—wrote me a sonnet!" ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... Florence and Pisa George Gordon Byron Stanzas for Music George Gordon Byron "When As a Lad" Isabel Ecclestone Mackay "Around the Child" Walter Savage Landor Aladdin James Russell Lowell The Quest Ellen Mackey Hutchinson Cortissoz My Birth-Day Thomas Moore Sonnet on His having Arrived to the Age of Twenty-Three John Milton On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year George Gordon Byron Growing Gray Austin Dobson The One White Hair Walter Savage Landor Ballade of Middle Age Andrew Lang Middle Age Rudolph Chambers Lehmann To Critics Walter ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... After describing this vision, he says, that, thinking of what had appeared to him, he "proposed to bring it to the knowledge of many who were famous poets at that time; and since I had already seen in myself the art of speaking words in rhyme, I proposed to write a sonnet, in which I would salute all the vassals of Love; and praying them to give an interpretation of my vision, I wrote to them that which I had seen in my slumber. And I ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... number of the artistic requirements than such situations usually presented. He was still dallying with this pleasant vagueness of sensation when he picked up a copy of a magazine, and the name Katherine Colebrooke caught his eye and held it like the flight of a comet. Her contribution was a sonnet entitled "The Miracle." As a naive emotional confession, "The Miracle" interested him; as a sonnet, ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... received his liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He was possessed of an obsession that drove him north. The homing instinct, Irvine called it, after he had expended the selling price of a sonnet in getting the animal ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... sonnet." Well, I reckon not, I would not scorn a rondeau, villanelle, Ballade, sestina, triolet, rondel, Or e'en a quatrain, humble and forgot, An so it made my Pegasus to trot His morning lap what time he heard the bell; An so it made the poem stuff to jell— To mix a met.—an so it boil'd ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... eager for pleasure, her eyes sparkled with youth and gaiety, but when shy or thoughtful or impatient her mouth was too large and closely set, her low thick brows made her eyes look sullen and opaque, their blue too dark even for beauty. It was a day when "pencilled" eyebrows inspired the sonnet, when mouths were rosebuds, or should be for fashion's sake, when forms were slight and languid, and a freckle was a blemish on the pink and white complexions of England's high-born maidens. Anne was tanned by the winds of moor and sea, she had a superb majestic figure, and strode when she took her ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... Giovanni Sanzio's only claim to fame rests on his being the father of his son. Of the boy's mother we have only obstructed glances and glimpses through half-flung lattices in the gloaming. Raphael was her only child. She was scarce twenty when she bore him. In a sonnet written to her, on the back of a painting, Raphael's father speaks of her wondrous eyes, slender neck, and the form too frail for earth's rough buffets. Mention is also made of "this child born in purest love, and sent by God to comfort ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... their Reception. If they chanced to like one more than another, they would be cutting her Name in the Table, or Chalking out her Figure upon a Wall, or talking of her in a kind of rapturous Language, which by degrees improved into Verse and Sonnet. These were as the first Rudiments of Architecture, Painting, and Poetry among this Savage People. After any Advantage over the Enemy, both Sexes used to Jump together and make a Clattering with their Swords and Shields, for Joy, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... already set in, but there was a moon in the cold grey sky, that I could almost have thanked in a sonnet for a light which I felt was never more welcomely dispensed, when I thought of the cross roads and dreary country I had to pass before I reached the longed for haven of Chester Park. After I had left the direct road, the wind, which had before been piercingly keen, fell, and I ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... admit that I am thinking of a little thing," he said with diffidence, as though he were a budding poet with a sonnet on his mind. ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... defiling through those gates into the courts within. The modern bricks and mortar with which that picturesque scene has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows and bright green shutters which now interrupt the flowing lines of arch and gallery; these disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of a sonnet sung by Folgore, when still the Parties had their day, and this deserted city was the centre of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... his loom, Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom, High as the highest peak of Furness fells, Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells: In truth the prison unto which we doom Ourselves no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground; Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... lies immediately before him. As for me, life has resolved simply into a time during which I must get upon paper as many as possible of the poems with which my heart is stuffed like a schoolboy's pocket." He quotes from "that simple and powerful sonnet of dear old William Drummond of Hawthornden": — Know what I list, this all cannot me move, But that, O me! — I both ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... sat down to study he found himself in a more cheerful mood than he had been in for many a day, though he could not help wondering what had become of Leo. As he went on thinking where the boy could be he was inspired to write what he called a sonnet upon the subject. Here ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... night I'll put in practice. Therefore, sweet Proteus, my direction-giver, 90 Let us into the city presently To sort some gentlemen well skill'd in music. I have a sonnet that will serve the turn To give the onset to thy ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... of a society which she knew only by hearsay. Hither came, unwittingly, simple-minded Church dignitaries, who, Sybell hoped, might influence for his good the young agnostic poet who had written a sonnet on her muff-chain, a very daring sonnet, which Doll, who did not care for poetry, had not been shown. Hither, by mistake, thinking it was an ordinary dinner-party, came Hugh, whom Sybell said she had discovered, and who was not aware that he was in need of discovery. ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... Exercise, l. 71, Times for times. Also where the employment or omission of a capital is plainly due to misprinting, as too frequently in the 1673 edition, I silently make the correction. Examples are, notes for Notes in Sonnet xvii. l. 13; Anointed for ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with new force upon his perceptions.—Read the sonnet, if you please;—it is Wordsworth all over,—trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but immensely suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster. All I want ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... cornerstone of virtue, a love for animals. If at your heels a dog sniffs and growls, you humor his mistake, you flick him off and proceed with unbroken serenity. It is scarcely an interlude to your speculation on the market. Or if you work upon a sonnet and are in the vein, your thoughts, despite the beast, run unbroken to a rhyme. But pity this other whose heart is less stoutly wrapped! He has gone forth on a holiday to take the country air, to thrust himself ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... farewell to a world that had grown dark to him. He said that he mentioned the fact to Potts in confidence because he wanted him to perform some little offices for him when he was gone. He entrusted to Potts a sonnet entitled "A Last Farewell," and addressed to Julia Brown. This he asked should be delivered to Miss Brown as soon as his corpse was discovered. He said it might excite a pang in her bosom and induce her to cherish his memory. Then he gave Potts his watch as a keepsake, and handed him forty dollars, ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... Butler's "Seven Sonnets" (except Nos. I. and V.), by Ingroja. In manuscript. His translation of Sonnet I. is printed with the "Seven Sonnets." He could not manage Sonnet V. I think the repetitions of "pull" ...
— The Samuel Butler Collection - at Saint John's College Cambridge • Henry Festing Jones
... frigate thought their captain spoony, and the captain's clerk of the Tudor was guilty of a most reprehensible breach of confidence, if he spoke the truth, in whispering that he had one day discovered on the commander's desk a sonnet addressed to Stella's eyebrow. The fact, however, was doubted, as Captain Babbicome had never been suspected of possessing the slightest poetical talent, nor had a book of poetry ever been seen in ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... about concoction of a moving sonnet in praise of Monna Vittoria de' Pazzi. Desperation loaned him extraordinary eloquence (as he complacently reflected) in addressing this obdurate woman, who had held out against his love-making for ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... caused us to be conducted to the mouth of the Rio Guaurabo in a fine carriage lined with old crimson damask; and, to add to our confusion, an ecclesiastic, the poet of the place, habited in a suit of velvet notwithstanding the heat of the climate, celebrated, in a sonnet, our ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... hash," said Mrs. Dawe. "It may not be art, but I do wish you would do a five-course Marion Crawford serial with an Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... "That sonnet, Abate, Beautiful, I am quite exhausted by it. Your phrases turn about my heart And stifle me to swooning. Open the window, I beg. Lord! What a strumming of fiddles and mandolins! 'Tis really a shame to stop indoors. Call my maid, or I will make you lace me yourself. ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... salutation: "In the hope of her marvelous salutation there no longer remained to me an enemy, nay, a flame of charity possessed me which made me pardon everyone who had done me wrong." Under the influence of her salutation, Dante tells us that he devised this sonnet: ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... nor to be driven by a poet's verses, as Bubonax was, to hang himself; nor to be rhymed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland; yet thus much curse I must send you in the behalf of all poets; that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there"... So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you were Beauty ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... advice that restrains me," said the Idiot, dryly. "It is the fact that this sonnet has already ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... ranks like an army of soldiers, each striving to outstrip the others and to hold up the thickest and gaudiest spike to the sun. They are all there; and, at the entrance to the walk that leads to their motley beds, is a streamer with this device, taken from an exquisite sonnet ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... Coke, and become a sighing, languishing, poetic Lovelace. I'll go and dance, and feel my pulse every hour, and look at the weather-glass of my affections, and at night, or rather in the morning, report to myself the result. What a lucky lover I am! I will write a sonnet to that thread, and an ode to the hook;—I will expand the affair ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... stones are the more valued and admired for the art of the lapidary. Whitman did not cultivate versification. He almost despised it. He sneered at "dulcet rhymes." Yet this may hinder his access to posterity. Mr. Meredith hints as much in his sonnet entitled "An Orson of the Muse," which surely refers to Whitman. He allows him to be the Muse's son, though he ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... cleverest of our western poets, who has written so many beautiful things for the New-Orleans 'Picayune,' presents us lately with the subjoined tender sonnet. He has 'discharged' it as well as if he had previously read the directions of our eastern 'manufacturer of the article,' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... with his friend Philinte for receiving the bow of a man he despises; and with his mistress for enjoying a little harmless ridicule of her friend, when her back is turned. He tells a conceited poet that he prefers the sense and simplicity of an old ballad to the false wit of a modern sonnet—he proves his judgment to be just—and receives a challenge from the poet in reward of his criticism. Such a character, placed in opposition to the false and fantastic affectations of the day, afforded a wide scope for the satire of Moliere. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... rogue's face. I paused and looked the place over with interest. I noted that the brass plate with the "No. 38" on it had been polished until it had been nearly polished out of sight, like a machine-made sonnet too much gone over. The steps had been freshly sanded, and a little lemon-tree nodding in one of the windows made the rusty old house look quite inviting. A stout little woman with a big market-basket, bumped into me and apologized, for I had stepped backwards to get a better look ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... quality. It is posterior to imagination,—it is one of the means by which imagination seeks to realize its ends. Some animals reason, or seem to do so: but the most cultivated ape or donkey has not yet composed a sonnet, or a symphony, or "an arrangement in green and yellow." Man still retains a few prerogatives, although, like Aesop's stag, which despised the legs that bore it away from the hounds, and extolled the antlers that entangled it in the thicket,—so man often magnifies those elements of his nature ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... dear. That wouldn't do at all. It isn't done. You can't alter a sonnet to another person. If it came to that I'd sooner write one to you as well, some time or another, when ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... appointment as Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland in March, 1813, through Lord Lonsdale's "patronage" (see his letter, March 6, 1813). The Excursion was dedicated to Lord Lonsdale in a sonnet dated July ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Mr. Glascock had moved away together, and Miss Petrie was left alone. This was no injury to Miss Petrie, as her mind at once set itself to work on a sonnet touching the frivolity of modern social gatherings; and when she complained afterwards to Caroline that it was the curse of their mode of life that no moment could be allowed for thought,—in which she referred specially ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... attention and observation to keep it accurately in time to the fiddling. The smallest diversion of the thought, the briefest relaxing of the mind, is fatal to the performance. 'Tis as easy to fix attention on a sonnet of Shakspeare while working at whist as gloat upon your partner while waltzing. It can not be intelligently, appreciatively, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... Angelo. If a man does not love them he cannot care for the work of Michael Angelo. They express his highest idea of beauty—man created in the image of God, as he testifies in this vault, and in the sonnet ending:— ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... we love to ruffle it in silk as well as in mail or in homespun. The voices and faces of fair women make music and beauty for our ears and our eyes; we love the harp and the lute as well as the mavis and throstle in the hedgerow, and we pore as diligently over a sonnet as thou ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... to be too low for a poem, nay more, for a paper of verses; but if too low for an ordinary sonnet, how much more for tragedy, which is by Aristotle, in the dispute betwixt the epic poesy and the dramatic, for many reasons he ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Floral Fable Ring Down the Curtain The Telegraph Post Breaking on the Shore Hurrah! for the Rifle Corps Be Careful when you Find a Friend Brotherly Love England and France Against the Stream Wrecked in Sight of Home Sonnet Sebastopol is Won Hold Your Tongue My Mother's Portrait Never More Lines on the Death of the Rev. Canon Jenkins, Vicar of Aberdare Filial Ingratitude The Vine and the Sunflower POETIC PROVERBS: I.—Danger ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... official places. And as with any other artist, the care the eighteenth-century man expended on oratory is a proof of his sincerity, not a disproof of it. An enthusiastic eulogium by Burke is as rich and elaborate as a lover's sonnet; but it is because Burke is really enthusiastic, like the lover. An angry sentence by Junius is as carefully compounded as a Renascence poison; but it is because Junius is really angry—like the poisoner. Now, nobody who has realized this psychological truth can doubt for a moment that many of ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... enough for them! They asked no such inconvenient reward as marriage: indeed, one or two of them had already obtained that boon from others. To serve their purpose, and then, if it must be, to be forgotten, or—wild hope—to be embalmed in a sonnet ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... book is to provide an anthology of English lyrical poetry earlier than the advent of the Sonnet with Wyatt and Surrey during the sixteenth century. It includes 152 poems, ranging between 1225 and 1550 A.D., an essay on Some Aspects of Mediaeval Lyric by E. K. ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... and repeats this operation over and over again. What is he doing? He is copying a beauty which he has seen in the invisible world, and which he is attempting to bring out from its hiding so that the men who have no eyes except for the sensuous may also see it. In my library is an original sonnet by John G. Whittier. In almost every line are erasures and interlineations. In some cases the careful poet has written a new line and pasted it over the rejected one. What does this mean? It means that he has discovered a truth of moral beauty and is ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... source is unknown. One popular account attributes the name to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the Manhattan Project. According to this version, the well read Oppenheimer based the name Trinity on the fourteenth Holy Sonnet by John Donne, a 16th century English poet and sermon writer. The sonnet started, "Batter my heart, three-personed God."[2] Another version of the name's origin comes from University of New Mexico historian Ferenc M. Szasz. In his 1984 book, The Day the Sun ...
— Trinity [Atomic Test] Site - The 50th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb • The National Atomic Museum
... admiration: he was still young enough to recognise the hand of the master. And in his admiration there was a trace of a frank envy, a certain unresentful humiliation—the feeling which he could remember to have experienced many times in the old days, when he put aside the sonnet he had just finished for some fashionable magazine, and took down from his limited bookshelf the little time-worn volume which contained the almost forgotten work of a poet whose name would have fallen ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... poetry was exclusively lyrical. The average standard of versifying was higher, perhaps, than it has ever been before or since. Every man of education seems to have been able to turn a sonnet or ode. Men of religion, like St. Francis or Brother Jacopone of Todi; statesmen, like Frederick II. and his confidant, Peter de Vineis; professional or official persons, like Jacopo the notary of Lentino, or Guido dalle Colonne the judge of Messina; ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... The following of the Rose would take a volume, even treated as the poem itself is here. The English version has been referred to: Italian naturalised it early in a sonnet cycle, Il Fiore. Every country welcomed it, but the actual versions are as nothing to the imitations ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... were the first to introduce the sonnet, which Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth employed with such power in after times. Blank verse was first used in England by the Earl of Surrey, who translated a portion of Vergil's AEneid into that measure. When Shakespeare took up his pen, he found ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Lay.[257] Fragments from Christabel are quoted or alluded to so often in the novels[258] and throughout Scott's work that we should conclude it had made a greater impression upon him than any other single poem written in his own time, if Lockhart had not spoken of Wordsworth's sonnet on Neidpath Castle as one which Scott was perhaps fondest of quoting.[259] Christabel is not the only one of Coleridge's poems which Scott used for allusion or reference, but it was the favorite. "He is naturally ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... to express my heartiest thanks to Signore Pasquale Villari for valuable assistance kindly rendered in the interpretation of some difficult passages of Campanella, and to Signore V. de Tivoli for calling my attention to the sonnet of Michael Angelo deciphered by him on the back of a drawing in the Taylor ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... Italian, and wrote two Sonnets on * * *. I never wrote but one sonnet before, and that was not in earnest, and many years ago, as an exercise—and I will never write another. They are the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions. I detest the Petrarch so much[104], that I would not be ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... of the day. To begin with, he was a friend of Ben Jonson and wrote a set of commendatory verses for the Laureate's "Sejanus." These appear in the folio edition of Jonson's works. Probably this sonnet—it has fourteen lines—is one of the most cryptic things in the whole of Elizabethan literature. No member of our family or any other family has ever been able to construe it. Yet it is a pleasure to me to gather from the concluding couplet that ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... minimizes man's imaginative and intellectual power, leveling him down to the amoral instinct of the brute. "How much more," said Jesus, "is a man better than a sheep!" One of the greatest of English humanists was Matthew Arnold. You remember his sonnet, entitled, alas! "To a Preacher," which runs ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Chesterton. On my arrival I found him sitting on the stairs, where he had been for two hours, greatly incommoding passers up and down and deaf to all requests to move on. It appeared that he had written a sonnet to his wife on her recovery from the operation and was bringing it to give her. He was not however satisfied with the last line, but was determined to perfect it before entering her room to take tea ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... definite and personal attitude towards life. Shakespeare is no Absolute Divinity, reconciling all oppositions and transcending all limitations. He is not that "cloud-capped mountain," too lofty to be scanned, of Matthew Arnold's Sonnet. He is a sad and passionate artist, using his bitter experiences to intensify his insight, and playing with his humours and his dreams to soften the sting of that brutish reality which he was doomed ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... midnight hours, so that his neighbours have been known to break his windows with bottles, and then to throw in all that remained of the cold meats of a supper party, without interfering with the divine afflatus. When the college poet has composed a sonnet, ode, or what not, he sends it to the Editor of the Nineteenth Century, and it returns to him after many days. At last it appears in print, in College Rhymes, a collection of mild verse, which is (or was) printed at regular or irregular intervals, and was never seen except in ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... History of Britain." Compare also Wordsworth's "Sonnet to Wycliffe," and the lines, attributed to an unknown writer of Wycliffe's time: "The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea; And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... is latent a whole philosophy of art. To some extent he also finds the story of the Passionate Pilgrim "replete with the deepest knowledge of the passions of early adolescence" The series culminates in Sonnet 116, which makes love the sole beacon of humanity. It might be said that it is connected by a straight line with the best teachings of Plato, and that here humanity picked up the clue, lost, save with some Italian poets, in ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... day, at the Dolphin inn, Stamford. Accordingly, on the day named, Clare went over to Stamford, his heart fluttering high with expectations. When Mr. Henson handed him the 'Address to the Public,' with the 'Sonnet to the Setting Sun' on the other side, both neatly corrected and printed in large type, he was beside himself for joy. In its new dress, his poetry looked so charmingly beautiful, that he scarcely knew it again. ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... revelled in detecting beauties which had been covered with the dust of oblivion during the reign of Pope. His appreciation was intensified by that charm of discovery which finds its typical utterance in Keats's famous sonnet. He was scarcely a more impartial judge of Fletcher or Ford than 'Stout Cortes' of the new world revealed by his enterprise. We may willingly defer to his judgment of the relative value of the writers whom he discusses, but ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... his vows for the prosperity of Rome, he knelt before the throne, and received from the senator a laurel crown, with a more precious declaration, "This is the reward of merit." The people shouted, "Long life to the Capitol and the poet!" A sonnet in praise of Rome was accepted as the effusion of genius and gratitude; and after the whole procession had visited the Vatican, the profane wreath was suspended before the shrine of St. Peter. In the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Rome another revolutionary leader, the Advocate Armellini, who pronounced the downfall of the Pope from his temporal sovereignty. This consistorial advocate had, six times over, solemnly sworn fidelity to the Pontiff. He had even composed in honor of the Papacy a sonnet, in which are read these remarkable words: "I spoke with Time, and asked it what had become of so many empires, of those kingdoms of Argos and Thebes and Sidon, and so many others which had preceded or followed them. For only answer, Time strewed its passage with shreds of purple ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... material here for art of every kind! If I had the misfortune to be a poet, I should now be obliged to rush out in a fit of inspiration, hide myself in the kennel, and, at a safe distance from all exciting causes, write a passionate sonnet, while the fox kept biting my heels. But, as I am no poet, I prefer to enjoy the beautiful when it is before me, to putting it into rhyme." And again he looked admiringly ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... School-master. "And only shows how in weak hands so beautiful a thing as the sonnet ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... her that silence is more to her interest in the pursuit of her wily mission. In June, when so many an ecstatic love-song among the birds has modulated from accents of ardent love to those of glad fruition, when the sonnet to his "mistress's eyebrow" is shortly to give place to the lullaby, then, like the "worm i' the bud," the cow-bird begins her parasitical career. How many thousands are the bird homes which are blasted in her ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... acquaintance John Sterling had been repelled by the "verbosity" of Paracelsus: "Doth Mr Browning know," she asked, "that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of a single word that is the one fit for his sonnet?"[17] Browning was determined to avoid "verbosity"; but the method which seems to have occurred to him was that of omitting many needful though seemingly insignificant words, and jamming together the words that gleam and sparkle; with the ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... sonnet in the Second Folio (1632), Milton took the Jonsonian view of Shakespeare, whose "easy numbers" he contrasted with "slow-endeavouring Art," and readers of the poems of 1645 found in L'Allegro an early ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... which the Furioso swears Such chat as this offends his ears It rather doth become this Age To talk of bloodshed, fury, rage, And t' drink stout healths in brim-fill'd Nogans. To th' downfall of the Hogan Mogans. With that the Player doffs his Bonnet, And tunes his voice as if a Sonnet Were to be sung; then gently says, O what delight there is in Plays! Sure if we were but all in Peace, This noise of Wars and News would cease; All sorts of people then would club Their pence to see a Play that's good. You'l ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... which is full of small figures, with some larger ones above. In this tomb rests the body of M. Cino d'Angibolgi, doctor of laws, and a very famous man of letters in his day, as M. Francesco Petrarca testifies in the sonnet: ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... which is first addressed to the Friends of the Beautiful, and whose object is to touch the heart, we give a sonnet of M. Edmond Rostand. It is entitled, "The Cathedral," and will show that pride may be taken by the victim of violence, and that a crime against the beautiful diminishes only the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... says he has found that substitute in going to church when there's no service. Goethe wrote "The Sorrows of Werther" in order to get rid of his own. Many an unhappy lover has found peace by expressing his misery in sonnet form. The problem is to find something for the common man who is not interested in contemporary churches and who can't ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... following year he died. Most of the poems in the little volume which his friends put through the press in the year 1800 are written in standard English. They display a mind of considerable refinement, but little originality. In the form of ode, elegy, eclogue, or sonnet, we have verses which show tender feeling and a genuine appreciation of nature. But the human interest is slight, and the author is unable to escape from the conventional poetic diction of the eighteenth ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... poets—he continued his work of self-education. Some of his Cambridge friends appear to have grown a little anxious, on seeing one who had distinction stamped upon his brow, doing what the world calls nothing; and Milton himself was watchful, and even suspicious. His second sonnet records ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... metrical tests include the following: the frequency of rhyme, whether in the heroic couplet or, as not uncommonly occurs in early plays, in alternates and even such elaborate arrangements as the sonnet; doggerel lines; alexandrines, or lines of twelve syllables; the presence of an extra syllable before a pause within the line; short lines, especially at the end of speeches; the substitution of other feet for the regular iambic movement of blank verse; ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... In song and sonnet and ballad these views were illustrated and enforced. They served the purpose of the ridicule which it was hoped might operate to cure people of the prevailing toleration for the romance of the slums and ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... advising me to go on writing immortal poetry. If I were immortal, I might, but that fool thing was the result of about ten years' hard labor. I tried to make a sonnet of it, but I gave up at the end of the decade and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to Mr. Yates; trips abroad; his London residences; his last letter to Tennyson; revisits Asolo; Palazzo Rezzonico; his belief in immortality; his death, Thursday, Dec. 12th, 1889; funeral in Westminster Abbey; Sonnet by George Meredith; new star in Orion; R. Browning's place in literature; Summary, etc. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... about the hand are tragic. Remember the light play of words in "Romeo and Juliet" where the dialogue, flying nimbly back and forth, weaves a pretty sonnet about the hand. And who knows the ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... been radically Teutonick; but English and High Dutch have no similarity to the eye, though radically the same. Once, when looking into Low Dutch, I found, in a whole page, only one word similar to English; stroem, like stream, and it signified tide'. E. 'I remember having seen a Dutch Sonnet, in which I found this word, roesnopies. Nobody would at first think that this could be English; but, when we enquire, we find roes, rose, and nopie, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... People can't live always on their highest levels. Perhaps you'll never do it again." Jonathan looked distinctly relieved. "I'll accept it as a unique effort—like Dante's angel and Raphael's sonnet." ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... of Tickell, maliciously called by Steele "prose in rhyme," is alike inspired by affection and fancy; it has a melodious languor, and a melancholy grace. The sonnet of Gray to the memory of West is a beautiful effusion, and a model for English sonnets. Helvetius was the protector of men of genius, whom he assisted not only with his criticism, but his fortune. At his ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... you remember the 'Sonnet of Revolt' you sent me? Sit on this bench; I wish to say it over to you, very slowly; I want you to hear it while you keep your ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... period of Charles's life. The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in the play of HENRY V.; and it is at least odd that we can trace a resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, "I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle; and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene, would be quite in character for a man who spent many years of his life capping verses with his ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... us such old forgotten secrets about ourselves...It is in the mightiest of all instincts, the primitive sex traditions of the race before man was, that music is rooted...Beauty is the child of love." Dante Gabriel Rossetti has imprisoned in a sonnet the almost intangible feeling aroused by music, the feeling of having pursued in the immemorial ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... only by the promise of a ten-dollar note beside that in the hands of the auctioneer; on condition, however, that she should never mention it.' Of course she kept her word! . . . HOW seldom it is that one encounters a good sonnet! Most sonnetteers of our day are like feeble-framed men walking in heavy armor; 'the massy weight on't galls their laden limbs.' We remember two or three charming sonnets of LONGFELLOW'S; PARK BENJAMIN ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... for Roy, of course she was in love with him—madly so. How could she help it? Was he not her ideal? Who could resist those glorious dark eyes, and that pleading voice? Were not half the Redmond girls wildly envious? And what a charming sonnet he had sent her, with a box of violets, on her birthday! Anne knew every word of it by heart. It was very good stuff of its kind, too. Not exactly up to the level of Keats or Shakespeare—even Anne ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... making no reservations, not even of their worst thoughts; men of vast acquirements, natures tried in the crucible of poverty. Once admitted as an equal among such elect souls, Lucien represented beauty and poetry. They admired the sonnets which he read to them; they would ask him for a sonnet as he would ask Michel Chrestien for a song. And, in the desert of Paris, Lucien found an oasis in the Rue ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... as she spoke. A sonnet to this suspended heart rose instantly to his lips, but he did not give it utterance, for he was in no mood to continue their conversation in this light vein of false sentiment, which broke the sweet spell she had been weaving about him. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... literary inheritance of the German people. Buerger attempted a translation of the Iliad in iambic blank verse, and a prose translation of 'Macbeth.' To him belongs also the credit of having restored to German literature the long-disused sonnet. His sonnets are among the best in the language, and elicited warm praise from Schiller as "models of their kind." Schiller had written a severe criticism of Buerger's poems, which had inflamed party strife and embittered the last years of Buerger himself; ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... not only for the muscles but also for the soul; and it may be because they know this, that artists are inclined to go afield in search of difficulties to be overthrown, that they set themselves problems, that they accept limitations. Herein we may see a cause for the long popularity of the sonnet, with its restricted scheme of rimes. Herein, again, we may see a reason for the desire of the novelist to try his fate as a dramatist. "To work successfully beneath a few grave, rigid laws," so Mr. James once declared, "is always a strong man's ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... easily be perceived that the only part of this Sonnet which is of any value is the lines printed in Italics: it is equally obvious that except in the rhyme, and in the use of the single word "fruitless" for fruitlessly, which is so far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... and ignominy; the latter's fecundating activities had never been allowed full scope, but something of his spirit of adventure into new literary fields was doubtless caught by the younger man. Buerger's attempts at naturalizing the sonnet, for instance, are interesting in view of the fact that Wilhelm Schlegel became the actual creator of this literary form among the Germans. Schlegel's own pursuits as a student were prevailingly in the field of Hellenism, in which his acquisitions were astounding; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... extreme rarity, and the poetry is no less rare, in the French manner of 1830. On this specimen Aytoun has written marginalia. Where the hero's love of arms and dread of death are mentioned, Aytoun has written 'A rum cove for a Hussar,' and he has added designs of skeletons and a sonnet to the 'wormy author.' 'A curse! a curse!' shrieks the poet. 'Certainly, but why and wherefore?' says Aytoun. There is nothing very precious in his banter; still it is diverting to follow in the footsteps of the author of 'Ta Phairshon.' Mr. Lang also possesses John ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... Montenegrins, and Sir Henry Elliott had made himself the mouthpiece of it. Mr. Gladstone, having become warmly interested in the little mountain principality by my correspondence, had taken its case up in a strong review article, and had persuaded Tennyson to devote a sonnet to it. He was, as he himself informed me, warned by Sir Henry Elliott not to trust to my letters or to employ them as authority for his work, for Sir Henry said that I was considered in the Levant, where I was well known, to be an infamous and untrustworthy character. ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... in its ancestry. I passed two men on the sidewalk, their hats on the back of their heads, arguing fiercely. One had slightly long hair. The other looked the more truculent, and was saying to him, intensely, "See here! We contracted with you to supply us with sonnets at five dollars per sonnet—" I passed up a side-street, one of those deserted ways that abound just off the big streets, resorts, apparently, for such people and things as are not quite strident or not quite energetic enough for the ordinary glare of life; dim places, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... can survive perfidy"; and in the relations between men and women unfaithfulness is held to cancel all bonds, however indissoluble they may seem. Now and again, it is true, some strange voice reaches us, keyed to a different music. Shakespeare, for example, in his famous one hundred and sixteenth sonnet, ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... edition of his works to have been published last week, and enthusiastic Dullborough to have got half through them. (I doubt, by the way, whether it had ever done half that, but that is a private opinion.) A young gentleman with a sonnet, the retention of which for two years had enfeebled his mind and undermined his knees, got the sonnet into the Dullborough Warden, and gained flesh. Portraits of Shakespeare broke out in the bookshop windows, and our principal ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... plaintive, in fact a positively wistful note, which is almost incongruous amongst the definite and sharply defined moods of Jean Francois, is struck in the sonnet of which only the first line has reached us: "I wish I had a hundred thousand pounds." ("Voulentiers serais pauvre avec dix mille escus.") But in nearly all his verse, whether joyous as in the "Chant ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... experience with the organ into whose depths the lost chord sank, never to return. I dashed off the jests well enough, but somewhere between the keys and the types they were lost, and the results, when I came to scan the paper, were depressing. And once I tried a sonnet on the keys. Exactly how to classify the jumble that came out of it I do not know, but it was curious enough to have appealed strongly to D'Israeli or any other collector of the literary oddity. More singular than the ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... told that Cowper's poetry lacked the true note of passion, that there was an absence of the "lyric cry." I protest that I find the note of passion in the "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture," in his two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce not less marked than I find it in other great poets. I find in The Task and elsewhere in Cowper's works a note of enthusiasm for human brotherhood, for man's responsibility for man, for universal kinship, that had scarcely any place in literature before he wrote ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... suddenly—Allcraft pushed every paper from him in a paroxysm of delight, and looked up—"and I think we were agreed in our opinion of that great poet. What a sweet thing is this! Did you ever read it? It is the sonnet ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... my brother's beautiful sonnet "Freiheit und Gesetz." (Wilhelm von Humboldt, 'Gesammelte Werke', bd. iv., s. 358, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... rides the ass,' he exclaimed; 'prosperity the eagle.' Never for an instant was he dejected to the extent of faltering in the energy of his protests against the endeavours to suppress him. As Mr. Rossetti has noted in an exquisite sonnet, his mind remained always at liberty. His avocations and interests were enough to engage a dozen ordinary lives. He had always been interested in chemical experiments. He had studied the qualities of metals. In August, 1602, Carew mentioned to Cecil that he had been sending over to Ralegh ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... raises wordy strife About "the happiest hour of Woman's life." I'll answer in less compass than a sonnet:— "When she outshines her best friend's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... of all colors? Several times when it appeared as if the lady of your dreams were white, I fancied you were drawing a portrait of Isabelle Ray. All the girls, your old friends, to whom I have shown At Sea, send you their compliments, to which I join my own. Each of them will beg you to write her a sonnet; but first of all, in virtue of our ancient friendship, I ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... Wells, ask Murray Gilchrist, ask George Moore, ask Eden Phillpotts, ask "Q," ask Henry James. Lo! I say to all facile gabblers about the "art of the short story," as the late "C.-B." said to Mr. Balfour: "Enough of this foolery!" It is of a piece with the notion that a fine sonnet is more difficult than ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... the Elizabethan age was more famous than John Dowland, whose "heavenly touch upon the lute" was commended in a well-known sonnet (long attributed to Shakespeare) by Richard Barnfield. Dowland was born at Westminster in 1562. At the age of twenty, or thereabouts, he started on his travels; and, after rambling through "the chiefest parts of France, a nation furnished with great variety of music," he bent ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... utterly absent from his latest work. Perhaps one of the most remarkable instances is that of Rossetti. In the course of the House of Life, the dark curtain of the exotic mood, with its strange odours and glimpses, its fallen light, its fevered sense, is raised at intervals upon a sonnet of pure transparency and delicate sweetness, as though the weary, voluptuous soul, in its restless passage among perfumed chambers, looked out suddenly from a window upon some forest glade, full of cool winds and winter ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... European morals, lent his great name to a great delusion, when he attempted in a passage too well known, to garland the prostitute as the protectress of pure women. Edwin Arnold, the paganizing English poet, put Lecky's folly into verse, writing a sonnet in praise of the harlot as the purest of all women—a sort of devil's compliment to our wives ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... convulsions, such as the earthquake of Lisbon or the eruption of Mont Pelee, treating human communities just as an elephant might treat an ant-hill. It is this sense of the immeasurable disproportion in things that a pessimist poet has expressed in the well-known sonnet:— ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... libel upon the Prince Regent, that Keats, who was coming over to Enfield, met me, and, turning, accompanied me back part of the way to Edmonton. At the last field-gate, when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet entitled, "Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison." Unless I am utterly mistaken, this was the first proof I had received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly can I recall the conscious look with which he hesitatingly offered ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... two parts; the first is a sonnet sequence describing the author's capture with his battalion in the great March Offensive, his weary tramp as a prisoner, and internment in a German camp; the second consists of a series of meditative sonnets on these inevitably ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... object depends on its being carried forward in the mind to assist in forming an image of the object, it must happen that if, from length or complexity, it cannot be so carried forward, the advantage is not gained. The annexed sonnet, by Coleridge, ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... Petrarch at the present day depends chiefly on his lyrical poems, which served as models to all the distinguished poets of southern Europe. They are restricted to two forms: the sonnet, borrowed from the Sicilians, and the canzone, from the Provencals. The subject of almost all these poems is the same—the hopeless affection of the poet for the high-minded Laura. This love was a kind of religious and enthusiastic passion, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta |
