"Sonnet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... advanced any farther, possibly because they conflicted with the relations developing between Anne and the King himself. As Wyatt complained in a sonnet,[539] ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... as Sterling exhorted, "in religion and radicalism." He saw life differently; more practically, if more selfishly; to one rhapsodizing about the "plain living and high thinking" of Wordsworth's sonnet, he answered: "You know that you prefer dining with people who have good glass and china and plenty of servants." For Tennyson's poetry he even then felt admiration; quotes, nay, misquotes, in "Eothen," from the little known "Timbuctoo"; {3} and from "Locksley Hall"; and supplied long ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... it was a 'Gospel Sonnet on Tobackka and Pipes'; pipes, mind you, as well—all about this Indian weed, and the pipe which is so lily white. Oh, sir, it was most improvin'. And that fanatic of a praycher, not fit to blacken the Erskines' ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... bugle-note to any war-horse, as the first twittering of the birds in the hedgerows to the light-sleeping vagabond, that cry of 'Take your seats please!' or—better still—'En voiture!' or 'Partenza!' Had I the knack of rhyme, I would write a sonnet-sequence of the journey to Newhaven or Dover—a sonnet for every station one does not stop at. I await that poet who shall worthily celebrate the iron road. There is one who describes, with accuracy and gusto, the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... 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
... Mr. Fisher took up architecture and practiced this profession for seventeen years, but although he still retains connection with it in a consulting capacity, he has given up its active practice to be the publisher and editor of a small magazine called 'The Sonnet', which he founded. Mr. Fisher has written some of the finest sonnets that have appeared in America in recent years and has brought out the first collection of them under the title, "Sonnets: A ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... the nutmeg song, but beauteous still is the sonnet! Near the T'u Mei to sleep, makes e'en a dream ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... about their writings that we talked, but about the something kindling in them, which never got expressed. His theory of writing was this:—"No good writer can ever be translated." He used to quote triumphantly from Shakespeare's 130th. Sonnet. ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... thereupon 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, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... which he thinks the indication of a scar. Two gentlemen, one an artist, who have seen the mask itself, assure him that they find his scar to be merely a slight abrasion or discoloration of the plaster; but Mr. Page, secure in his position, quotes Sonnet 112, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... somewhere. If I am not allowed to show myself, I will look on from a distance, hidden in the crowd. At a pinch I will disguise myself—as a guide at Pompeii, a lazzarone at Naples. She shall find a sonnet in the bunch of fresh flowers offered her by a peasant at the door of her hotel. And at least I shall bask in her smile, the sound of her voice, the glints of gold about her temples, and the pleasure of knowing that she is near even when I do not ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of our moderns are tempted to look back with a very real measure of regret to the golden age of mythology, feeling that in comparison the present is often sadly dull and sordid. Wordsworth's great sonnet gives classical expression to this mood, and rises to ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... English giant,' said Charles aside to an attendant: then turning eagerly to Sidney, whose transcendent accomplishments had already become renowned, Charles welcomed him to court, and began to discuss Ronsard's last sonnet, showing no small taste and knowledge of poetry. Greatly attracted by Sidney, the King detained the whole English party by an invitation to Walsingham to hear music in the Queen-mother's apartments; and Berenger, following in the wake of his friends, found himself in a spacious hall, with ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... taste," said Charles Larkyns. "Well, this shop - you see the name - is Spiers'; and Wordsworth, in his sonnet to Oxford, has immortalized him. Don't ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,—few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods—what the after-age Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage. [Footnote: Epilogue to the Dramatic Idyls. The same thought is in the sonnet, "I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap," by James Russell Lowell, and Overnight, a Rose, by ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... another. And all the elements, which in contemplation we reproduce in the form of motor impulses, are bound to make a closed circle of these suggested energies. The symmetrical picture calls out a set of motor impulses which "balance,"—a system of energies reacting on one centre; the sonnet takes us out on one wave of rhythm and of thought, to bring us back on another to the same point; the sonata does the same in melody. In the "whirling circle" of the drama, not a word or an act that is not indissolubly linked with before and after. Thus the unity of a work ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... Raleigh, as 'the Summer's Nightingale, thy sovereign goddess's most dear delight,' not to delay in publishing his own great poem, the Cynthia. The first of the eulogistic pieces prefixed by friends to the Faery Queen was that noble and justly celebrated sonnet signed W. R. which alone would justify Raleigh in taking a place among ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... old ballad. But even where Wilde was right, he had a way of being right with this excessive strain on the reader's sympathy (and gravity) which was the mark of all these men with a "point of view." There is a very sound sonnet of his in which he begins by lamenting mere anarchy, as hostile to the art and civilisation that were his only ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... time has flung away Uncouth words in disarray, Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet Ode, and elegy, and sonnet." ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... No! This sonnet is evidently written in reference to the writer's mask or pseudonym which would continue to have immortal life (even though he himself might be forgotten) ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... Roland. "I have always wanted to see that famous fountain of Vaucluse, the Hippocrene of Petrarch. You know his sonnet? ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... them, and the result is certainly such an avoidance. Nevertheless both, and especially Wyatt, had a great deal to learn. It is perfectly evident that neither had any theory of English prosody before him. Wyatt's first sonnet displays the completest indifference to quantity, not merely scanning "harber," "banner," and "suffer" as iambs (which might admit of some defence), but making a rhyme of "feareth" and "appeareth," not on the penultimates, but on the mere "eth." In the following poems ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... surviving fame, and for the progress of English poetry, the circumstance was eminently propitious; since it is from the return of this noble traveller that we are to date not only the introduction into our language of the Petrarchan sonnet, and with it of a tenderness and refinement of sentiment unknown to the barbarism of our preceding versifiers; but what is much more, that of heroic blank verse; a noble measure, of which the earliest example exists in Surry's spirited and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... against the prince of Parma. On his return he published Parthenophil and Parthenophe, Sonnettes, Madrigals, Elegies and Odes (ent. on Stationers' Register 1593), dedicated to his "dearest friend," William Percy, who contributed a sonnet to the eulogies prefixed to a later work, Offices. Parthenophil was possibly printed for private circulation, and the copy in the duke of Devonshire's library is believed to be unique. Barnes was well acquainted with the work of contemporary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... a thing not to be spoken of! Is there anything worse, except it be a sonnet? How many miles of it are ground out every day—sometimes that kind comes to me to mock me—I could have written a whole poem full of it this afternoon. If there are two lines of that sort in The Captive, I'll burn ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... chapter by translating a sonnet addressed to Giovanni da Pistoja, in which Michelangelo humorously describes the discomforts he endured while engaged upon the Sistine. Condivi tells us that from painting so long in a strained attitude, gazing up at the vault, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Formenlehre, 1 squared 332. Isocrates, the greatest teacher of rhetoric of his time, lived from 436 to 338, when he died by voluntary starvation owing to his grief at the loss of Greek freedom through the battle of Chaeronea. Milton, Sonnet X. 'That dishonest victory At Chaeronea, fatal to liberty, Kill'd with report that old man eloquent'. — EUM ... INSCRIBITUR: the periphrasis is common, and the verb inscribere is nearly always in the present tense (in later prose as well as in ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... imperial Rome admired the gladiator. It also assumed that genius combined with force of character released men from the shackles of ordinary morality."[2254] Cellini was a specimen man of his age. He kept religion and morality far separated from each other.[2255] Varchi wrote a sonnet on him which is false in fact and in form, and displays the technical and conventional insincerity of the age.[2256] The augmentative form of the name Lorenzaccio expresses the notion that he was great, awful, and wicked.[2257] His biographer says that he was a "mattoid."[2258] He missed ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... trying to analyze the reason of her blushes. As 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 was not so deeply in love as to think that. But it was very tolerable magazine verse. And ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and habits of Alfieri and those of the noble poet of England, no less remarkable coincidences might be traced; and the sonnet in which the Italian dramatist professes to paint his own character contains, in one comprehensive line, a portrait of the versatile author ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... my dear lady, is it a fitting vehicle for so much weight of expression? I admire, as do you, the sonnet, but I can never be brought to believe that Milton could have compressed 'Paradise ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... on his Edition of Shakespeare's Works 78 Dirge in Cymbeline, sung by Guiderus and Arviragus over Fidele, supposed to be dead 87 Verses written on a Paper which contained a Piece of Bride-cake, given to the Author by a Lady 89 To Miss Aurelia C——R, on her Weeping at her Sister's Wedding 91 Sonnet 91 Song. The Sentiments borrowed from Shakespeare 92 On our late ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... wring from my unwilling pen A sonnet,—and all ordered thoughts pass by; Light as a swirl of mist, too soon they fly For my poor wits to capture them again. O sonnet unattained! For other men So easy to attain, but it is I Who struggle, and for me all goes awry,— My efforts fond ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... even, was better prepared for bringing the symbolist movement into music. Loeffler is affiliated in temper, if not exactly in achievement, with the brilliant band of belated romanticists who adopted as their device the sonnet of Verlaine's beginning. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... sitting at the other end of the table very limp and sad after a night of tiresome tossing that was neither wholly sleep nor wholly wakefulness, and sheltered by various dishes with spirit-lamps burning beneath them worked gloomily at a sonnet inspired by the girl he had met the day before while his mother thought he was eating his patent food. The girl, it seemed, could not inspire much, for beyond the fourth line his muse refused to go; and he was beginning to be unable to stop himself from an angry ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... And thy aduice, this night, ile put in practise: Therefore, sweet Protheus, my direction-giuer, Let vs into the City presently To sort some Gentlemen, well skil'd in Musicke. I haue a Sonnet, that will serue the turne To giue the ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... littered with all Betty's futile beginnings, and her smile came flashing back again. "I should think," she said, "that you must be writing a love letter—if it isn't a sonnet— judging by the trouble it's making you. They told me downstairs that you were cramming history, but I was sure it would take more than a mere history cram to keep you away from that music. Isn't ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... this last sonnet he put down his bundle of papers and began to think. 'The wife.' Yes, and a French wife, and a Roman Catholic wife—and a wife who might be said to have been in service! And his father's hatred of the French, both collectively and individually—collectively, as tumultuous brutal ruffians, who ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... as Dyce showed, Davies is glancing at a sonnet of Drayton's "To the Celestiall Numbers" in Idea. Jonson told Drummond that "S. J. Davies played in ane Epigrame on Draton's, who in a sonnet concluded his mistress might been the Ninth [sic] Worthy; and said he used a phrase like Dametas in Arcadia, who said, For wit ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... Miss Oliver found pleasure in looking at him for his good looks—he was so exactly like what she would have liked her own son to be. Glossy black hair, brilliant dark grey eyes, faultless features. And a poet to his fingertips! That sonnet sequence was really a remarkable thing for a lad of twenty to write. Miss Oliver was no partial critic and she knew that Walter ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... sonnet, addressed to the new Magistrate, by the elegant and learned Abbe Bettolini, will entertain such of my readers ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... aloud the story as related by Pliny, a volume of whose letters he had put into his pocket, and Margery recited some lines of a beautiful sonnet on Pompeii which she had once learned, whose ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... credit of being one of the smartest vessels in the navy, was assigned to take him to Malta. He had, before he left Abbotsford itself, an affecting interview with Wordsworth, which occasioned Yarrow Revisited and the beautiful sonnet, 'A trouble, not of clouds or weeping rain,' and had no doubt part in the initiation of the last really great thing that Wordsworth ever wrote—the Effusion on the deaths of Hogg, Coleridge, Crabbe, Lamb, and Scott himself, in 1835. Some ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... Lyndon had, and don't be astonished that she, on her side, should be indifferent. Nor has she, I will dare to wager, ever passed beyond the bounds of harmless gallantry, or sinned beyond the composing of a sonnet or a billet-doux.' ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the very same tree. It comforts me, because we have ourselves to eat many bitter roots here, whose perfect flower shall one day delight us. This, dear Sophia, has been a long ramble. I promised to copy that sonnet of James's for you, so ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... 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 ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... a sonnet, Phoebe, and you have cruelly interrupted him," said Doctor Stedman, not without a ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... Book of Common Prayer. The result of this latter voyage of discovery will be an increased wonder at the affluence of the mediaeval devotions, combined with amazement at the poverty and unsatisfactoriness of the existing translations. It is with a Latin collect as with a Greek ode or an Italian sonnet: no matter how wonderful the diction, the charm of it is as a locked secret until the thing has been Englished by genius akin to his who first made it out of his own heart. Of others besides the many brave men who lived before Agamemnon ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... portrait of his fair young mistress, and we have more than one proof of the admiration which the Florentine master's work excited among his contemporaries. In the Rime of the court-poet, Bellincioni, we find the following sonnet evidently inspired by this picture and bearing the inscription: "On the portrait of Madonna Cecilia, painted by Maestro Leonardo." The poet seeks to appease Dame Nature's wrath at the sight of this portrait, in which the painter has represented the lovely maiden "listening, not speaking," ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... 'Richard II.' borrowed from a Greek play by Euripides, called 'Hellene,' as did the author of the sonnets. There is, we need not say, no Greek play of the name of 'Hellene.' As Mr. Holmes may conceivably mean the 'Helena' of Euripides, we compare Sonnet cxxi. with 'Helena,' line 270. The parallel, the imitation of Euripides, ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... it all is, and how infinitely restful! (He yawns.) What a blessed relief to be without that fellow PODBURY! He's very careful to keep out of my way—I've scarcely seen him since I've been here. He must find it dreadfully dull. (He sighs.) I ought to find material for a colour-sonnet here, with these subdued grey tones, those dull coppery-greens, and the glowing reds of the conical caps of those towers. I ought—but I don't. I fancy that half-engagement to MAUD TROTTER must have, scared away the Muse. I wonder if PODBURY has really gone yet? (Here a thump on the back disposes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 26, 1891 • Various
... 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 sonnet, though, was the fact that when I tried to write my ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... impatience; but Byron was, during the whole of this period, almost preternaturally active. Detained by bad weather at Ouchy for two days (Juno 26, 27), he wrote the Prisoner of Chillon, which, with its noble introductory sonnet on Bonnivard, in some respects surpasses any of his early romances. ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... Titian, the majesty and dignity of Leonardo da Vinci, and the fresh beauty of Angelica Kauffmann. I liked best the romantic head of Raphael Mengs. In one of the rooms there is a portrait of Alfieri, with an autograph sonnet of his own on the back of it. The house in which he lived and died, is on the north bank of the Arno, near the Ponte Caraja, and his ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... been considered so if they had been married," replied the gentleman. "Mammas have no mercy on each other in those delicate manoeuvrings. Well, he waltzed with her always; and bent over her—willow-fashion; looked with her at the moon; and wrote a sonnet which she took to herself, for it was addressed 'To mine own dear ——;' and then when, about eight weeks afterwards, we met him at the dejeuner at Sally Lodge, he was as entranced with Lizzie Grey's guitar ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... employed for this work. These Athletes are the very epitome of the work of Michael 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
... 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, boldly ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... purpose of this 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. CHAMBERS, and ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... that, where all else perished, Odes, Idyls, Lines, Stanzas, this one Sonnet to the stars should be miraculously reserved for such a starry ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Rome; others put the numbers as high as two hundred thousand, and contemporary poetry as well as history has celebrated this pious assemblage of Christians of every nation, language, and age around the tomb of their fathers in the faith. "The old man with white hair goeth far away," says Petrarch (Sonnet xiv.), "from the sweet haunts where his life hath been passed, and from his little family astonished to find their dear father missing. As for him, in the last days of his age, broken down by weight of years and a-weary of the road, he draggeth along as best he may by force of willing spirit ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... rouge. Yet he deceives nobody, and having grown stout and wheezy is eventually carried off by a common cold in an odour of pastilles. He will be buried in a wicker-work coffin covered with lilies, and a rival Dilettante having written a limp and limping sonnet to his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... art in our modern education, of the knack or science or how of things, is to be followed next by the emphasis of the art that conceals art, genius, the norm and climax of human ability. Any finishing-school girl can out-sonnet Keats. The study of appearances, the passion for the outside has run its course. The next thing in education is going to be honesty, fearless naturalness, upheaval, the freedom of self, self-expectancy, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... not belie his reverence intellectually for Shakspeare; and in his younger days we know that he had spoken more enthusiastically of Shakspeare, than he ever did again of any uninspired author. Not only did he address a sonnet to his memory, in which he declares that kings would wish to die, if by dying they could obtain such a monument in the hearts of men; but he also speaks of him in his Il Penseroso, as the tutelary genius of the English stage. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Rogers's companies to being that prominent gentleman's confidential private secretary was, of course, a very big one. He hugged it secretly at first alone. On the journey back from the City to the suburb where he lived, Minks made a sonnet on it. For his emotions invariably sought the safety valve of verse. It was a wiser safety valve for high spirits than horse-racing or betting on the football results, because he always stood to win, and never to lose. Occasionally ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... fashion, always necessary and necessary to everyone. But once these universal unchanging needs supplied, a great many others become visible: needs to the individual or to individuals and races under definite and changing circumstances. The sonnet or the serenade are useful to the romantic lover in the same manner that carriage-horses and fine clothes are useful to the man who woos more practically-minded ladies. The diamonds of a rich woman serve to mark her status quite as much as to please the unpleasable ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... her hands. "What lovely hypocrite have we among us? What Lady Pure Innocence, wondering with the rest of the world?—and all the while Cleon's latest sonnet hot against her heart! Is ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... of songs that kept time with his footsteps, or rather they were repeating and humming themselves along through his brain, while he sat apart and listened. At this moment the fragment that came and went apropos of nothing was Shakespeare's sonnet, ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... and turned, as if for relief from a bitter theme, to the book in his hand. He read aloud, from the sonnet out of which ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... in acquaintance with the great Learned Cornelius Agrippa, so famous for Magick, who shewed him the Image of his Geraldine in a Glass, sick, weeping on her Bed, and resolved all into devout Religion for the absence of her Lord; upon sight of which, he made this Sonnet. ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... M. Kemble, one of our earliest and best Anglo-Saxon scholars in modern times, was, like others of his famous family (so far as is generally known) a person of varied talents, though he showed these neither in letter writing nor in the direction which Tennyson incorrectly augured in the "Sonnet to J. M. K." His sister Frances (invariably, like most though by no means all ladies of her name, called "Fanny"[42]) was a very remarkable person indeed. After taking early and with brilliant success to the stage which might almost be said to be hers by inheritance,[43] ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... was restlessly pacing to and fro in the confined space of the chamber allotted to him at Whitehall, and this sonnet, one of the most beautiful which he ever wrote, will express better than any other words what effect his sister's counsel ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... 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
... a thousand years hence Riouperoux The Town without a Market The Balled of Camden Town Mignon Felo de se Tenebris Interlucentem Invitation to a young but learned friend . . . Balled of the Londoner The First Sonnet of Bathrolaire The Second Sonnet of Bathrolaire The Masque of the Magi The Balled of Hampstead Heath Litany to Satan The Translator and the Children Opportunity Destroyer of Ships, Men, Cities War Song of the Saracens ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... seven have got their thoughts upon him," replied Rumple, who was nibbling the end of a stumpy pencil and lovingly fingering a dirty little notebook. He was just then very undecided as to whether he would write a sonnet to his father or start on a history of Sydney. Mr. Wallis had told him so many stories of the old Botany Bay days that he felt quite primed for a very ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... 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
... Afraid of these crocodiles, eh?' The little sentimentality which exceeded was forced to take its course down the inside of the nose. We have other work in this world than indulging in sentimentality of the 'Sonnet to the ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... the closing lines of Keats's famous sonnet to Homer, in which a great poet has admirably depicted the scene, though, by a strange error, giving the credit to Cortez ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... 49, I print Leasure, although both editions read leasure; and in the Vacation 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 anointed in ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... such inimitable eyes, that his fate was decided for life. The world was valueless without her; and my particular advice was requested as to the way in which he was to make his approaches. I advised a sonnet. He smiled, and acknowledged that he had anticipated my advice, and had spent an hour of that twilight, dear to love and the muses, during which he had kept me in all the discomforts of suspense, devoting all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... solitary and dejected. She accused herself of having suffered her wishes to mislead her judgment; and the present conduct of Hippolitus convinced her, that she had mistaken admiration for a sentiment more tender. She believed, too, that the musician who had addressed her in his sonnet, was not the Count; and thus at once was dissolved all the ideal fabric of her happiness. How short a period often reverses the character of our sentiments, rendering that which yesterday we despised, to-day desirable. The tranquil state which she had so lately delighted ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... in his 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 ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... of painting! and a very elegant compliment to the handsome nature of Buonaggiunta. Jacopo da Lentino, called the Notary, and Fra Guittone of Arezzo, were celebrated verse-writers of the day. The latter, in a sonnet given by Mr. Cary in the notes to his translation, says he shall be delighted to hear the trumpet, at the last day, dividing mankind into the happy and the tormented (sufferers under crudel martire), because an inscription will then be seen on his forehead, shewing that he had ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... 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 ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... written at Ravenna, and at the suggestion of the Guiccioli, to whom it is dedicated in a sonnet, prettily but inharmoniously turned. Like all his other best performances, this rugged but masterly composition draws its highest interest from himself and his own feelings, and can only be rightly appreciated by observing how fitly many of the bitter breathings of Dante ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... of Dibdin A Sketch from Life On the Portrait of the Son of J.G. Lambton, Esq. Written in the Album of the Lady of Counsellor D. Pollock The Heliotrope Sonnet On seeing a Young Lady I had previously known, confined in a Madhouse Prometheus Rosa's Grave The Sibyl. A Sketch Love On a delightful Drawing in my Album Stanzas Shakspeare Impromptu. To Oriana, on attending with her, as Sponsors, at a Christening To my ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... This last sonnet seems to have been written after seeing the picture of Sand, which represents her in a man's dress, but with long, loose hair, and an eye whose mournful fire is impressive, even in ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... refined by the lofty and poetic discipline to which he had subjected himself. It is delicately implied in the refection in Paradise, and more substantially, though still elegantly, betrayed in the sonnet proposing to "Laurence, of virtuous father virtuous son," a series of nice little dinners in midwinter; and it blazes fully out in that untasted banquet which, elaborate as it was, Satan tossed up in a trice from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... for Spanish conspiracy and stratagem; with Scotland at its back, a foreign country, with half its population exasperated enemies of England, and the rest but doubtful friends, and with the legitimate sovereign of that country, "the daughter of debate, who discord still did sow,"—[Sonnet by Queen Elizabeth.]—a prisoner in Elizabeth's hands, the central point around which treason was constantly crystallizing itself, it was not strange that with the known views of the Queen on the subject of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... glance through many sheets had shown Katharine that, by some coincidence, her attention had to be directed to many different anxieties simultaneously. In the first place, Rodney had written a very full account of his state of mind, which was illustrated by a sonnet, and he demanded a reconsideration of their position, which agitated Katharine more than she liked. Then there were two letters which had to be laid side by side and compared before she could make out the truth of their story, and even when she knew ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Giulio Romano caused Marc' Antonio to engrave twenty plates showing all the various ways, attitudes, and positions in which licentious men have intercourse with women; and, what was worse, for each plate Messer Pietro Aretino wrote a most indecent sonnet, insomuch that I know not which was the greater, the offence to the eye from the drawings of Giulio, or the outrage to the ear from the words of Aretino. This work was much censured by Pope Clement; and if, when it was published, Giulio had not already left ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... for 'bear a part' (l. 1135) is 'sing a part.' [See also Sonnet VIII.] Any person of decent education could 'bear a part' in those days, i.e., read at sight the treble, alto, tenor, or bass 'part' of the work presented by the host for the diversion of his guests. ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... well known to be the commonest thing in the world. Or one might make the words the Backbone of a triolet, only one would have to split them up to fit it into the metre; or one might make it the decisive line in a sonnet; or one might make a pretty little lyric of it, to the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... was no general public interest in art until the generous Charles appeared upon the scene. Charles was an elegant scholar and prided himself on being able to turn a sonnet or paint a picture; and the only reason, he explained, why he did not devote all his time to literature and art was because the State must be preserved. He could hire men to paint, but where could one be found ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... side; or contrariwise, to our scientific one. There are days when he may be deeply moved by a Guido Reni martyrdom, or absorbed in the "Marriage a la Mode"; days when even Giorgione's Pastoral may (as in Rossetti's sonnet) mean nothing beyond the languid pleasure of sitting on the grass after a burning day and listening to the plash of water and the tuning of instruments; the same thought and emotion, the same interest and pleasure, being equally ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... the mouth of one of the lovers, who are about to separate. A modification of it is familiar to us all in Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers debate whether the song they hear is of the nightingale or the lark; the aubade, with the two other great forms of love-poetry then floating in the world, the sonnet and the [220] epithalamium, being here refined, heightened, and inwoven into the structure of the play. Those, in whom what Rousseau calls les frayeurs nocturnes are constitutional, know what splendour they give to the things of ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... was so disappointed by any work of art as I was by this statue, which is easily accounted for. In the first place, I had not seen any model or copy of the original; and, secondly, I had read Zappi's sublime sonnet, which I humbly conceive does rather more than justice to its subject. The ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... and helpful than his sonnet to "To-morrow, the Mysterious Guest," who whispers to the boding ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... same consideration which induced us to regard "Manawyd" as a proper name in a former stanza, has caused us to leave "Gwanar" untranslated in this place. It is not improbable, however, from the shortness of this sonnet, that the line containing the name of its hero may have been lost. In that case we should translate "chwerthin wanar," "their leader laughed." That Gwanar was occasionally used as a proper name by the ancient Britons, appears from Triad xl. (first series) where we find ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... written in a loose, swinging couplet, some in quatrains, some in blank verse, some in the choice, picked prose made the fashion by Lyly. It contains more lyrics than any other Shakespearean play. One of the lyrics, a sonnet in Alexandrines, is the fruit of a real human passion. The lyric at the end of the play is the loveliest thing ever said about England. If this play and most of the other plays were modern works, the Censor would not allow them to be performed publicly. The men and women converse with a frankness ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Sonnet compare Hamlet's "Give me that man That is not passion's slave," etc. Shakespeare's writings show the deepest sensitiveness to passion:—hence the attraction he felt in ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... business," said Rivington; "you couldn't have applied to a better shop. What I don't know about little old New York wouldn't make a sonnet to a sunbonnet. I'll put you right in the middle of so much local colour that you won't know whether you are a magazine cover or in the erysipelas ward. When do you ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... wanted to linger near them, and their glances caused him strange emotions. He resented this, as an invasion of his privacy; it was inconsistent with his hermit-instinct. Thyrsis wished no women in his life save the muses with their star-sewn garments. He had been fond of a line from a sonnet ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... they seem fit for but to serve as little shapes in which a man may mould very mechanically any single thought which comes into his head, which thought is not lyrical enough in itself to exhale in a more lyrical measure? The difficulty of the sonnet metre in English is a good excuse for the dull didactic thoughts which naturally incline towards it: fellows know there is no danger of decanting their muddy stuff ever so slowly: they are neither prose nor poetry. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Yet the Poets he affirms have contributed very much to the spoiling the Tongue: And who would he have to restore it? Himself, and his Brethren. Himself a Poet of Renown, and who, if he would once speak his Mind, I make no question is Prouder of his Elegy upon Patridge, and his Sonnet on Miss Biddy Floyd, than of all His Prose Compositions together, or even that elegant Poem, call'd The Humble Petition of Frances Harris, which is ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... dates the second 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 ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chiefly through lanes, planted on either side with mulberries and poplars, from which vines hung dangling in careless festoons, I found many a bowering shade, where I sat, at intervals, to indulge my pensive humour over some ejaculatory sonnet; as the pilgrim, on his journey to Loretto, reposes here and there, to offer his prayers and meditations to the Virgin. In little more than an hour and half, I found myself in the midst of the Euganean hills, and, after winding almost another hour ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... was staying, suggesting that I should come round and remonstrate with Mr. 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... profession, had the utmost indulgence for all whose pursuits were different from his own. His sole relaxations were those of a retiring, mild, and pensive temper, and were limited to a ramble, almost always solitary, among the woods and hills, in praise of which, he was sometimes guilty of a sonnet, but rather because he could not help the attempt, than as proposing to himself the fame or the rewards which attend the successful poet. Indeed, far from seeking to insinuate his fugitive pieces into magazines and newspapers, he blushed at his poetical attempts even while ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... triumphant display of skill by extemporising a dozen of the most interesting and scientific variations upon the air Non piu andrai. It is needless to mention the uproar that followed. The concert was altogether found so delightful, that a second, upon the same plan, soon followed. A sonnet was written in his honour, and his performances brought him one thousand florins. Wherever he appeared in public, it was to meet testimonies of esteem and affection. His emotion at the reception of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... wing of the castle. The famous avenue began at her very window, and her eyes rested only on grass and flowers. A native poet (Marguerite, in the provinces as in Paris, was always the star of the poets) had composed a sonnet about her. ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... he was young," Lady Brigit Mead continued, her thick-looking white eyelids, eyelids that the hapless Mr. Babington compared in his twenty-second sonnet to magnolia-petals, drooping till her lashes made shadows on ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... coming. Thank God! the sun is setting, the night will soon fall; the moon will rise and I shall know my fate; the widow will tell me everything, I shall unravel all the profound mystery which is hidden from me now. Let me think over the sonnet which I have reserved for a grand effect—it is intended to describe the beauty of her eyes. Perhaps she has never heard a sonnet—possibly she will be sensible of its beauty and spirit; but no, I cannot ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... it. Anything would be better than to go through life with a girl who didn't feel there are some things no fellar can do; and one of them, that he can't put a word like crimpy in his sonnet." ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... can't play away his hundred Pound at sight; his Third Day won't afford it; and therefore he rails at Gamesters; Whores shun him, as much as Noblemen, and for the same cause, Money; those care not to sell their Carcases for a Sonnet, nor these to scatter their Guineas, to be told an old Tale of a Tub, they were so ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... was, became quite easy and confidential in her company. The Tutor is not only a poet, but is a great reader of the poetry of many languages. It so happened that Number Five was puzzled, one day, in reading a sonnet of Petrarch, and had recourse to the Tutor to explain the difficult passage. She found him so thoroughly instructed, so clear, so much interested, so ready to impart knowledge, and so happy in his ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the best of his productions are a cycle of lyrics entitled 'The Flowers'; 'The Isle of Blessedness,' a romantic drama of great beauty, published in 1823; and a fragment of a fairy drama, 'The Blue Bird.' He introduced the sonnet into Swedish poetry, and did a great service to the national literature by his critical work, 'Swedish Seers and Poets,' a collection of biographies and criticisms of poets and philosophers before and during the reign of Gustavus III. Atterbom's life may be accounted long in the way of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... sentimentalism—it might have passed as an error of his youth, but for poor Leyland's comments on its majesty and beauty. There are corpses in it and tombstones, and girls dying of tuberculosis, obscured beyond recognition in a mush of verbiage. There is not a live line in it. One sonnet only, out of Branwell's many sonnets, is fitted to survive. It has a certain melancholy, sentimental grace. But it is not a good sonnet, and it shows Branwell at his best. At his worst he sinks far below Charlotte at her worst, and, compared with Emily ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... unnoted by Mr Zangwill is simply this, that R. L. Stevenson never lost the strange tint imparted to his youth by the religious influences to which he was subject, and which left their impress and colour on him and all that he did. Henley, in his striking sonnet, hit it when ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... sonnet to write to the eyebrow of a lady—no, Caroline: you do not know her—and I must have perfect solitude, by the side of still water, in the moonlight. So I am going down to the long pool; and I must on no account be ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... 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 century. Phrases like "vocal groves," "Pomona's rich bounties," or "the sylvan choir's responsive ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... poverty the Lord-Treasurer Danby's proffered bribe, became a character in history before the exquisite quality of his garden-poetry was recognised. There was a cult for Liberty in the middle of the eighteenth century, and Marvell's name was on the list of its professors. Wordsworth's sonnet has preserved ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... quarrels 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... I have no doubt her work might have appeared with a very pretty collection of well-deserved poetical praises in its introductory pages. As old customs linger longest in places like this, I hope she and you will not think it quite extravagant to send a single sonnet on the occasion. ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... followed by an absolute loathing of his usual studies. Music all through life affected him most powerfully, and he states that his tragedies were almost invariably planned by him when under its influence. It was about this time that he composed his first sonnet, which was made up of whole or mutilated verses of Metastasio and Ariosto, the only two Italian poets of whom he knew any thing. It was in praise of a certain lady to whom his uncle was paying his addresses, and whom ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... wuss it was. But, oh! Mr Tickler, to see the cretur sittin wi' a pen in 's hand, and pipe in 's mouth, jotting down a sonnet, or odd, or lyrical ballad! Sometimes I put that black velvet cap ye gied me on his head, and ane o' the bairns's auld big-coats on his back; and then, sure aneugh, when he takes his stroll in the avenue, he ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... with college students in California, one is impressed by their boundless ingenuity. If anything needs doing, some student can do it for you. Is it to sketch a waterfall, to engrave a portrait, to write a sonnet, to mend a saddle, to sing a song, to build an engine, or to "bust a bronco," there is someone at hand who can do it, and do it artistically. Varied ingenuity California demands of her pioneers. Their native originality has been intensified by circumstances, ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... of American women poets. Emily Dickinson is more imaginative, but her utter scorn of form in composition makes her work, unique as it is, less satisfying. Mrs. Jackson was a favorite with Emerson, and he is said to have liked best among her poems this sonnet, "Thought." ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... his time, the sonnet had been but little used in England, the principal writers being Surrey, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton. Shakspeare left one hundred and fifty-four, which exhibit rare poetical power, and which are most of them addressed to a person unknown, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... spreading their waste of blossom around it, and the weeping birches, which towered over the underwood, drooping their long and leafy fibres to intercept the sun, it must have seemed a place for a youthful poet to study his earliest sonnet, or a pair of lovers to exchange their first mutual avowal of affection. Apparently it now awakened very different recollections. Bertram's brow, when he had looked round the spot, became gloomy and embarrassed. Meg, after uttering to herself, "This is the very spot!" looked at ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... thought in this sonnet? Quote corresponding passages. Give illustrations from history ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty |
