"Elegiac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Elegiac poetry has an honorable place in Roman literature. To this school belongs Ovid, [Footnote: Born B.C. 43. Died A.D. 18.] whose "Metamorphoses" will always retain their interest. He, with that self- conscious genius common to poets, declares that his poem would be proof against sword, fire, thunder, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... they are not free from certain hardnesses, have a pathos and greatness in their simplicity, sufficient to endear the legitimate Sonnet to every Reader of just taste. They possess a characteristic grace, which can never belong to three elegiac stanzas, closing with ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... or verse, and one form of verse or many): this art has no name up to the present (i.e. there is no name to cover mimes and dialogues and any similar imitation made in iambics, elegiacs, &c. Commonly people attach the 'making' to the metre and say 'elegiac-makers', 'hexameter-makers,' giving them a common class-name by their metre, as if it was not their imitation that makes ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... mainly by the genius of Rousseau in France and of Goethe in Germany. I cannot here pretend to deal with the treatment of nature in Rousseau, or with the outcome of his influence first in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand, and then in the elegiac beauty of Lamartine and de Musset's Nuits; nor can I deal with the poetry of nature in Goethe, and its lesser but often beautiful expression in the German 'Romanticists', and in Heine. It is only possible here to remind ourselves that neither the ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... Henry Cleveland Wood, is a pleasant and urbane bit of light verse; while "Percival Lowell," by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, is an abominably dull elegiac piece of heavy verse. Edwin Gibson's "Sonnet to Acyion" deserves keen attention as the work of a capable and rapidly developing young bard. "Real versus Ideal" is a bright metrical divertissement by John Russell, which suffers through the omission ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... the old couple would feel in embracing their son as their bishop. When he arrived at their village, he learnt that it was but a few days since they were no more. His sensibilities were exquisitely pained. The muse dictated some elegiac verse, and in the solemn pathos deplored the death and the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... poured forth his elegiac strains upon the fate of the widowed bridegroom, on which subject, after a long and querulous effusion, the poet arrives at the sound conclusion, that if Baldoon had walked on foot, which it seems was his general custom, he would have escaped perishing ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... recognised there some of the ideas of our distinguished and poetical relative, that dear Viscount Philibert de la Choue. A man of letters, yes! a man of letters! Literature, mere literature! I beg God to forgive him, for he most surely does not know what he is doing, or whither he is going with his elegiac Christianity for talkative working men and young persons of either sex, to whom scientific notions have given vagueness of soul. And I only feel angry with his Eminence Cardinal Bergerot, for he at any rate knows what he does, and does as he pleases. No, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... to Juliet; "a most estimable young person, the daughter of my father's chamberlain. She is rather given to singing ballads of an elegiac nature," added the prince, reflectingly, "but our madcap Romeo will cure her of that. Methinks ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... de Roubigne, which, in the opinion of many, shares the palm with his first novel: the plot is more varied than that of the second, and the language is exceedingly harmonious—elegiac prose. The story is plaintive and painful: virtue is extolled, but made to suffer, in a domestic tragedy, which all readers would be glad to ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... which hurls its gauntlet into the face of fate itself,[28] checked, as it were, and cooled by soberer reflection and retrospective regret. It is the sorrow for the yet recent loss of Finland which inspires the elegiac tones in Tegner's war-song; and it is his own ardent, youthful spirit, his own deep and sincere love of country, which awakes the martial melody with the throbbing of the drum and the rousing alarum of trumpets. What can be more delightfully—shall I say juvenile—than this reference ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... another. In this way we come to say that a rock projects boldly, that fire rages furiously over a building, that a summer evening with flocks going home at sunset is peaceful and idyllic; that autumn, dripping with rain, its willows sighing in the wind, is elegiac and melancholy ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... the Lavacrum Pallados of Callimachus very beautiful indeed, especially that part about the mother of Tiresias and Minerva.[1] I have a mind to try how it would bear translation; but what metre have we to answer in feeling to the elegiac ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... of the old Dorchester Church seems also to have been a maker of elegiac verse; for after the decease of Rev. Richard Mather, the pastor, and one of the ablest divines of colonial New England, the church records contain the two complimentary stanzas quoted below, the first being ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... come across a poem which it is impossible to classify in accordance with European standards. Yet such a poem is Omar's "Rubaiyat." If elegiac poetry is the expression of subjective emotion, sentiment, and thought, we might class this Persian masterpiece as elegy; but an elegy is a sustained train of connected imagery and reflection. The "Rubaiyat" is, on the other hand, a string of quatrains, each of which ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... a cheerful, and on the other a melancholy feeling. To our thought, the associations connected with the return of the herds from the fields at sunset are best fitted to awaken that quiet, reflective state of mind which is most congenial to the mood of the elegiac poet. To another, these associations may be of such a character as to produce a ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... to recitation on the stage—in which are displayed, for instruction and amusement, all the passions, feelings, errors, and virtues of the human race in real life; lyric poetry, or that suited to music, as songs, odes, &c; didactic, or instructive; elegiac, or sentimental, and affecting; satirical, or censorious; epigrammatic, or witty and ludicrous; and pastoral, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... and Down the Avon. Rambles in Arden. The Stratford Fountain. Bosworth Field. The Home of Dr. Johnson. From London to Edinburgh. Into the Highlands. Highland Beauties. The Heart of Scotland. Sir Walter Scott. Elegiac Memorials. Scottish Pictures. Imperial Ruins. The Land of ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... An elegiac, lack-a-daisical, or pentameter verse, consists of four feet and two long syllables, one of which is placed between the second and third foot, and the other at the end of the verse. The two first feet may ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... and round in his brain. And then, in a sudden burst of clearness, he understood what it meant for him to say this. It meant that the farce of friendship, at which he had played, was at an end; it meant that he loved her—not as hitherto, with a touch of elegiac resignation—but with a violence that made him afraid. If seemed incredible to him now that he had spent two months in close fellowship with her: it was ludicrous, inhuman. For he now saw, that his ultimate desire had been neither to help her nor to ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... his mind wandered back to the last night scene which he surveyed on the bloody shores of the River Raisin. He gave up the heroic part and became the schoolboy again, and commemorated his sorrows for his lost friends in verse, like some passionate, heart-broken lover. These elegiac strains were never intended for any but the eye of mutual friends, whose sympathies, like his own, poured out tears with their plaints over the dead. We give some of these lines of his boyhood, to show that the heroic youth had a bosom not ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... and Gaspar, pieces as witty as anything in Bocage but free from Bocage's coarse impiety, will always interest literary students. But it is as the singer of love that Joao de Deus will delight posterity as he delighted his own generation. The elegiac music of Rachel and of Marina, the melancholy of Adeus and of Remoinho, the tenderness and sincerity of Meu casta lirio, of Lagrima celeste, of Descalca and a score more songs are distinguished by the large, vital simplicity which withstands time. It ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... is a reflective lyric prompted by the death of some one. Tennyson's In Memoriam is a collection of elegiac lyrics. ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... She believed in one emotion at a time. It offended her to have Davidge suggest that the funeral baked meats of her tragedy should coldly furnish forth a wedding breakfast. She wanted to revel awhile in her elegiac humor and pay full honor to her sorrow, full penalty for her guilt. She put aside his amorous impatience ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... conventions of length and metre. Sometimes it becomes in all but metrical form a lyric; sometimes it hardly rises beyond the versified statement of a fact or an idea; sometimes it is barely distinguishable from a snatch of pastoral. The shorter pieces of the elegiac poets might very often well be classed as epigrams but for the uncertainty, due to the form in which their text has come down to us, whether they are not in all cases, as they undoubtedly are in some, portions of longer poems. Many couplets and quatrains of Theognis fall under ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... follows the jolly little counter-theme in connection with the leading theme, and while the continued treatment of the working out seems simple, it is in fact extremely rich, and well managed for intensifying the elegiac character of the opening subject. Abundance of melodic life meets us in every one of the orchestral voices, and the richness of detail is like that of one of the old cathedrals, where the mighty mass of the whole is no less significant to the distant ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... the palace of the noble. In deriving his inspiration direct from the national heart, Chopin did what Schumann, Schubert, and Weber did in Germany, what Rossini did in Italy, and shares with them a freshness of melodic power to be derived from no other source. Rather tender and elegiac than vigorous, the deep sadness underlying the most sparkling forms of his work is most notable. One can at times almost recognize the requiem of a nation in the passionate melancholy on whose dark background his fancy weaves ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... elegies. It is dead Hyacinth lifted and extended to view, in all his beautiful, dead youth. The young, male body droops forward on the cross, like a dead flower. It looks as if its only true nature were to be dead. How lovely is death, how poignant, real, satisfying! It is the true elegiac spirit. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... year of the Seven against Thebes; but after 458, when the Oresteia was exhibited at Athens, we find the poet again in Sicily for the last time. In 456 he died, and was buried at Gela; and on his tomb was placed an epitaph in two elegiac couplets saying: "Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian, who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela; of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak, or the long-haired Persian who knows it well.'' ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... satires in the vein of Sebastian Brant. Though himself a sharp critic of clerical abuses, he could not brook the thought of a rupture with the Roman church. In the Great Lutheran Fool he assailed Luther scurrilously. His verse is mostly prosaic and often coarse, but there is a certain elegiac warmth in his song of thirty-five stanzas on the Downfall of the Christian Faith, which was published in the early days of the Lutheran revolt. A part of it is given below, the text according to Krschner's Nationalliteratur, Vol. 17{1}, ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... yet know not, what they say: Know not, yet know, the fire's tongue And the rain's elegiac song, And the white language of the spray, And all the wind meant yesterday— Yea! wiser he, when the day ends, Who shared it with ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... versed in British literature, in a note of his usual length and learning, has confuted the arguments of Scriblerus. In support of the present reading, he quotes a passage from a poem written about the same period with our author's, by the celebrated Johannes Pastor[*], intituled "An Elegiac Epistle to the Turnkey of Newgate," wherein the gentleman declares, that rather indeed in compliance with an old custom, than to gratify any particular will of his own, ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... understand, couldn't account for it. What possessed him to get a regular scare like this? It was too absurd for words. Sentiment?—Yes, by all means a reasonable amount of it, well in hand and thus capable of translation—if the fancy took you—into nicely turned elegiac verse; but a scare, a scare pure and simple, wasn't to be tolerated! And he got up, standing astraddle to brace himself against the swinging of the train, while he stretched, settling himself in his clothes—pulled ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... with the lapse of many years. With the exquisite pathos that pervades this volume, there is no indulgence in weak and morbid sentiment. It is free from the preternatural gloom which so often makes elegiac poetry an abomination to every healthy intellect. The tearful bard does not allow himself to be drowned in sorrow, but draws from its pure and bitter fountains the sources of noble inspiration and earnest resolve. No one can read these natural records of a spirit, wounded but not crushed, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the instant, renders such Decret, and 'order to submit and repent,' as he requires; if it will avail any thing. On the other hand, Journalism, through all its throats, gives hoarse outcry, condemnatory, elegiac-applausive. The Forty-eight Sections, lift up voices; sonorous Brewer, or call him now Colonel Santerre, is not silent, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. For, meanwhile, the Nanci Soldiers have sent a Deputation of Ten, furnished with ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... would expect us to condole with them or to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his attitude is not wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom time can never force to retract his superlative claims ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... of Camilla had been sprung from a fresh Italian well; neither the elegiac-melodious, nor the sensuous-lyrical, nor the joyous buffo; it was severe as an old masterpiece, with veins of buoyant liveliness threading it, and with sufficient distinctness of melody to enrapture those who like to suck the sugarplums of sound. He would indeed have favoured the public ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... collection of English Odes, defines the ode as "any strain of enthusiastic and exalted lyrical verse directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with one dignified theme." Spenser's "Epithalamium" or marriage ode, Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," Tennyson's elegiac and encomiastic "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," Lowell's "Harvard Commemoration Ode," are among the most familiar examples of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... between two mattresses, like Shakespeare's Othello. Caroline puts on the air of a martyr; her submission is positively killing. On every occasion she assassinates Adolphe with a "Just as you like!" uttered in tones whose sweetness is something fearful. No elegiac poet could compete with Caroline, who utters elegy upon elegy: elegy in action, elegy in speech: her smile is elegiac, her silence is elegiac, her gestures are elegiac. Here are a few examples, wherein every household will find ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... exclude the sun"; but the increasing prominence of the mossy cave and hermit's cell, both in descriptive verse and in gardening, was symptomatic. It was a note of the coming romanticism, and of that pensive, elegiac strain which we shall encounter in the work of Gray, Collins, and the Wartons. It marked the withdrawal of the muse from the world's high places into the cool sequestered vale of life. All through the literature of the mid-century, the high-strung ear may catch ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... pieces omitted are of elegiac character. Of this class, he could find a place for such pieces only as were dedicated to the most distinguished of the persons falling in battle, or such as are marked by the higher characteristics of poetry—freshness, thought, and imagination. But many of the omitted pieces ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... endure, to endure and to enjoy. She seems to say that what she brings us is but an earnest of what she holds for us out there along the vanishing road. There is nothing, indeed, she will not promise us, and no promise, we feel, she cannot keep. Even in her tragic and bodeful seasons, in her elegiac autumns and stern winters, there is an energy of sorrow and sacrifice that elevates and inspires, and in the darkest hours hints at immortal mornings. She may terrify, but she never deadens, the soul. In earthquake and eclipse she seems to be less busy with destruction than with renewed creation. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... gave this poem to the world as his own answer to the doubts and questionings of men. This universal human interest, together with its exquisite form and melody, makes the poem, in popular favor at least, the supreme threnody, or elegiac poem, of our literature; though Milton's Lycidas is, from the critical view point, undoubtedly ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Er{)a}to, presided over elegiac or amorous poetry, and dancing, whence she was sometimes called Saltatrix. She is represented as young, and crowned with myrtle and roses, having a lyre in her right hand, and a bow in her left, with a ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... and as the manner is, was not unstudied in those authors which are most commended: whereof some were grave orators and historians, whose matter methought I loved indeed, but as my age then was, so I understood them; others were the smooth elegiac poets, whereof the schools are not scarce, whom both for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing, which in imitation I found most easy and most agreeable to nature's part in me, and for their matter, which what it is there be few who know not, I was so allured to read, that no recreation ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of King Olaf, and is much the longest tale in the volume, recounting the effort to plant Christianity in Norway by the sword of the King. In every variety of measure, heroic, elegiac, lyrical, the wild old Scandinavian tradition is told. Even readers who may be at first repelled by legends almost beyond modern human sympathy cannot escape the most musical persuasion of the poem which wafts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Robert Dundas: and their contention was, as the verses intimate, for the place of Dean of the Faculty of Advocates: Erskine was successful. It is supposed that in characterizing Dundas, the poet remembered "the incurable wound which his pride had got" in the affair of the elegiac verses on the death of the elder Dundas. The poem first appeared in the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... love of Nature, the same religious outlook, the same insistence on the individual point of view; but the tints are less brilliant, the emphasis is more restrained; the rhetorical impulse still dominates, but it is the rhetoric of elegiac tenderness rather than of picturesque pomp. A wonderful limpidity of versification which, while it is always perfectly easy, is never weak, and a charming quietude of sentiment which, however near it may seem to come to the commonplace, always just escapes it—these qualities give Lamartine ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... telegram which announced Mr. Poland's death was received, he tried to comfort her by words that were so peculiarly elegant and sombre, that, in spite of Laura's wishes to think otherwise, they struck her like an elegiac address that had been carefully prearranged and studied; and when the tidings of poor little Bertha's death came, it would occur to Laura that Mr. Beaumont had thought his first little address so perfect that he could do no better than to repeat it, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... of Hanover proved insoluble throughout, and was like a perpetual running sore. Oh the pamphleteerings, the denouncings, the complainings, satirical and elegiac, which grounded themselves on Hanover, the CASE OF THE HANOVER FORCES, and innumerable other Hanoverian cases, griefs and difficulties! So pungently vital to somnambulant mankind at that epoch; to us fallen dead as carrion, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Burlington, there is a place called Essex Junction. It consists of a dismal shed of a station, a bewildering wilderness of tracks, and an adjacent cemetery, thickly populated (according to a local legend) with the bodies of people who have died of old age while waiting for their trains. This elegiac locality was visited, many years ago, by the Honorable E.J. Phelps, once ambassador of the United States to the court of St. James's. He was allotted several hours for the contemplation of the cemetery; and his consequent meditations moved him ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... it House of Lamentations; and on Mondays and Thursdays he devoted himself to the business of the state and ordering the affairs of his levies and lieges; and the rest of the week he was wont to spend in the House of Lamentations, mourning for his son and bewailing him with elegiac verses,[FN324] of which ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Zuloaga. Decadent he was; a romantic before French romanticism, he yet had borrowed from an earlier France. Some of his gay Fetes Champetres recall the influence of Watteau—a Watteau without the sweet elegiac strain. He has been called a Spanish Hogarth—not a happy simile. Hogarth preaches; Goya never; satirists both, Goya never deepened by a pen stroke the didactic side. His youth was not extraordinary in promise; his father and mother were poor peasants. The ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... mine ode, Adorned by sculptur'd art; Make it, O Learning, thy abode, Thy gems through it impart. There may the bards of tragic name Forever flourish, Graecia's fame— With Homer's deathless lay! Here Maro with heroic glow, And Naso's elegiac flow ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... Dumb Virgin, The Wandering Beauty, The Unhappy Mistake. She was working at high pressure, and 1688 still saw a tremendous literary output. Waller had died 21 October, 1687, at the great age of eighty-one, and her Elegiac Ode to his ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... begin with three elegiac couplets headed Titulus Bibliothece, probably placed over the ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... he had resented the misrepresentation which had cost him his daughter, was not a man to do anything which might give any opening for gossip; he repressed his wife's tendency to become elegiac on her daughter's account, and treated Mark in public as before. But on occasions when he dined there en famille, and sat alone with his father-in-law over dessert, there was no attempt to conceal from him that he was only there on sufferance, and those were terrible ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... great industry, and wrote in prose and in all kinds of verse; but of these only a few hymns and epigrams have come down to our time. Egypt seems to have been the birthplace of the mournful elegy, and Callimachus was the chief of the elegiac poets. He was born at Cyrene; and though, from the language in which he wrote, his thoughts are mostly Greek, yet he did not forget the place of his birth. He calls upon Apollo by the name of Carneus, because, after Sparta and Thera, Cyrene was his ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... 1357, Petrarch received a letter from Benintendi, the Chancellor of Venice, requesting him to send a dozen elegiac verses to be engraved on the tomb of Andrea Dandolo. The children of the Doge had an ardent wish that our poet should grant them this testimony of his friendship for their father. Petrarch could not refuse ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... of the feminine gender was more capable than Mademoiselle Sophie Gamard of formulating the elegiac nature of ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... poem, which was afterwards named by Mrs. Wordsworth 'The Prelude', was finished. In that year also Wordsworth wrote the 'Ode to Duty', 'To a Sky-Lark', 'Fidelity', the fourth poem 'To the Daisy', the 'Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm', the 'Elegiac Verses' in memory of his brother John, 'The Waggoner', and a ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... merit 'in the language and the style of such better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches of Catherine and of Rosamond.' But the difference between these speeches is very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentations and meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the best speeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine splendour of language, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication of that 'power to grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive' ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... has near a volume of poems—elegiac—in memory of Arthur Hallam. Don't you think the world wants other notes than elegiac now? Lycidas is the utmost length an elegiac should reach. But Spedding praises: and I suppose the elegiacs will see daylight, public daylight, one day. Carlyle goes on growling ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... of William Shenstone, Esquire, In whose verse Were all the natural graces. And in whose manners Was all the amiable simplicity Of pastoral poetry, With the sweet tenderness Of the elegiac. ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... her a figure at it. She began to be seen here and there in the company of the widower, and it was reported privately to me that she had been perceived standing side by side with him in decorous contemplation, as it were in a sort of transient, elegiac revery a deux, before the monument. It was no surprise, therefore, when we heard, two months later, ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... inherent joyousness of anapestics, that is perhaps not less ideal. Father Humphrey says, "Anapaestic and amphibrachic verse, being similar in measure and movement, are pleasing to the ear, and well adapted to cheerful and humourous compositions; and sometimes to elegiac compositions, and subjects important and solemn."—Humphrey's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the appearance of the 1842 volume of Tennyson's verse the poet's bosom friend, Arthur Hallam, died at an immature age at Vienna, and his death was the subject of much brooding in noble, elegiac verse, written, as was Milton's 'Lycidas,' to commemorate the loss of one very dear to the poet. In "In Memoriam," as all know, Tennyson sought to assuage his grief and give fine, artistic expression to his profound sorrow at the loss of his companion and friend; but ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Nor is it only in the higher walks of tragedy, with its pomp and circumstances of action, that the poet here serves us. His humbler minstrelsy has soothed many an English heart from the tale of "Lycidas" to the elegiac verse of Tennyson. George Herbert still speaks to this generation as two centuries ago he spoke to his own. His quaint verses gather new beauties from time as they come to us redolent with the prayers and aspirations of many successions of the wives, mothers and daughters ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... among us before Parliament met, on which the speech of the honorable member from Maidstone commented this evening. I quite sympathize with him; it was one of the most interesting contributions to our elegiac literature I have heard for some time. But is it in this house only that we find these indications of the want of maturity in our views upon this subject? Our tables are filled at this moment with ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... Or the elegiac strain Softly sings of mental pain, And mournful diapasons sail On the faintly dying gale. But, ah! the soothing scene is o'er, On middle flight we cease to soar, For now the muse assumes a bolder sweep, Strikes on the lyric string her sorrows deep, In strains unheard before. ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... sons of Ariston, 'inspired offspring of the renowned hero,' as the elegiac poet terms them; but he does not understand how they can argue so eloquently on behalf of injustice while their character shows that they are uninfluenced by their own arguments. He knows not how to answer them, although he is afraid of ...
— The Republic • Plato
... up to the chin in verse. His muse was singularly prolific and her progeny various. He roamed recklessly through the realm of poesy. Every style seemed his—blank verse and rhyme, ode and epic, lyrical and tragical, satiric and elegiac, sacred and profane, sublime and ridiculous, he was equally good at all. His poetry might not perhaps have stood a very strict classification, but he produced a fair, marketable sample, which deserved (his friends thought) to be quoted at as liberal figures as some about ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... of the successive literary productions of ancient India. As in Greece there is an epic age of literature, where we should look in vain for prose or dramatic poetry; as in that country we never meet with real elegiac poetry before the end of the eighth century, nor with iambics before the same date; as even in more modern times rhymed heroic poetry appears in England with the Norman conquest, and in Germany the Minnesaenger rise and set with the Swabian dynasty—so, only in a much more ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... giving her a high place among the verse-writers of her generation. "Thoreau's Flute," printed in the Atlantic, has been called the most perfect of her poems, with a possible exception of a tender tribute to her mother. Personally, I consider the lines in memory of her mother one of the finest elegiac poems within my knowledge: ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... drive to Spello to inspect either Roman antiquities or frescoes, but to see an inscription on the city walls about Orlando. It is a rude Latin elegiac couplet, saying that, 'from the sign below, men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland, nephew of Charles; his deeds are written in history.' Three agreeable old gentlemen of Spello, who attended us ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... in Anglo-Saxon but breathes the saltness and the bitterness of the sea-air. To the old English the sea was something inexpressibly melancholy and desolate, mist-shrouded, and lonely, terrible in its grey and shivering spaces; and their tone about it is always elegiac and plaintive, as a place of dreary spiritless wandering and unmarked graves. When the English settled they lost the sense of the sea; they became a little parochial people, tilling fields and tending cattle, wool-gathering and wool-bartering, their shipping confined to cross-Channel ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... own hand.' The handwriting resembles that of Ralegh in 1603. It comprises altogether 568 verses. Two short poems, of seven and fourteen lines, come first; and the manuscript terminates with an unfinished poem of seven stanzas in a variety of terza rima. The body of the contents consists of 526 elegiac verses, described in the manuscript as 'The twenty-first and last book of the Ocean, to Cynthia.' Archdeacon Hannah, in his Courtly Poets from Ralegh to Montrose, concludes, with some hesitation, that the whole was composed as a sequel, between 1603 and 1612, to ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... elegiac poet of Megara; flourished in the second half of the 6th century B.C.; lost his possessions during a revolution at Megara, in which the democrats overpowered the aristocrats, to which party he belonged; compelled to live in exile, he ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... James Graham, the great marquis of Montrose, over whom some lowly bard has poured forth the following elegiac verses. To say, that they are far unworthy of the subject, is no great reproach; for a nobler poet might have failed in the attempt. Indifferent as the ballad is, we may regret its being still more degraded by many apparent corruptions. There seems an attempt ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... end; The neighbours round admire his shrewdness For songs of loyalty and lewdness; Outdone by none in rhyming well, Although he never learn'd to spell. Two bordering wits contend for glory; And one is Whig, and one is Tory: And this, for epics claims the bays, And that, for elegiac lays: Some famed for numbers soft and smooth, By lovers spoke in Punch's booth; And some as justly fame extols For lofty lines in Smithfield drolls. Bavius[16] in Wapping gains renown, And Maevius[16] reigns o'er Kentish town: Tigellius[17] ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... excellent poetry, but he seems to have cultivated this talent too little. The English verses prefixed to his book, which possess beautiful imagery, and great sweetness of versification, have been frequently published. His Latin elegiac verses addressed to his book, shew a very agreeable ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... he was the prince of Greek elegiac poets. Of his elegies we have a few fragments, and also the Latin translation by Catullus of the 'Lock of Berenice.' Berenice, the sister and wife of Ptolemy Euergetes, who succeeded his father Philadelphus in B.C. 245, had sacrificed some of her hair, laying it ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... significance. At last, however, one felt that the light was fading, that the somber silhouettes of the cypresses were more visible than their poetic embellishment. And finally, with the darkness, a breeze seemed to bring a long sigh from those elegiac branches, together with a perfume of the roses that had become unapparent, wet with dew as if with ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... head of invention John gives definitions, several examples of good letters, a long list of proverbs under appropriate captions so that the letter writer can quickly find the one to fit his context, and an "elegiac, bucolic, ethic love poem" in fifty leonine verses, accompanied by an inevitable allegorical interpretation.[111] Then he comes to selection. Tully, he admits, puts arrangement after invention, "but," he pleads, "in writing letters and documents poetically the art of ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... which have come down to us: three dramas, two epics, one elegiac poem, and one descriptive poem. Many other works, including even an astronomical treatise, have been attributed to him; they are certainly not his. Perhaps there was more than one author who bore the name Kalidasa; perhaps ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... and incalculable loss to English letters by Thomas Nash, the worthiest English precursor of Swift in vivid, pure, and passionate prose, embodying the most terrible and splendid qualities of a personal and social satirist; a man gifted also with some fair faculty of elegiac and even lyric verse, but in nowise qualified to put on the buskin left behind him by the "famous gracer of tragedians," as Marlowe had already been designated by their common friend Greene from among the worthiest of ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... could keep this up all day, This lyric, elegiac, song, Meseems hath come the time to say Farewell! ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... earnest in its expostulatory accents. B[o]w (long) w[)o]w (short). "Why such haste?" Then he tried his eloquence upon us; and while reiterating his canine accidente in his own way at the horses now close at hand, his voice assumes an elegiac whine as he turns to supplicate, in a tone that none accustomed to Italian beggars can mistake; "non abbandonatemi," being plainly the purport of its most dolorous and plaintive accents. We hesitate, the carriage draws up, down go the steps, and lo! in a twinkling, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... matter?" asked Sophie. "Are you in your elegiac mood? You look as I imagine Victor Hugo when he has not made up his mind about the ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... contains in all only about thirty thousand lines; but it includes epic, lyric, didactic, elegiac, and allegorical poems, together with war-ballads, paraphrases, riddles, and charms. Of the five elegiac poems (Wanderer, Seafarer, Ruin, Wife's Complaint, and Husband's Message), the Wanderer is the most artistic, and best portrays the gloomy contrast between ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... which enables us to travel it. It is now clear that the conception of popular culture is not, after all, represented by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catchwords with which we are wont to console ourselves in our elegiac orations, but that by it is meant a ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... peculiar that Lorand had written to me that he did not wish the elegiac tone of our first gathering to be disturbed by the voice of the stoics of Lankadomb, yet he had invited the whole Epicurean alliance here—a fact which was likely to give a dithyrambic ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed, yet want there not idle tongues to bark at them. These be subdivided into sundry more special denominations. The most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satiric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others. Some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with, some by the sorts of verses they liked best to write in, for indeed the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that numbrous kind ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... and found in the "Lyrical Ballads" "vulgarity, affectation and silliness." He is alarmed, moreover, lest his "childishness, conceit and affectation" spread to other authors. He proposes a poem to be called "Elegiac Stanzas to a Sucking Pig," and of "Alice Fell" he writes that "if the publishing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted." When the "White Doe of Rylstone" was published—no ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... signed 'Loving Father and 3 Sisters.' But the actual authorship rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or mortuary or memorial laureate ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... my land!" the girl cried, with kindling indignation. "You need not trouble yourself to do anything of the kind." Then, with a sudden change to the elegiac, she fixed her mournful gaze upon her departed friend and said, "I shall bury him ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... which has come down to us is of later date than the commencement of the Second Punic War, and consists almost exclusively of works fashioned on Greek models. The Latin metres, heroic, elegiac, lyric, and dramatic, are of Greek origin. The best Latin epic poetry is the feeble echo of the Iliad and Odyssey. The best Latin eclogues are imitations of Theocritus. The plan of the most finished didactic poem in the Latin tongue was taken from Hesiod. The Latin tragedies ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... produced by a distinct though unintended anti-climax. Nowhere has Heine struck a more truly elegiac note ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... Simonides here meant is the celebrated poet of Ceos, the perfecter of elegiac poetry among the Greeks. He flourished about the time of the Persian war. Besides his poetry, he is said to have been the inventor of some method of aiding the memory. He died at the court of Hiero, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Theocritus, believed in having an image of himself and an image of the beloved. Into the heart of the female image he thrust magic powders, and he said that this was common, lovers adding songs, "partly elegiac, partly malicious, and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... are mild and plaintive as the ballads sung amid the mists of Scotland. They are pallid as young girls carried to their bier by the dance or by love; they are eminently elegiac and they breathe all ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... "Poems of Jeshurun" published in He-Asif for 1888, alive with emotion and patriotic ardor, as well as his Haggadic legends, must be put in the first rank. After him comes Menahem M. Dolitzki, the elegiac poet of Zionism, the singer of sweet "Zionides." [Footnote: Poems published in New York, in 1896.] Then a young writer, snatched away all too early, Mordecai Zebi Manne, who was distinguished for his tender lyrics ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... pagan story. On this point Tegnr: "Another peculiarity common to the people of the North is a certain disposition for melancholy and heaviness of spirit common to all deeper characters. Like some elegiac key-note, its sound pervades all our old national melodies, and generally whatever is expressive in our annals, for it is found in the depths of the nation's heart. I have somewhere or other said of Bellman, the most ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... The Two Voices and Morte d' Arthur. The latter was the seed of the splendid Idylls of the King. Five years later he published The Princess, with its beautiful songs, and three years after In Memoriam the greatest elegiac poem in the language, in which he lamented the fate of Arthur Hallam and poured forth his own grief over this irreparable loss. In the same year he married Miss Emily Sellwood, who made his home a haven of rest and of whom he once said that with her ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... same date as the wellknown and very plainspoken "Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse," addressed by him to the new Sovereign without loss of time, if not indeed, as it would be hardly uncharitable to suppose, prepared beforehand. Even in this "Complaint" (the term was a technical one for an elegiac piece, and was so used by Spenser) there is a certain frank geniality of tone, the natural accompaniment of an easy conscience, which goes some way to redeem the nature of the subject. Still, the theme remains one which only an exceptionally skilful ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... of work than the seventeenth- century dialogues, and the use which is made of the local idiom is more restricted. Yet it is not without historic interest. Composed at a time when the Enclosure Acts were robbing the peasant farmer of his rights of common, the poem is an elegiac lament on the part of the Snaith farmer who sees himself suddenly brought to the brink of ruin by the enclosure of Snaith Marsh. To add to his misery, his bride, Susan, has deserted him for the more prosperous rival, Roger. As much of the poem is in standard English, it would be out ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... dares to ride Without Apollo by his side, Nor in a sonnet take the air, Unless his lady Muse be there; She, from some amaranthine grove, Where little Loves and Graces rove, 90 The laurel to my lord must bear, Or garlands make for whores to wear; She, with soft elegiac verse, Must grace some mighty villain's hearse, Or for some infant, doom'd by Fate To wallow in a large estate, With rhymes the cradle must adorn, To tell the world a fool is born. Since then our critic lords expect No hardy poet should reject 100 ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... fifty-four ballads divided into three parts; ballads of romance, ballads historical and legendary, ballads literary and elegiac. Each ballad is told in verse with an explanatory note and there is a general introduction on ballad poetry. Contains: Kinmont Willie, Sir Patrick Spens, and ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... seductively into the soul. The inconsistencies of unsuccessful passion, the wanderings of a mind diseased, and a prey to irresistible desire, he has portrayed more touchingly and truthfully than any French poet before him, or even perhaps after him. Generally speaking, he was more inclined to the elegiac and the idyllic, than to the heroic. I will not say that he would never have elevated himself to more serious and dignified conceptions than are to be found in his Britannicus and Mithridate; but here we must distinguish between ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... and a small but valuable library of choice manuscripts by Callinus, the Elegiac poet; Batalus, the musician; Dion, Andron, Delias, and Daphnus, the philosophers; with works by Phavorinus, Zenodotus, Menander, and ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... last paragraph was his article 'The Death of Jean,' his last serious writing, and one of the world's most beautiful examples of elegiac prose.—[Harper's Magazine, Dec., 1910,] and later in the volume, 'What Is Man ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at least a quarter of a century, has served her as a home. It was completed before Whitsunday, and I then deliberated on setting myself to seek after employment of a more remunerative kind, with just a little of the feeling to which we owe one of the best-known elegiac poems in the language—the "Man was made to Mourn" of Burns. "There is nothing that gives me a more mortifying picture of human life," said the poet, "than a man seeking work." The required work, however, came direct in my way without ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... table beside him. "Gracious, Georgie!" she exclaimed. "You have been investing!" and as she came across the room for a closer view, "Is it—is it Lucy?" she asked half timidly, half archly. But the next instant she saw whose likeness was thus set forth in elegiac splendour—and she was silent, except for a long, ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... Scripture." Least esteemed have been his poetical compositions, some of which have been suffered to perish. The poem on the "Miracles of St. Cuthberht" is extant, but the "Book of Hymns in Various Metre or Rhythm" is lost, and so also is his "Book of Epigrams in Heroic or Elegiac Metre." But we are not left without an authentic specimen of his hymnody, as he has incorporated in his history the Hymn of Virginity in praise of Queen Ethelthry, the foundress of Ely. His extant poetry proves him to have been an accomplished scholar ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... out, perform a funeral, embalm, mummify; toll the knell; put to bed with a shovel; inurn[obs3]. exhume, disinter, unearth. Adj. burried &c. v.; burial, funereal, funebrial[obs3]; mortuary, sepulchral, cinerary[obs3]; elegiac; necroscopic[obs3]. Adv. in memoriam; post obit, post mortem[Lat]; beneath the sod. Phr. hic jacet[Lat][obs3], ci-git[Fr]; RIP; requiescat in pace[Lat]; "the lone couch of his everlasting sleep" [Shelley]; "without a grave- unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown" [Byron]; "in the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... more should be said about the title. I have not interpreted the term lyric so rigidly as to exclude sonnets, ballads, elegiac verse, or even pieces of almost pure description. If I had held to the strictest sense of lyric, this book would never have been compiled; for I suspect nothing will strike the reader more forcibly than the fact that, despite the excellence of the poems included, there is a notable ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... the loss of Captain Scott's expedition as two absolutely typical examples of what is thought by journalists to be fitting material for poetry. Yet by common consent, these tragic occurrences did not awaken our numerous poets to any really remarkable effort, lyrical or elegiac. No ode or threnody could equal in vibrating passion Captain Scott's last testament. These are matters in which the fullness of a wholly sincere statement in prose does not require, does not even admit, the introduction of the symbol. The impact of the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... this school that we may mention was Callinus, an Ephesian of the latter part of the eighth century B.C., to whom the invention of the elegiac distich, the characteristic form of the Ionian poetry, is attributed. Among the few fragments from this poet is the following fine war elegy, occasioned, probably, by a Persian invasion ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... appreciative friend, if indeed he had not known Bryskett before their going to Ireland. Bryskett too, perhaps, was acquainted with Sir Philip Sidney; for two of the elegies written on that famous knight's death and printed along with Astrophel in the elegiac collection made by Spenser were probably of Bryskett's composition, viz., The Mourning Muse of Thestylis, where 'Liffey's tumbling stream' is mentioned, and the one entitled A Pastoral Eclogue, where Lycon offers to 'second' Colin's lament ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... example may be found in the flourishing cycle of stories which, while Bret Harte was celebrating California, grew up about the life of Southern plantations before the war. The mood of most of these was of course elegiac and the motive was to show how much splendor had perished in the downfall of the old regime. Over and over they repeated the same themes: how an irascible planter refuses to allow his daughter to marry the youth of her choice and how true love finds a way; how ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... a hero wore, In spite of all this elegiac stuff: Let not seven stanzas written by a bore, Prevent your ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... as these we hear the elegiac strain of the antique world, wherein remorseless fate held dominion over human efforts and destiny. Like other great writers who are touched with humorous melancholy, he falls often into the moralising vein; he stops his narrative to ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... expedition, near a wild hut or shealing, at the head of Loch Eriboll. Here he found its only inmate a poor asthmatic old man, stretched on his pallet, apparently at the point of death. As he sat by his bed-side, he "crooned," so as to be audible, it seems, to the patient, the following elegiac ditty, in which, it will be observed, he alludes to the death, then recent, of Pelham, an eminent statesman of George the Second's reign. As he was finishing his ditty, the old man's feelings were moved in a way which will be found in the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... ourselves in depicting individual changeable moods. Do we not actually see at present stage-scenery painted like sentimental mood-pictures, trees in the foreground, for example, on whose deformed greenish-brown foliage an elegiac late-autumnal tinge rests? And these are shoved into position regularly each evening for every dialogue scene, and every light comic situation—a satire on the inner eye of our time. In a German metropolis of art one can even see sign-boards of sausage manufacturers on which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... words once more Called forth the praise of men, where praise is due; Your great elegiac, tragically true, Must leave all Britain prouder than before; And, in spite of all that breaking hearts deplore, And all that anguished consciences must rue, One arrowed gladness surely pierces through From ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... elegiac mood, though he meant to drive away his cares later in the evening by the "Falernian system." He felt the exodus in the air. Another spring drawing to its close—everybody scattering! He was filled, too, with that peculiar pensiveness which ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... wished for somebody to begin, but did not dare to stir first for fear of the law, counterfeited a distraction, and by his own family it was spread about the city that he was mad. He then secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... be elegiac,' interrupted Logan. 'I know. Still, I am rather sorry for people's people. The unruly affections simply poison the lives of parents and guardians, aye, and of the children too. The aged are now so hasty and imprudent. What would not Tala ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... The literary history of this epoch has been written by Leopold Zunz with warmth of feeling and stupendous learning. He closes his work with the hope that mankind, at some future day, will adopt Israel's religious poetry as its own, transforming the elegiac Selicha into a joyous psalm of universal ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... pentameter verse of the elegiac distich the caesura is always penthemimeral. In the iambic trimeter (consisting of three dipodia or pairs of feet), both in Greek and Latin, the most usual caesura is the penthemimeral; next, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... his short stories that he will live longest, and the present volume is one more illustration of the place which has always been occupied in English literature by the gifted amateur. The stories in the present volume all lead back by implication to the golden age, and if Mr. Nevinson's mood is elegiac, he never ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... stood in rather extensive grounds a few miles outside the city wherein he carried on his trade. Ella's life was lonely here, as the suburban life is apt to be, particularly at certain seasons; and she had ample time to indulge her taste for lyric and elegiac composition. She had hardly got back when she encountered a piece by Robert Trewe in the new number of her favourite magazine, which must have been written almost immediately before her visit to Solentsea, for it contained the very couplet she had seen pencilled on the wallpaper by the ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... avoid their strokes, fancying they will help conception and child-birth. Another thing peculiar to this feast is for the Luperci to sacrifice a dog. But as, a certain poet who wrote fabulous explanations of Roman customs in elegiac verses, says, that Romulus and Remus, after the conquest of Amulius, ran joyfully to the place where the wolf gave them suck; and that in imitation of that, this feast was held, and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... departing from that of his original. He has almost re-created the stanza for his purpose, giving it new movement, and successfully adapting to the exigencies of dialogue and of narrative what has hitherto chiefly been associated with elegiac and didactic poetry. Something of this may be seen in the following passages (from the description of the transit through the frozen circle of Caina), which moreover appear to us among the best ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... Italy, but none of the names, except Damian and Justin, seem to be Italian, but rather made at pleasure; so that I doubt whether the story be really of Italian growth. The adventure of the pear-tree I find in a small collection of Latin fables, written by one Adoiphus, in elegiac verses of his fashion, in the year 1315. . . . Whatever was the real origin of the Tale, the machinery of the fairies, which Chaucer has used so happily, was probably added by himself; and, indeed, I ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Elegiac's theme; From thence 'twas used to sing of love's young dream: But who that dainty measure first put out, Grammarians differ, and 'tis still ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... the woods of Roscarna, the river, and the lake took on a melancholy tinge. Though this aspect of them was new to her, it is hardly strange that she should have seen them thus, for the beauty of Roscarna is really of an elegiac kind, an autumnal beauty of desertion and of decay. As for Slieveannilaun, she dared not look ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of the pudic goddess. There was a ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... elegiac poems are attributed to Tibullus, who ranks first among Roman elegists in the view of Quintilian, x. 1, 93, 'Elegia quoque Graecos provocamus, cuius mihi tersus atque elegans maxime ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... which are attributed to him have, on the whole, a marked similarity of manner. Their characteristics have been well summed up as "creative originality, predominantly elegiac tone, graceful form and movement, antique but lucid style;"[A] to which may be added the intensity of their devotion, the passion of Divine love that glows in them all. They correspond, too, with the circumstances of ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... he was going to do in the future, but with less conviction; and he was conscious that his friends no longer believed in him: when he had drank two or three glasses of whiskey he was inclined to be elegiac. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... beginning, with the sardines, which evidently had been pickled in lamp-oil, a terribly hairy man, the darkest of them all, with a beard that grew up into its owner's eyes and then sprung out again in tufts from his nose and ears, presented some elegiac regrets to the memory of Jean-Paul Marat, and declared that at the next revolution it would be necessary to realize the programme of that delightful friend of the people, and make one hundred ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... without narrative— (1) Dialogues in the common epic measure—Balder's Doom, Dialogues of Sigurd, Angantyr—explanations in prose, between the dialogues 112 (2) Dialogues in the gnomic or elegiac measure: (a) vituperative debates—Lokasenna, Harbarzli (in irregular verse), Atli and Rimgerd 112 (b) Dialogues implying action—The Wooing of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... PERIOD.—After the death of Goethe, Germany could not maintain the same height. Once more was she glorified in poetry by Henry Heine, an extremely original witty traveller, in his Pictures of Travel, elegiac and deeply lyrical, affecting and delightful at the same time in The Intermezzo; by the Austrian school, Zedlitz, Gruen, and the melancholy and deep-thinking Lenau; in prose, above all, by the philosophers, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and lastly Nietzsche—at ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... and power. His MS. volumes, which have been kindly submitted to our inspection by a descendant, and from which we have made some extracts, contain numerous poetical compositions worthy of being presented to the public. A vein of humour pervades the majority of his verses; in the elegiac strain he is eminently plaintive. He is remembered as a man of excellent dispositions and eminent social qualities: he sung with grace the songs of his country, and delighted in humorous conversation. His elder brother was proprietor of Garnkirk, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Kent died in 1523, and as Barclay speaks of himself in the preface as advanced in age, the date of publication may be assigned to close upon that year. It is a translation, in the ballad stanza, of the Latin elegiac poem of Dominicus Mancinus, De quatuor virtutibus, first published in 1516, and, as appears from the title, was executed while Barclay was a monk of Ely, at "the desire of the righte worshipfull Syr Giles Alington, Knight." From the address to his ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... Shakespeare's account of the funereal functions fulfilled by the same four birds in his contribution to Chester's volume. This resemblance suggests that Shakespeare's poem may be a fanciful adaptation of Roydon's elegiac conceits without ulterior significance. Shakespeare's concluding 'Threnos' is imitated in metre and phraseology by Fletcher in his Mad Lover in the song 'The Lover's Legacy ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... love; to the last he could sing of love with the full inspiration of his best time; and the finest things in this volume are concerned with it. But as compared with the love-lays of the Dramatic Lyrics or Men and Women there is something wistful, far off, even elegiac, in this love-poetry. A barrier, undefinable but impassable, seems to part us from the full tide of youthful passion. The richest in this tender sunset beauty is the St Martin's Summer, where the late love is suddenly smitten with the discovery ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... amor, 1891; Hogar y patria, 1891; Leyendas, 1898; Flores del alma; Recuerdos y esperanzas, 1899, Garnier, Paris). The romantic pessimist, Manuel Gutierrez Najera (d. 1888), was tormented throughout life by the vain quest of happiness and the thirst of truth. His verses, which are often elegiac or fantastic, are highly admired by the younger generation of Mexican poets. In a letter to the writer of this article, Blanco-Fombona praises Gutierrez Najera above all other Mexican poets (Poesias, Paris, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... chateau. For this reason, and somewhat also on account of her superior charms, she has long since conquered the ill-will of Madame de Palme, who, in allusion to her rival's somber style of dress, to the languid character of her beauty, and to the somewhat elegiac turn of her conversation, is pleased to designate her, among the young people, as the Malabar Widow. Madame Durmaitre is positively lacking in wit; but she is intelligent, tolerably well read, and much ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... up another job in the Orient, wrote me an elegiac letter on Paul's death, ending with—"And what about the Academy?" and for all answer I sent him a newspaper clipping recording the terms of the will, and another announcing the sale of the house and Mrs. Ambrose's departure ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... pleased, against their will. But though taste is obstinate, it is very variable, and time often prevails when arguments have failed. Queen Mary conferred upon both those plays the honour of her presence; and when she died soon after, Congreve testified his gratitude by a despicable effusion of elegiac pastoral, a composition in which all is unnatural and yet nothing ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar metre. People do, indeed, add the word 'maker' or 'poet' to the name of the metre, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... They are tender in feeling, musical in verse, and pure in diction. They were mostly suggested by natural scenery, and are uniformly melancholy. Bowles could suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel sucks eggs. His sonnets continue the elegiac strain of Shenstone, Gray, Collins, Warton, and the whole "Il Penseroso" school, but with a more personal note, explained by a recent bereavement of the poet. "Those who know him," says the preface, "know the occasions of them to have been real, to the public he might only ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... feel them in old times; but which they do not feel as their forefathers felt—a sort of poetical Tractarianism, in short. Their metre betrays them, as well as their words; in both they are continually wandering, unconsciously to themselves, into the elegiac—except when on one subject, whereon the muse of Scotia still warbles at first hand, and from the depths of her heart—namely, alas! the barley bree: and yet never, even on this beloved theme, has she risen again to the height of ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... heart; he has nothing of the heroism of Beethoven, or Haendel, or Gluck, or even Schubert. He has all the charm of an Umbrian painter, as is shown in L'Enfance du Christ, as well as sweetness and inward sadness, the gift of tears, and an elegiac passion. ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... what notes to sound together and in succession; they can produce, by the marshalling of sounds and images, by the fugue of passion and the snap of wit, a thousand brilliant effects out of old materials. The Ciceronian orator, the epigrammatic, lyric, and elegiac poets, give examples of this art. The psychologists, on the other hand, gain their effect not by the intrinsic mastery of language, but by the closer adaptation of it to things. The dramatic poets ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... his surroundings, his auditory; all he felt was the fate of his poor heroine, the pitiful farm-drudge, sunk in hopeless wrong and misery. He read in his very best manner, with abundant feeling and full conviction, and for a moment his hearers felt with him. Then came a last elegiac paragraph, and here Abner's voice grew husky, his throat filled, he coughed, and as he laid aside his last sheet and turned to rise a quick pain darted through his chest; he coughed again and involuntarily raised his hand against his breast, and the acute and sudden pang was signalled clearly ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... in elegiac couplets. This probably refers to XLVI, but without their original context the lines must remain obscure. In any case the versifier has the story in a rather different form from the prose writers, and appears to regard it as an incident of the ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... home, I was careful not to leave this picture behind. I wrapped it in paper in which a few elegiac stanzas were inscribed in my own hand, and with my utmost elegance of penmanship. I then placed it in a leathern case, which, for greater security, was deposited in the centre of my bundle. It will occur to you, perhaps, that it would be safer in some fold or pocket of the ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... impression that he was a conqueror over death and the grave, the Prince of Life, an impression which lay at the bottom of their future ministry. Such a resuscitation could only have weakened the impression which he had made upon them in life and in death; at the most could only have given it an elegiac voice, but could by no possibility have changed their sorrow into enthusiasm, have elevated ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... no weak drops Be shed for him. The virgin in her bloom Cut off, the joyous youth, and darling child, These are the tombs that claim the tender tear And elegiac songs. But Adams calls For other notes of gratulation high; That now he wanders thro' those endless worlds He here so well descried; and, wondering, talks And hymns their Author with his glad compeers. Columbia's boast! whether with angels thou Sittest in dread ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward |
