"Lyric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the details of the battle of Copenhagen see Southey's Life of Nelson. That conflict has been celebrated, in a noble lyric, by Campbell— ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... to the poet Gascoigne, and the elder of our fascinating trio, is conspicuous for an unswerving, whole-hearted attachment to nature and rural scenes. It is in the pastoral lyric where, with tenderest devotion, he pursues, untrammelled, a light and free-born fancy. His fertile, varied muse, laden with the passionate exaggerations of love-lorn swain, is yet charged with richest ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... a season brief, The lice among your feathers, Stiff-winged and aimless-eyed, With song dead you shall fall; Refuse of some clotted ditch, Seeking no more berries; Why with lyric numbers now Do you ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... their feast of St. Cecilia: I have been so struck with the subject which occurred to me, that I could not leave it till I had completed it; here it is, finished at one sitting.' And immediately he showed him this Ode, which places the British lyric poetry above that of any other nation."[26] These accounts are not, however, so contradictory as they may at first sight appear. It is possible that Dryden may have completed, at one sitting, the whole Ode, and yet have ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... stories, and whatever else is usually delivered in declamation. At the same time she had contracted an unhappy habit of accompanying what she delivered with gestures, by which, in a disagreeable way, what is purely epic and lyric is more confused than connected ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... interview to young enthusiasts who had listened to Zola unfolding in lyric formula audacious methods, or to the soothing words of Daudet, who scattered with prodigality striking, thrilling ideas, picturesque outlines and brilliant synopses. Maupassant's remarks, in tetes-a-tetes, as in general conversation, were usually current commonplaces and on ordinary ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... verse, which they could not but have hit on before among the rudiments of grammar; but that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe. This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play-writers be; and show them what religious, what glorious and magnificent use might ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the 1921 "Literary Digests," and the silent, sullen, group of waiting patients, each trying to look unconcerned and cordially disliking everyone else in the room,—all these have been sung by poets of far greater lyric powers than mine. (Not that I really think that they are greater than mine, but that's the customary form of excuse for not writing something you haven't got time or space to do. As a matter of fact, I think I could do it much better than it ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... was, as I remember it, a most exquisite night—a white poem, a frosty, starry lyric of light. It was one of those nights on which one might fall asleep and dream happy dreams of gardens of mirth and song, feeling all the while through one's sleep the soft splendour and radiance of ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The breath of morn Still lingers in the valley; but the bee With restless passion hovers on the wing, Waiting the opening flower, of whose embrace The sun shall be the signal. Poised in air, The winged minstrel of the liquid dawn, The lark, pours forth his lyric, and responds To the fresh chorus of the sylvan doves, The stir of branches and the fall of ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... irreparable 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 his fellows. In this somewhat thin-spun and evidently hasty play a servile ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Preston, Esq. a young Irish gentleman, of whom Lord Charlemont had become the friend and patron. He afterwards published "Thoughts on Lyric Poetry, with an Ode to the Moon;" an "essay on Ridicule, Wit, and Humour;" and a translation of the Argonautics of Appollonius ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and the young men turn their heads to look at her. She has the appeal of a folk-song And her cheap clothes are always in rhythm. When the strike was on she gave half her pay. She would give anything—save the praise that is hers And the love of her lyric body. ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... Song. Poets and critics have been unanimous in their praise of this exquisite lyric, which, had she written nothing more, would alone have been amply sufficient to vindicate Aphara Behn's genius and immortality. It was a great favourite with Swinburne, who terms it 'that melodious ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... this faculty are probably to be sought in that Shelleian treasury, Prometheus Unbound. It is unquestionably the greatest and most prodigal exhibition of Shelley's powers, this amazing lyric world, where immortal clarities sigh past in the perfumes of the blossoms, populate the breathings of the breeze, throng and twinkle in the leaves that twirl upon the bough; where the very grass is all a-rustle with lovely spirit-things, and ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... additional polish, and bring them to the highest possible perfection of which they were susceptible, even had I written them down with the utmost care. Maroncelli did the same, and, by degrees, retained by heart many thousand lyric verses, and epics of different kinds. It was thus, too, I composed the tragedy of Leoniero da Dertona, and ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... of Ross I 'll daily sing, With vocal note and lyric string, And duly, when I 've drank the king, He 'll be my second toss. May Heaven its choicest blessings send On such a man, and such a friend; And still may all that 's good attend The worthy Man ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... had made upon her verse were continued when she published, in 1812, her third volume of 'Plays on the Passions.' His voice, however, did not diminish the admiration for the character-drawing with which the book was greeted, or for the lyric outbursts occurring now and then in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... the most perfect lyric of its kind in the English language. Every verse is worthy of careful study, and it should be read and reread until its exquisite melody is felt and the subtle thoughts which it embodies fully understood. Yet there is little ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... Roth's stirring "Chariot Race" and St. Gaudens's equestrian statue of General Sherman. Sculpture was profusely used to beautify buildings. Wholly original and charming were the four groups for the Temple of Music: Heroic Music, Sacred Music, Dance Music, and Lyric Music. Perched in every corner were figures ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... drama. Very rarely have dramatic writers, even of the first rank, exhibited powers of equal rate, when out of the precincts of their own art; while, on the other hand, poets of a more general range, whether epic, lyric, or satiric, have as rarely succeeded on the stage. There is, indeed, hardly one of our celebrated dramatic authors (and the remark might be extended to other countries) who has left works worthy of his reputation in any other line; and Mr. Sheridan, perhaps, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... masterful on the wing, the child and darling of the summer air, reaping its invisible harvest in the fields of space as if it dined on the sunbeams, touching no earthly food, drinking and bathing and mating on the wing, swiftly, tirelessly coursing the long day through, a thought on wings, a lyric in the shape of a bird! Only in the free fields of the summer air could it have got that steel-blue of the wings and that warm tan of the breast. Of course I refer to the barn swallow. The cliff swallow seems less a child of the sky and sun, probably because its sheen and glow are less, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... seemed that the whole-world fabric shook, Thrilled and dissolved in radiant dew; then Brown made him a golden book, Full of the faith that Life is good, that the earth is a dream divinely fair, Lauding his gem of womanhood in many a lyric rich and rare; Took it to Jones, who shook his head: "I will ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... "Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes" Thora's Song "Ashtaroth: A Dramatic Lyric" The Sick Stock-rider "Bush Ballads ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... subtlety compatible with an individual self,—the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... have finished his education who is not well acquainted with my teazing machine. In fact it has had a great influence on the literature of this country. For the ode to my teazing machine, which is generally regarded as the most finished production of the English lyric muse——" ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... these books to contain divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and if occasion be, willingly to die for them."(55) This list agrees with our present canon, showing that the Palestinian Jews were tolerably unanimous as to the extent of the collection. The thirteen prophets include Job; the four lyric and moral books are ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... which the promise had come to him. Although his mission was not properly a prophetic one,—although, in the main, it belonged to him to describe poetically what had come to him through prophetic inspiration, yet prophetic inspiration and sacred lyric are frequently commingled in him. The man who is "the sweet psalmist of Israel" claims a [Hebrew: naM] in 2 Sam. xxiii. 1, and, in ver. 2, says that the Spirit of God spake by him, and His word was upon his tongue. In Acts ii. 30, 31, Peter declares that, by the divine promise, David ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... obtained among them never altogether perfect, and dependent for its charm frequently on strange complexities and unexpected rising and falling of weight and accent in its marble syllables; bearing the same relation to a rigidly chiselled and proportioned architecture that the wild lyric rhythm of Aeschylus or Pindar bears to the finished measures ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... adapted to the tune. Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, which records a piece of Scottish news of no importance whatever, has become an English nursery rhyme. In Jamie Douglas an historical fact has been interwoven with a beautiful lyric. Indeed, the chances of corruption ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... periphrases; the rich and riotous vocabulary of earlier poetry had been replaced by one more decorous, measured, and high-sounding. A corresponding process of selection and exclusion was applied to the subject matter of poetry. Passion, lyric exaltation, delight in the concrete life of man and nature, passed out of fashion; in their stead came social satire, criticism, generalized observation. While the classical influence, as it is usually called, was at its height, with such men as Dryden and Pope to ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... fat woman, lapsing, as she occasionally did lapse, into the easy Italian of the lyric ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... think, there was a waiter in this very hotel, but, alas! he is now gone, who sang (from morning to night, as my informant said with a shrug at the recollection) what but 's ist lange her, the German version of Auld Lang Syne; so you see, madame, the finest lyric ever written will make its way out of whatsoever corner of patois it found ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Corot, and at moments I have thought of him as the heir and successor to some of Corot's haunting graces; but there was all the difference between them that there is between lyric pure and tragic pure. Ryder has for once transcribed all outer semblances by means of a personality unrelated to anything other than itself, an imagination belonging strictly to our soil and specifically to our Eastern geography. In his autographic quality he is certainly our finest genius, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... "Those lyric feasts, Where men such clusters had, As made them nobly wild, not mad; While yet each verse of thine Outdid the meat, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... the art which he practiced with such splendid success as few men have known them. His command of the lyric form was complete. And yet who that loves his work has not felt that lack in it which Matthew Arnold had in mind when he said that with all his genius Byron had the ideas of a country squire? The poet was a master of the technique of his art; he had rare ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... teachers of the lyre take similar care that their young disciple is temperate and gets into no mischief; and when they have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the poems of other excellent poets, who are the lyric poets; and these they set to music, and make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children's souls, in order that they may learn to be more gentle, and harmonious, and rhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action; ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... other arts, which stimulate poetry, were more widely practised than in the earlier ages. Finn's Song to May, here translated, is of a good type, frank and observant, with a fresh air in it, and a fresh pleasure in its writing. I have no doubt that at this time began the lyric poetry of Ireland, and it reached, under Christian influences, a level of good, I can scarcely say excellent, work, at a time when no other lyrical poetry in any vernacular existed in Europe or the Islands. It was religious, mystic, and chiefly ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... characters of Herbert and his father are favorable specimens of well-meaning, even honorable, Southern gentlemen,—only not endowed with such exceptional moral heroism as to offer the pride of life to be crushed before hideous laws. The connection between lyric and tragic power is shown in the "Tragedy of Errors." The songs and chants of the slaves mingle with the higher dialogue like the chorus of the Greek stage; they mediate with gentle authority between the worlds of natural feeling and barbarous usage. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... The Lyric Poems are almost all of the light and airy kind, such as trip lightly and nimbly along, without the load of any weighty meaning. From these, however, "Rural Elegance" has some right to be excepted. I once heard it praised by a very learned ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... by Alderman Barber in 1723. in two splendid 4to volumes. The first volume containing pieces in most species of poetry, the epic excepted, and also imitations from other authors. His Grace wrote some Epigrams, a great number of lyric pieces, some in the elegiac strain, and others in the dramatic. Amongst his poems, an Essay on Poetry, which contains excellent instructions to form the poet, is by far the most distinguished. He wrote ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... marble figures that beautified the walks and bowers of Versailles were conceived by the gifted Lebrun. Among his designs were the Four Seasons, the Four Quarters of the Globe, the Four Kinds of Poetry (Heroic, Satiric, Lyric and Pastoral), the Four Periods of the Day (Morning, Noon, Twilight, Night), the Four Elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), the Four Temperaments (Phlegmatic, Melancholy, Coleric and Sanguine). Mythological figures, vases ornamented with bas-reliefs of Louis ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... mighty that its branches reach the heavens and its roots the primal rock and nations of men may rest in its shade; Edgar Lee Masters, whose work is full of the shadow and light of Lincoln, has made his most moving lyric an epitaph upon Ann Rutledge, the girl Lincoln loved and lost; and Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln's own Springfield, during the World War thought of him as so stirred even in death by the horrors which then alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... his correspondence-office in the Place de la Bourse; and he began to compose for the Troyes newspaper an account of recent events in a lyric style—a veritable tit-bit—to which he attached his signature. Then they dined together at a tavern. Hussonnet was pensive; the eccentricities of ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... good or evil all striving would be meaningless, one might as well jump from a housetop or walk into the fire. But as a matter of fact such mystical assertions are indulged in only in the inactive moments of life, and mean no more than a lyric poem or a burst of music. Every one in his practical moments acknowledges tacitly, at least, the difference between the intrinsic goodness and badness of experiences. A life of even delight or even wretchedness, or of colorless indifference, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful prolonged lyric delivered at the recent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... wealth and in power to their AEolian and Dorian neighbours. Among the Ionic cities themselves Miletus and Ephesus were the most flourishing, Grecian literature took its rise in the AEolic and Ionic cities of Asia Minor. Homer was probably a native of Smyrna. Lyric poetry flourished in the island of Lesbos, where Sappho and Alcaeus were born. The Ionic cities were also the seats of the earliest schools of Grecian philosophy. Thales, who founded the Ionic school of philosophy, was a native of Miletus. Halicarnassus was one ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... low. "An' now again I see the faces of those who dance with it. It is the Fires of Mora—come, God alone knows how—from Erin—to this place. The Fires of Mora!" He contemplated the hushed folk before him; and then from his lips came that weirdest, most haunting of the lyric legends of Erin—the Curse ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... birth the lyric queen Of numbers smiled, shall never grace The Isthmian gauntlet, or be seen First in the famed Olympic race. But him the streams that warbling flow Rich Tibur's fertile meads along, And shady groves, his haunts shall know The master of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of her contemporaries. Sappho was at the height of her career about six centuries before Christ, at a period when lyric poetry was peculiarly esteemed and cultivated at the centres of Greek life. Among the Molic peoples of the Isles, in particular, it had been carried to a high pitch of perfection, and its forms had become the subject of assiduous study. Its technique ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... the soldier should care so little for martial songs, or the songs that are ostensibly written for him; but that is not the fault of Tommy Atkins. Lyric poets don't give him what he calls "the stuff." He doesn't get it even from Kipling; Thomas Hardy's "Song of the Soldiers" leaves him cold. He wants no epic stanzas, no heroic periods. What he asks for is something simple and romantic, something about a girl, and home, and the lights of London—that ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... of Pushkin's lyric productions which we shall present to our countrymen, "done into English," as Jacob Tonson was wont to phrase it, "by an eminent hand," is a production considered by the poet's critics to possess the very highest degree of merit in its peculiar style. We have mentioned some details respecting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... box you can haf all your wishes," asserted the Professor, still in the German lyric strain over his triumph. "It iss the box of enchantments. You haf but to will the change you would haf taig place—it iss done. The substance of the rocks, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... primitivism in which the products of the first poets were "extemporary effusions," rudely imitative of pastoral scenes or celebratory of the divine being. Thus the first generic distinction Ogilvie makes is between pastoral poetry and lyric; the function of the former is to produce pleasure, the latter to raise admiration of the powers presiding over nature. As poetry is more natural to the young mind than philosophy, so is the end of pastoral poetry more easily achieved than that of the lyric. The difference resides essentially in ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... with the men before they will let us pass. For example, one afternoon I was waylaid on my way to the women by the head of the household I was visiting, a fine old man of the usual type, courteous but opposed. He asked to look at my books. I had a Bible, a lyric book, and a book of stanzas bearing upon the Truth, copied from the old Tamil classics. He pounced upon this. Then he began to chant the stanzas in their inimitable way, and at the sound several other old men drew round the verandah, till soon a dozen or more were listening with that appreciative ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... Lyric poetry is by its excellence the chief art of England, as music is the art of Germany. A book of poetry is almost sure of fair appreciation in the English press which does not trouble to notice a "Sartor Resartus" ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... "en rapport" with those around her. Books were her world from her earliest years; in them she literally lost and found herself. She was eleven years old when the War of Succession broke out, which inspired her first lyric outbursts. Her poems and translations written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were collected, and constituted her first published volume. Crude and immature as these productions naturally were, and utterly condemned ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... not a tulip, which should stand for a 'declaration of passion,' and, at the same time, for a pledge of secrecy. Many of these modern fancies are, however, very beautiful; as, for instance, in that German lyric in which the Angel of the Flowers confers a fresh grace on the rose by veiling it ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dealing therefore with problems ineradicably complex, varying endlessly in their instances, and changing as we deal with them. I am inclined to think that the only really profitable discussion of sexual matters is in terms of individuality, through the novel, the lyric, the play, autobiography or biography of the frankest sort. But such generalizations as ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... of Christmas as reflected in lyric poetry, we now pass to other forms of devotion in which the Church has welcomed the Redeemer at His birth. These are of two kinds—liturgical and popular; and they correspond in a large degree to the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... among the old editions of the poets and romancists; and there are, and always will be, a distinguished minority, of which the selling prices may be expected to remain firm. Such men as Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, Massinger, and among the lyric group Barnfield, Watson, Constable, Wither (earlier works and Hallelujah), Carew, Herrick, Suckling, and Lovelace, are to be viewed ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... flagon to the brim, he declared his despotic pleasure, that I should quaff it off to the last lingering globule. No hard calamity, truly; for the drinking of this wine was as the singing of a mighty ode, or frenzied lyric to the soul. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... a mood and a symbol the almost worshipful admiration felt by Browning for the poet in his youth, which he had, many years before this little lyric was written, recorded in a finely ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... that to many of our readers the name which stands at the head of this sketch is unknown, and that those who recognize it will only know it as that of the author of the well-known lines upon the death of Sir John Moore—a lyric of such surpassing beauty, that so high a judge as Lord Byron considered it the perfection of English lyrical poetry, preferring it before Coleridge's lines on Switzerland—Campbell's Hohenlinden—and the finest of Moore's Irish melodies, which were instanced by Shelley and others. Yet, unknown ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... understood his humour, when, after engaging in close colloquy with the schoolmaster of Moffat, respecting a disputed quantity in Horace's 7th Ode, Book ll., the dispute led on to another controversy, concerning the exact meaning of the word Malobathro, in that lyric effusion. His second escapade was made for the purpose of visiting the field of Rullion-green, which was dear to his Presbyterian predilections. Having got out of the carriage for an instant, he saw the sepulchral monument of the slain at the distance of about a mile, and was ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... the first complete edition of Sidney Lanier's poems — published three years after the poet's death — predicted with confidence that Lanier would "take his final rank with the first princes of American song." Anticipating the appearance of this volume, one of the best of recent lyric poets, who had been Lanier's fellow prisoner during the Civil War, prophesied that "his name to the ends of the earth would go." Indeed, there was a sense of surprise to those who had read only the 1877 edition of Lanier's poems, when his poems were collected in ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... this volume plunges into the middle of things, with the revolution brought about by Copernicus; but, within the tale, partly by means of an incidental lyric, there is an attempt to give a bird's-eye view of what had gone before. The torch then passes to Tycho Brahe, who, driven into exile with his tables of the stars, at the very point of death hands them over to a young man ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... was an artiste. I longed to bring them to my feet, as Jupiter did the Titans. So I ordered from one of those poetasters to be found in every land, a sort of libretto called, in theatrical parlance, a lyric drama; and to the words of this monstrosity I arranged the very finest airs of my several operas. When I had completed this musical kaleidoscope I called it 'Pyramus and Thisbe.' I dished up my olla podrida, and set it before the hungry English; but they ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the same class, even giving the word class a fairly elastic sense. They are short prose Romans d'aventures. But Asseneth is a mystical allegory; Aucassin et Nicolette is a sort of idyll, almost a lyric, in which the adventure is entirely subordinated to the emotional and poetical interest; L'Empereur Constant, though with something of the Roman d'aventures in it, has a tendency towards a moralitas ("there is no armour against fate") which never appears in the pure ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... another, and unity of time in a strict sense was, of course, impossible. To overcome that difficulty of accounting for time, which is effected on the modern stage by dropping a curtain, the judgment and great genius of the ancients supplied music and measured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of AEschylus, the capture of Troy is supposed to be announced by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and the transmission of the signal by successive beacons to Mycenae. The signal is first seen at the 21st line, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... travelled about the country gathering them together by ear and word of mouth, and, having weeded out the repetitions, he edited the famous epical Kalevala, and later collected quantities of other lyric ballads from the heathen times, and published them as Kanteletar. Thus much ancient music and verse was revived that had almost been forgotten. But of this we must ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... might work—it might add interest—" Mr. Heatherbloom waited patiently. "Would you have any objections," earnestly, "to my making a little addenda to the sign on the chariot of cadence? What's the Matter with Mother? 'The touching lyric, as interpreted by Horatio ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... part. None the less, however, did He feel for her the love of a loyal son. He had shown this a few days before, when, in the midst of His triumph, He paused on the brow of Olivet, where the city came into view, and burst into a flood of tears, accompanied with such a lyric cry of affection as has never been addressed to any other city on earth. Subsequently, sitting with His disciples over against the temple, He showed how well He foreknew the terrible fate which hung ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... wonder that a heart like Burns, which, for all its unsteadfastness, never lost its sensibility, nor even a sense of conscience, should have been visited by the remorse which forms the burden of the lyric to Mary in heaven, written three years after. ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... the staircase paths beside the falls in morning sunlight, or stationed on the points of vantage that command their successive cataracts, we enjoyed a spectacle which might be compared in its effect upon the mind to the impression left by a symphony or a tumultuous lyric. The turbulence and splendour, the swiftness and resonance, the veiling of the scene in smoke of shattered water-masses, the withdrawal of these veils according as the volume of the river slightly shifted in its fall, the rainbows ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... which the war has brought forth, we must class that grim Puritanical lyric, 'The Kansas John Brown,' which appeared originally in the Kansas Herald, and which is, as we are informed, extensively sung in the army. The ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... of wonder to the Americans. The friendly intercourse between them, and their occasional intermarriages, seemed little short of monstrous to the ferocious exclusiveness of the Anglo-Saxon. [Footnote: Michelet notices this exclusiveness of the English, and inveighs against it in his most lyric style. "Crime contre la nature! Crime contre l'humanite! Il sera expie par la sterilite de l'esprit."] The Indians in the central part of Illinois cut very little figure in the reminiscences of the pioneers; they occupied much the same relation to them as the tramp ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... Hogg's, and, though not so intellectual as Shelley's, rivals it in truth. Mackay's is the lark itself, Shelley's is himself listening, with unwearied ears and tightly-stretched imagination, to the lark. Who is surprised that Eric Mackay's lyric, 'The Waking of the Lark,' sent a thrill through the heart of America? This poem, which appeared in the New York Independent, is undoubtedly the lark-poem of the future. From the opening to the closing stanza there is not an imperfect verse, not a commonplace. ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... of some seventy-nine verses. Seventy-eight were quite unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cowpunchers monstrously. They, knowing him to be a singular man, forebore ever to press him, and awaited his own humor, lest he should weary of the lyric; and when after a day of silence apparently saturnine, he would lift his gentle voice ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... Lyric Poems contained in this volume are those prescribed by the Department of Education for examination for Junior and Senior Public School Diplomas, and for the Senior High School Entrance, and Entrance into the ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... cathedral trumpeting an apocalyptic summons to the dead to bloom from their graves. When she played the cornet it was with a superhuman tone that shook his emotions almost insufferably. She had sung, too, in four voices—in an imitation of a bass, a tenor, a contralto, and finally as a lyric soprano, then skipping from one to the other. They called her ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... judges. Naturally his chief weapon in the collision is just common sense; it is at the impact of mere common sense that the current system crumbles. It is simply unanswerable common sense which will infuriate those who do not like the book. When common sense rises to the lyric, as it does in the latter half of the tale, you have something formidable. Here Wells has united the daily verifiable actualism of novels like "Love and Mr. Lewisham" and "Kipps," with the large manner of the paramount synthetic scenes in (what general usage compels me to term) ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... judged of by my extracts or by anybody's extracts from his last-published volume.[68] Do you remember his grand ode upon Childhood—worth, to my apprehension, just twenty of Dryden's 'St. Cecilia's Day'—his sonnet upon Westminster Bridge, his lyric on a lark, in which the lark's music swells and exults, and the many noble and glorious passages of his 'Excursion'? You must not indeed blame me for estimating Wordsworth at his height, and on the other side I readily confess to you that he is occasionally, and not unfrequently, heavy ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... epic, lyric and dramatic poetry are dealt with in the order in which they are here named, while in the second the arrangement is strictly chronological, taking up historians, philosophers and orators as they appeared upon the scene. Except in the case of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... was the last, and the most interesting, of these recruits, and a good example of Murchard's somewhat morbid assertion that our old friend "liked 'em juicy." It was indeed a fact that Culwin, for all his mental dryness, specially tasted the lyric qualities in youth. As he was far too good an Epicurean to nip the flowers of soul which he gathered for his garden, his friendship was not a disintegrating influence: on the contrary, it forced the young idea to robuster bloom. And in Phil ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... detectives say when tracking down a criminal. It is, however, of no consequence; but it was clear that the song she sang had moved her, for there was the glint of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the house, the words of the lyric singing themselves ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the first of another series of short pieces (cf. the epithet nugae in l. 4). Catullus doubtless published his larger pieces together. The traditional arrangement, due to a later hand, is as follows: (1) The lyric poems in various metres; (2) the larger poems and the elegies; (3) the shorter poems written in elegiacs. Catullus began to be popular as soon as his works were published; cf. Nep. Att. 12, 4 (quoted p. 124). He is imitated in the Priapea, in Ovid, in Ausonius, in the Ciris, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... various schools, great and small; and was very early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially for my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen I wrote Greek with ease; and at fifteen my command of that language was so great that I not only composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but could converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment—an accomplishment which I have not since met with in any scholar of my times, and which in my case was owing to the practice of daily reading off the newspapers into the best Greek I could furnish ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... confirming man. For, besides that the mind is raised with the height and sublimity of such a verse, it takes spirit from the greatness of the matter, and is tinctured with the best things. Tragic and lyric poetry is good, too, and comic with the best, if the manners of the reader be once in safety. In the Greek poets, as also in Plautus, we shall see the economy and disposition of poems better observed ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... study, hoping to persuade him into telling the story of how he had gone down to Dulwich to write a criticism of Innes's concert, and how he had at once recognised that Evelyn had a beautiful voice, and would certainly win a high position on the lyric stage ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... immutable law in himself as it is in nature; it is the highest object of his thoughts. Its workings are submitted to his observation and experiment as a part of the world of knowledge; he sees its operation in individuals, social groups, and nations, and sets it forth in the action of the lyric, the drama, and the epic as the law of life. In its sphere is the higher unity of plot by virtue of which it integrates many lives in one main action. Such, then, is the nature of plot as intermediary between man and his environment, but deeply engaged in the latter, and not to ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... friend, and by the aid of virtue in the person of Director Holtei, thanks to a magnanimous oversight on the part of Franz Listz. The preference of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. for church scenes contributed to secure him eventually his important position at the greatest lyric theatre in Germany, the Royal Opera of Berlin. For he was prompted far less by his devotion to the dramatic muse than by his desire to secure a good position in some important German city, when, as already hinted, through Liszt's recommendation ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... is an "Official Number", containing the work of none but titled authors. Rheinhart Kleiner contributes the single piece of verse, a smooth and pleasing lyric entitled "Love Again", which is not unlike his previous poem, "Love, Come Again". As an amatory poet, Mr. Kleiner shows much delicacy of sentiment, refinement of language, and appreciation of metrical values; his efforts in this direction ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... that—when the heart Is pure—love overflows the lips in song As sweet and limpid as a mountain spring; But—when it's bitter with base treachery— It dams itself against all utterance, And either mines the soul, or, breaking forth, Sweeps downward to destruction. Oh! 'tis true, Love is the lyric happiness of youth; And they, who sing its perfect melody, Do from the honest parish register Still take their tune. And so must you. For you Are now in the very period of youth When myriads of unborn beings knock loud and long Upon the willing portals of the heart For entrance into life. Deny ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... the gobble-gobble, moo-moo, baa-baa, etc., as long as the laureate's imagination and the infant's breath hold good. The tune is pretty, and I do not know, or did not, when I was young, a more fascinating lyric. ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... could tell under what new phases of uneasy life Europe was labouring even then, while we, two of her lonely children, rehearsed the tale of her late woes and glories? More worthily, perhaps, had the tongue of a lyric Demodocus recounted them; but, in the absence of the poet, the newspaper correspondent performed his part as well and ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... names he can string together from the rough Cornish and Devon coasts. Only out of a poetic-hearted people are poets born. The peasant writes ballads, though scholars and antiquaries collect them. The Hebrew lyric fire blazed in myriad beacons from every landmark. The soil of Palestine is trodden, as it were, with the footsteps of God, so eloquent are its mountains and hamlets with these records ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... a catch of a song or a phrase of a lyric will haunt one along the lonely miles of a walk, up hill and down dale of one's pilgrimage. Hood found a phrase of a lyric dogging him down the first stages of his home-road last year. He thought little of the circumstance at the time, but afterwards he remembered it, and wondered ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... not greater progress in the early ages of Grecian history. Hesiod lived B.C. 735; and lyric poetry flourished in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, especially the elegiac form, or songs for the dead. Epic poetry was of still earlier date, as seen in the Homeric poems. The AEolian ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... an introduction to the reading and study of French lyric poetry. If it contributes toward making that poetry more widely known and more justly appreciated its purpose will ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... attracted by "The Buffalo Battery," a rollicking lyric known to all Anglo-India from Peshawur to Tuticorin. The air is the familiar one of the "Hen Convention," and the opening verse runs in ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... pass; The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon, Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune Of insects, and the chirp of songless birds, Forgetful of the spring-time's lyric words, Drowsed round us while we tried to find the lane That to our coming feet had been so plain, And lost ourselves among the sweetfern's growth, And thickets of young pine-trees, nothing loath, Amidst the wilding loveliness to stray, And spend, if need were, looking for the way, Whole hours; ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... a book which he had never read. Nietzsche was an inveterate enemy of efficiency, astigmatic with regard to practical life, and he never worked out a philosophy in the accepted sense of the term. He was a lyric poet who wrote psychology when he failed to sustain the poetic mood. In the Engadine and at Sils-Maria, brooding in a rocky void wherein he touched the sharp edge of infinity, he sang a Dionysian hymn to life against the melancholy products of German ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... those who saw it wept with joy and fright. "Thou art Apollo, than the sun more bright!" They cried. "Our music is of little worth, But thrill our blood with thy creative mirth Thou god of song, thou lord of lyric might!" ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... cock thy indulgent eye at the petition Of one consumed by corresponding ambition, And lend the helping hand to lift, pulley-hauley, To Parnassian Peak this poor perspiring Bengali! Whose ars poetica (as per sample lyric) Is fully competent to turn out panegyric. What if some time to come, perhaps not distant, You were in urgent need of Deputy-Assistant! For two Princesses might be confined simultaneously— Then, how to homage the pair extemporaneously? Or with Nuptial Ode, ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... lyric lips, what cry Of unborn beauty, sunk in utter night, Lost worlds of song, sealed in ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... lyric then came another to which the captain especially directed my attention as being what Sam. Petalengro calls 'The girl in the red chemise'—as well as I can recall his words. A very sweet song, with a simple but spirited chorus, and as the sympathetic electricity of excitement seized the ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... B.C.), who is, however, not mentioned by Aristotle. The mask, to enable the actor to assume different parts, by whomsoever invented, was in regular use before Aeschylus' day. The third change was the enlarged range of subjects. The lyric dithyramb-tales were necessarily about Dionysus, and the interludes had, of course, to follow suit. Nothing in the world so tenaciously resists innovation as religious ceremony; and it is interesting to learn that the Athenian populace (then, as ever, eager ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... wishing there were some such rule in Society, at the conclusion of a song—that the singer herself should say the right thing, and not leave it to the audience. Suppose a young lady has just been warbling ('with a grating and uncertain sound') Shelley's exquisite lyric 'I arise from dreams of thee': how much nicer it would be, instead of your having to say "Oh, thank you, thank you!" for the young lady herself to remark, as she draws on her gloves, while the impassioned words 'Oh, press it to thine own, or it ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... end, but all his best poetry was written in about five early years. Tennyson went on to a patriarchal age, but there is little of his later work that bears comparison with what he wrote before he was forty. Browning produced volume after volume, but, with the exception of an occasional fine lyric, his later work is hardly more than an illustration of his faults of writing. Coleridge deserted poetry very early; Byron, Shelley, Keats, all died ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lines of pilgrims from every nation of the earth to the gushing fountain of poesy opened by the touch of his magic wand; if he could be permitted to behold the vast assemblage of grand and glorious productions of the lyric art called into being by his own inspired strains, he would weep tears of bitter anguish that, instead of lavishing all the stores of his mighty genius upon the fall of Ilion, it had not been his more blessed lot to crystallize in deathless ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... the wind, and fancied that, if moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that. Finally, he took a draught at the Shaker spring, and, as if it were the true Castalia, was forthwith moved to compose a lyric, a Farewell to his Harp, which he swore should be its closing strain, the last verse that an ungrateful world should have from him. This effusion, with two or three other little pieces, subsequently written, he took the first opportunity to send, by one ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Singha poems were coming out in the Bharati, Dr. Nishikanta Chatterjee was in Germany. He wrote a thesis on the lyric poetry of our country comparing it with that of Europe. Bhanu Singha was given a place of honour as one of the old poets such as no modern writer could have aspired to. This was the thesis on which Nishikanta Chatterjee ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... Moscow opera a Belgian singer, Desiree Artot, who was then thirty-three years old, a woman whose pictures make her nearly beautiful, and who is recorded as a queen of grace and a queen of dramatic and lyric song. She was witty and magnetic, and Peter Iljitsch, five years her junior, like another Chopin and another ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... Wouldn't you like to? The hills are one long glory to-day." It was not the note of her prayer, it was well-ordered and calm. Still, Steering's heart leaped like a boy's at her friendliness, and he began to speak his gratitude in a lyric tune: ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... or to the disturbance of the state, an absolute government will certainly more effectually prohibit them from, or punish them for publishing such thoughts, than a free one could do. But how does that cramp the genius of an epic, dramatic, or lyric poet? or how does it corrupt the eloquence of an orator in the pulpit or at the bar? The number of good French authors, such as Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, and La Fontaine, who seemed to dispute it with the Augustan age, flourished under the ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... Rabelaisian license of uproarious mirth. It rests with the audience to take the whole as pure extravaganza, or as a reductio ad absurdum or playful defense of the conception underlying the original idea. In the intervals between the scenes, the chorus sing rollicking topical songs or bits of exquisite lyric, or in the name of the poet directly exhort and admonish the audience in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the publication, in 1855, of the Poems, in two volumes, entitled "Men and Women," Browning reviewed his work and made an interesting reclassification of it. He separated the simpler pieces of a lyric or epic cast—such rhymed presentations of an emotional moment, for example, as "Mesmerism" and "A Woman's Last Word," or the picturesque rhymed verse telling a story of an experience, such as "Childe Roland" and "The Statue and the Bust"—from their more complex companions, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... 'Lycidas' we have reached the high-water mark of English Poesy and of Milton's own production." Its innumerable beauties are rather exquisite than magnificent. It is an elegy, and cannot, therefore, rank as high as an equally consummate example of epic, lyric, or dramatic art. Even as elegy it is surpassed by the other great English masterpiece, "Adonais," in fire and grandeur. There is no incongruity in "Adonais" like the introduction of "the pilot of the Galilean lake"; its invective and indignation pour naturally out of the subject; their ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... COLLINS, whose poems though small in number are rich in vivid imagery and beautiful description, was born in Chichester, England, December 25, 1720, and died in 1756. His odes are acknowledged to be the best of their kind in the language. His finest lyric is his Ode on the Passions, which has been called "a magnificent ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... book, laid it back in her basket, and raising the lid of the piano, she sang that sad, wailing lyric of Kingsley's, "The ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Italian poetry, which now followed at the end of the fifteenth century, as well as the Latin poetry of the same period, is rich in proofs of the powerful effect of nature on the human mind. The first glance at the lyric poets of that time will suffice to convince us. Elaborate descriptions, it is true, of natural scenery are very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age, the novels and the lyric or epic poetry had something ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... striking of the poems of the elder Timrod are the following. Washington Irving said of these lines that Tom Moore had written no finer lyric:— ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... and tragic things of art we began, at the landmarks set by Leonardo and Michael Angelo; and are come now, not quite at random, to the lyric and elegiac loveliness of Andrea del Sarto. To praise him would need sweeter and purer speech than this of ours. His art is to me as the Tuscan April in its temperate days, fresh and tender and clear, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... when he was left alone, set to work on a little lyric of joy, with which to welcome the return of ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... for applause. It is now what Shelley's 'Cloud' was for many years, a comfort to those who do not like to deny altogether the genius they cannot understand. Yet I am certain that, in the long run, his grotesque plays with their lyric beauty, their violent laughter, 'The Playboy of the Western World' most of all, will be loved for holding so much of the mind of Ireland. Synge has written of 'The Playboy' 'anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... had been of late somewhat tempered by the inclemency of the weather and the obvious unfriendliness of the dog; but there is no resisting a lady's commands; and clear or foul, you might at any twilight's death have found me under her window, where a host of lyric phrases asserted the devotion which a cold in the ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... English poetry has been for years eminently lyric; the few attempts at the epic or dramatic having been laid aside, if not permanently, at least for a time. The age has been too busy in working out, with machinery and steam, its own great epic thought, to find leisure to listen to any thing longer than a single bugle-blast encouraging ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... frauds of literature, had an irresistible charm for him; and he once declared that he would almost rather have been Ireland than Shakespeare; and then it was his delight to write Greek versions of a poem that might attach the mark of plagiarism to Tennyson, or show, by a Scandinavian lyric, how the laureate had been poaching from the Northmen. Now it was a mock pastoral in most ecclesiastical Latin that set the whole Church in arms; now a mock despatch of Baron Beust that actually deceived ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... powerful though narrow intelligence, a passionate theorist, and an ardent specialist in grammar and the use of words, Malherbe reacted violently both against the misplaced and artificial erudition of the Pleiade and their unforced outbursts of lyric song. His object was to purify the French tongue; to make it—even at the cost of diminishing its flavour and narrowing its range—strong, supple, accurate and correct; to create a language which, though it ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Spluttering and smoky you hover around her, and yet don't dare even to address her. But we must be lenient with him; his shyness is to blame. He blushes in woman's presence, and is still capable of lovely emotions, for he started out to be a lyric poet. ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... as is generally known, this dramatic and lyric adaptation of the famous romance is not particularly happy. I was much embarrassed and I pretended not to understand, but I never dared to go ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... It was inconceivable by him that New York could reject it. He spoke about the music, but he meant his "production." The man was a marvel in his own line, and such a worker as can rarely be found anywhere. He believed the opera was going to mark an epoch in the history of the lyric stage. And he said so, almost wildly, in late hours of ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... his happiness. He felt that he belonged, that Sanford, the "mother of men," had taken him to her heart. The music in the chapel swelled, lyric, passionate—up! up! almost a cry. The moonlight was golden between the heavy shadows of the elms. Tears came into the boy's eyes; he was melancholy ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... depression,—a 'fit of the blues,' which he attributed partly to the damp, lowering weather. Idly he turned over the leaves of a first edition of Tennyson's poems,—pausing here and there to glance at a favourite lyric or con over a well-remembered verse, when the echo of a silvery horn blown clear on the wintry silence startled him out of his semi-abstraction. Rising, he went instinctively to the window, though ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... remarkable musical composition France had produced. They hissed its performance? Not at all; "they were merely indifferent"—it is Berlioz who tells us this. It passed unnoticed. He died before he had seen Les Troyens played in its entirety, though it was one of the noblest works of the French lyric theatre that had been composed since the death of Gluck.[31] But there is no need to be astonished. To hear these works to-day one must go to Germany. And although the dramatic work of Berlioz has found its ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... opera-dancers is extremely well defined, as their names implies; for they most do congregate wherever an opera-house exists. Some, however, descend to the non-lyric drama, and condescend to "illustrate" the plays of Shakespeare. It is said that the classical manager of Drury Lane Theatre has secured a company of them to help the singers he has engaged to perform Richard the Third, Coriolanus, and other ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... country before it appeared in that one, such imitation or suggestion was so rapid that with regard to the French, the Provencals, and the Germans at least, the impression is simultaneous; only the Sicilians beginning distinctly later, forerunners of the new love lyric, wholly different from that of trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers, of the Italians of the latter thirteenth century. And this simultaneous revelation of mediaeval love takes place in the last quarter of the twelfth century, when Northern France had already consolidated into a powerful monarchy, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee |
