"Sonnet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mr. Baviad Gifford on account of his satires, The Moeviad and The Baviad, against the Delia Cruscan school of poetry, of which Robert Merry had been the principal member. Some of Lamb's grudge against Gifford, which was of old standing (see notes to Lamb's review, Vol. I.), was repaid in his sonnet "St. Crispin to Mr. Gifford" (see Vol. IV. of this edition). Gifford's connection with Canning, in the Anti-Jacobin, could not have improved ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... but not unpleasing melancholy, followed by an absolute loathing of his usual studies. Music all through life affected him most powerfully, and he states that his tragedies were almost invariably planned by him when under its influence. It was about this time that he composed his first sonnet, which was made up of whole or mutilated verses of Metastasio and Ariosto, the only two Italian poets of whom he knew any thing. It was in praise of a certain lady to whom his uncle was paying his addresses, and whom he himself admired. Several persons, including the lady herself, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... is he doing? He is copying a beauty which he has seen in the invisible world, and which he is attempting to bring out from its hiding so that the men who have no eyes except for the sensuous may also see it. In my library is an original sonnet by John G. Whittier. In almost every line are erasures and interlineations. In some cases the careful poet has written a new line and pasted it over the rejected one. What does this mean? It means that he has discovered ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Guiderus and Arviragus over Fidele, supposed to be dead 87 Verses written on a Paper which contained a Piece of Bride-cake, given to the Author by a Lady 89 To Miss Aurelia C——R, on her Weeping at her Sister's Wedding 91 Sonnet 91 Song. The Sentiments borrowed from Shakespeare 92 On our late Taste ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... than the early morning stroll from Clerkenwell to the Poultry in October, 1816, that produced "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold." He must have set out early enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on Cowden Clarke's table by breakfast time. And by the way, did you know that the copy of Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to the financial editor of the Times? Never did financial editor live to ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... English writers) it was not about their writings that we talked, but about the something kindling in them, which never got expressed. His theory of writing was this:—"No good writer can ever be translated." He used to quote triumphantly from Shakespeare's 130th. Sonnet. ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... in the development of his dramatic art, and that this could not be said either of Lord Pembroke or Lord Southampton. Indeed, whoever he was, he could not have been anybody of high birth, as was shown very clearly by the 25th Sonnet, in which Shakespeare contrasting himself with those who are "great princes' ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... answer him, and he hung listening intently for their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with new force upon his perceptions.—Read the sonnet, if you please;—it is Wordsworth all over,—trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but immensely suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster. All I want of it is to enforce ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... when broken—and who, because of that, had succeeded in breaking far fewer than she fondly imagined—looked up into his face with the "most perditiously alluring" eyes in England—so Mr. Craske, the poet, who stood at her elbow now, had described them in the dedicatory sonnet of his last book of poems. (Wherefore, in parenthesis be it observed, she had rewarded him with twenty guineas, as he ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... of Virgil, and thrice repeating his vows for the prosperity of Rome, he knelt before the throne, and received from the senator a laurel crown, with a more precious declaration, "This is the reward of merit." The people shouted, "Long life to the Capitol and the poet!" A sonnet in praise of Rome was accepted as the effusion of genius and gratitude; and after the whole procession had visited the Vatican, the profane wreath was suspended before the shrine of St. Peter. In the act ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... poet and critic, 1849-1903. His poems, 'In Hospital' include also a very beautiful sonnet on 'The Chief'—Lister himself, which almost calls up his portrait to one who has once seen it: 'His brow spreads large and placid.... Soft lines of tranquil thought.... His face at once benign and proud and shy.... His ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... done, including Pinkster, the theatre, and the lion. I said nothing, however, of the Mordaunts, until questioned about them by my mother, quite a fortnight after Dirck had gone across to Rockland. One morning, as I sat endeavouring to write a sonnet in my own room, that excellent parent entered and took a seat near my table, with the familiarity the relation she bore me justified. She was knitting at the time, for never was she idle, except when asleep. I saw by the placid smile ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... Constance Gladowska musically idealized—the Krakowiak and an improvisation. The affair was a success. From these concerts he cleared six hundred dollars, not a small sum in those days for an unknown virtuoso. A sonnet was printed in his honor, champagne was offered him by an enthusiastic Paris bred, but not born, pianist named Dunst, who for this act will live in all chronicles of piano playing. Worse still, Orlowski served up the themes of his concerto ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... is that if Keats had spent fifteen or twenty minutes more on his Grecian Urn, all of the stanzas would be as good as three of them. And so we think that if A. B. had put in, say, a half hour more on her sonnet she would not have rhymed "worldliness" and "moodiness." Of the harmony, counterpoint, thoroughbass, etc., of verse we know next to nothing—we play on our tin whistle entirely by ear—but there are things which we avoid, perhaps needlessly. One of these is the rhyming of words like ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... Georg Friedrich, Margrave of Baden, was a partisan of the Calvinistic Friedrich V, Elector Palatine, who was chosen King of Bohemia in 1619, and is known as the "Winter King." As the sonnet shows, the defeated Protestants set high hopes on the Margrave of Baden, who commanded an army of 20,000 men; but he was soon defeated by the imperial forces ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... manuscript books without lines. They are written very unevenly and untidily, with very few erasures, but at times incoherently and with gaps. In one place he has cut from the newspaper Rupert Brooke's sonnet, beginning: ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... of their teaching was succinctly expressed in a sonnet written by Agostino, in substance as follows:—"Let him who wishes to be a good painter acquire the design of Rome, Venetian action and chiaroscuro, the dignified colouring of Lombardy (that is to say, ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... married, but in the following year he died. Most of the poems in the little volume which his friends put through the press in the year 1800 are written in standard English. They display a mind of considerable refinement, but little originality. In the form of ode, elegy, eclogue, or sonnet, we have verses which show tender feeling and a genuine appreciation of nature. But the human interest is slight, and the author is unable to escape from the conventional poetic diction of the eighteenth century. Phrases like "vocal groves," "Pomona's rich ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... although it did not advance with the same steadiness as before. One day, in listless mood, I took up a volume, without knowing what it was, or what I sought. It opened at the Amoretti of Edmund Spenser. I was on the point of closing it again, when a line caught my eye. I read the sonnet; read another; found I could understand them perfectly; and that hour the poetry of the sixteenth century, hitherto a sealed fountain, became an open well of refreshment, and the strength that comes ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... lovers, who are about to separate. A modification of it is familiar to us all in Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers debate whether the song they hear is of the nightingale or the lark; the aubade, with the two other great forms of love-poetry then floating in the world, the sonnet and the [220] epithalamium, being here refined, heightened, and inwoven into the structure of the play. Those, in whom what Rousseau calls les frayeurs nocturnes are constitutional, know what splendour ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... The following sonnet was written by Ugo Foscolo, in English, and accompanied the Essays on Petrarch, in the edition of that work which was printed for private circulation. It was omitted when the volume was subsequently published, and is consequently known ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... pious sonnet, which he was penitent for having composed in an illness; he seemed to be ashamed of having thought for a moment upon God at the sight of his lightning, and blushed at the weakness. The mistress of the ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... me to-day that you wish Tennyson's sonnet to be read after your health is given on Saturday. I am perfectly certain that it would not do at that time. I am quite convinced that the audience would not receive it, under these exciting circumstances, as it ought to ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... I will not write a sonnet, Singing their beauty as a poet might do: I just detest those on Aunt Nipson's bonnet, Because they are like her,—all gray and blue, Dusty and pinched, and fastened on askew! And as for heaven's own buttercups and daisies, ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... not infect Cain with his cynical theories as to the origin and endurance of love. For the antidote, compare Wordsworth's sonnet "To a Painter" (No. II), ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... use; he must get up. So, striking a light, he was presently deep in the composition of a fiery sonnet. It was evidently that which had caused all the phosphorescence. But a sonnet is a mere pill-box; it holds nothing. A mere cockle-shell,—and, oh, the raging sea it could not hold! Besides being confessedly an art-form, duly licenced to lie, it was apt to be misunderstood. It ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... projects advanced any farther, possibly because they conflicted with the relations developing between Anne and the King himself. As Wyatt complained in a sonnet,[539] ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... style are equally arbitrary, and rules are more necessary, as there is a larger power of choice. In letters of this kind, some conceive art graceful, and others think negligence amiable; some model them by the sonnet, and will allow them no means of delighting but the soft lapse of calm mellifluence; others adjust them by the epigram, and expect pointed sentences and forcible periods. The one party considers exemption from faults ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... found upon experiment, that there was nothing he stopped at. Under a sharp pressure, and when the necessary question of the Play required it, and nothing else would serve, it was found that he could compose 'a sonnet' as well as a state paper, or a decision, or a philosophical treatise. He wrote a sonnet for Essex, addressed to Queen Elizabeth, on one very important occasion. If it was not any better than those attempts ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... that the tea was of the most aromatic flavour, and that neither tongue nor venison-pasty was wanting,—we should have thought the reckoning high if we had been forced to earn our repast by listening every day to a new madrigal or sonnet composed by our host. We are glad, however, that Mr. Gleig has preserved this little feature of character, though we think it by no means a beauty. It is good to be often reminded of the inconsistency of human nature, and to learn ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Garrison was incarcerated in the Baltimore jail, April 17, 1830, in default of a fine of $50 with $50 costs. Undaunted in his captivity, he continued to write his protest against slavery and to record in verse his feelings. His famous sonnet, "The Immortal Mind," was written with pencil upon the walls of his cell. Liberated at the expiration of forty-nine days, through the generosity of Arthur Tappan, of New York, who paid his fine, Garrison visited Boston and Newburyport, endeavoring to speak in both places, but the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... advance was made this winter (1831-32) with his Shelleyan "Sonnet to a Cloud" and his imitations of Byron's "Hebrew Melodies," from which he learnt how to concentrate expression, and to use rich vowel-sounds and liquid consonants with rolling effect. A deeper and more serious turn of thought, that gradually usurped the place of the first ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... inditing a 'sonnet to your eyebrow,' or rather to your lids, they were so delicately tinted, and so much in unison with the extreme dejection of your entire bearing. I confess, unkind as it may sound, they moved me to laughter. Ah! that reminds me," says Cecil, her expression changing to one of comical ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... the heights and depths and glory of Youth as did Seeger. He sang it as he breathed it and lived it, and just as naturally. His singing of it was as rhythmic as breathing, and as sweet as the first song of an oriole in springtime. In his fifth sonnet, a form in which he loved to write and of which he was a master, he sings youth in terms ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... writing materials for two months the slate and pencil looked very inviting. I composed a few pieces of verse, including a sonnet on Giordano Bruno and some epigrams on Parson Plaford, Judge North, Sir Hardinge Giffard, and other distasteful personages. But as every piece written on the slate had to be rubbed out to make room for the next, I soon sickened of composition. It was murdering one bantling to make ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... does, there would be no problem of drink. Bernard Shaw says he has found that substitute in going to church when there's no service. Goethe wrote "The Sorrows of Werther" in order to get rid of his own. Many an unhappy lover has found peace by expressing his misery in sonnet form. The problem is to find something for the common man who is not interested in contemporary churches ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Exhibitions of strength and skill claim our interest not so much for the thing done, which often perishes with the doing, as for the doer. The poet with a hidden longing to express or a story to tell, who binds himself to the curious limitations of the Italian sonnet, in giving evidence of his powers, excites greater admiration than though he had not ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... through the various old parlors that now do duty as workrooms for bright-eyed girls, then over through the Kelmscott Press, and from this to another old mansion that had on its door a brass plate so polished and repolished, like a machine-made sonnet too much gone over, that one can scarcely make out its intent. Finally I managed to trace the legend, "The Seasons." I was told it was here that Thomson, the poet, wrote his book. Once back in the library ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... immortal bard became surprising. You might have supposed the first edition of his works to have been published last week, and enthusiastic Dullborough to have got half through them. (I doubt, by the way, whether it had ever done half that, but that is a private opinion.) A young gentleman with a sonnet, the retention of which for two years had enfeebled his mind and undermined his knees, got the sonnet into the Dullborough Warden, and gained flesh. Portraits of Shakespeare broke out in the bookshop windows, and our principal artist painted a large original portrait in oils for the decoration ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... like Sir Arthur Sullivan's experience with the organ into whose depths the lost chord sank, never to return. I dashed off the jests well enough, but somewhere between the keys and the types they were lost, and the results, when I came to scan the paper, were depressing. And once I tried a sonnet on the keys. Exactly how to classify the jumble that came out of it I do not know, but it was curious enough to have appealed strongly to D'Israeli or any other collector of the literary oddity. More singular than the sonnet, ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world. Or one might make the words the Backbone of a triolet, only one would have to split them up to fit it into the metre; or one might make it the decisive line in a sonnet; or one might make a pretty little lyric of it, to the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... dangers it would be impossible to say. But the example was evidently before them, and the result is certainly such an avoidance. Nevertheless both, and especially Wyatt, had a great deal to learn. It is perfectly evident that neither had any theory of English prosody before him. Wyatt's first sonnet displays the completest indifference to quantity, not merely scanning "harber," "banner," and "suffer" as iambs (which might admit of some defence), but making a rhyme of "feareth" and "appeareth," not on the penultimates, but on the mere "eth." In the following ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... style should be determined by higher considerations than the deliberate purpose to use as far as possible any single element of our language. Such a purpose degenerates into affectation, and becomes a mannerism. The following extract from a sonnet by Addison Alexander shows what may be done by short Anglo-Saxon words; but, because of its lack of musical rhythm and fine poetic quality, it is not to ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... to hold up the thickest and gaudiest spike to the sun. They are all there; and, at the entrance to the walk that leads to their motley beds, is a streamer with this device, taken from an exquisite sonnet of Jose Maria ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... dealing with college students in California, one is impressed by their boundless ingenuity. If anything needs doing, some student can do it for you. Is it to sketch a waterfall, to engrave a portrait, to write a sonnet, to mend a saddle, to sing a song, to build an engine, or to "bust a bronco," there is someone at hand who can do it, and do it artistically. Varied ingenuity California demands of her pioneers. Their native originality ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... forbidden to "dissemble or cloke;" and the bead-roll of the lawyer, who huddles together "give, devise, and bequeath," lest the cunning of litigants should evade any single verb. The works of the poets yield still better instances. When Milton praises the Virtuous Young Lady of his sonnet in that the spleen of her detractors moves her only to "pity and ruth," it is not for the idle filling of the line that he joins the second of these nouns to the first. Rather he is careful to enlarge and intensify ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... there was no stipend attached to this novel office. Mazarin procured him a pension of 500 crowns. He was then publishing his 'Typhon, or the Gigantomachy,' and dedicated it to the cardinal, with an adulatory sonnet. He forwarded the great man a splendidly bound copy, which was accepted with nothing more than thanks. In a rage the author suppressed the sonnet and substituted a satire. This piece was bitterly cutting, and terribly true. It galled Mazarin ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... from his heart. The cottage at Townend, Grasmere, where he first settled, is now surrounded by the out-buildings of a busy hotel; and the noisy stream of traffic, and the sight of the many villas which spot the valley, give a new pathos to the sonnet in which Wordsworth deplores the alteration which even his own residence might make in the simplicity of the ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... and one of the Directors of the South-Sea company—the same to whom Edwards, the Shakspeare commentator, has addressed a fine sonnet—was the only pattern of consistent gallantry I have met with. He took me under his shelter at an early age, and bestowed some pains upon me. I owe to his precepts and example whatever there is of the man of business (and that is not much) in my composition. It was not his fault that I did ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... period of Charles's life. The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in the play of HENRY V.; and it is at least odd that we can trace a resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, "I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle; and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene, would be ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said I'd spoiled the whole second volume of the Rubaiyat. I told him he ought to do his rubaiyatting at home, and he made a scene, to avoid which I hastened with my guest over to the billiard-room; and there, stretched at full length on the pool-table, was Robert Burns trying to write a sonnet on the cloth with chalk in less time than Villon could turn out another, with two lines start, on the billiard-table with the same writing materials. Now I ask you, gentlemen, if these things are to be tolerated? Are they not rather to be reprehended, ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... the School-master. "And only shows how in weak hands so beautiful a thing as the sonnet can ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... necessary to everyone. But once these universal unchanging needs supplied, a great many others become visible: needs to the individual or to individuals and races under definite and changing circumstances. The sonnet or the serenade are useful to the romantic lover in the same manner that carriage-horses and fine clothes are useful to the man who woos more practically-minded ladies. The diamonds of a rich woman ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... and eager to turn even the reluctance of nature into insult. He took his refusal for a sign that he, too, deserted him; and must be called back, after bidding Pennellini adieu, to hear the only condition on which the accursed sonnet would be furnished, namely, that it should not be signed Pennellini, but An Affectionate Friend. Never was sonnet cost poet so great anguish as this: Pennellini went at it conscientiously as if it were a problem in mathematics; he refreshed ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... Perhaps one of the most remarkable instances is that of Rossetti. In the course of the House of Life, the dark curtain of the exotic mood, with its strange odours and glimpses, its fallen light, its fevered sense, is raised at intervals upon a sonnet of pure transparency and delicate sweetness, as though the weary, voluptuous soul, in its restless passage among perfumed chambers, looked out suddenly from a window upon some forest glade, full of cool winds and winter sunshine, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "I was sick of the music and folly, and had retired to the summerhouse with Peggy Duckworth, who had brought a sweet sonnet of Mr. Ambrose Phillips, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... them French? As one grows older, even Mr. Squeers and 'Tilda give one less real delight; but think of the first discovery of them, and it is like Balboa's—or was it Cortez's?—discovery of the Pacific in Keats's sonnet. "Nicholas Nickleby" was read over and over again, with unfailing pleasure. I found "Little Dorrit" rather tiresome; "Barnaby Rudge" and "A Tale of Two Cities" seemed to be rather serious reading, not quite Dickensish enough ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... twittering of the birds in the hedgerows to the light-sleeping vagabond, that cry of 'Take your seats please!' or—better still—'En voiture!' or 'Partenza!' Had I the knack of rhyme, I would write a sonnet-sequence of the journey to Newhaven or Dover—a sonnet for every station one does not stop at. I await that poet who shall worthily celebrate the iron road. There is one who describes, with accuracy and gusto, the insides of engines; but he will ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... day," he said, "to the young poet who combines the gift of the prosateur with the charm and poetic faculty of Petrarch in that sonnet-form which Boileau declares to be ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... A sonnet has come to my hands, the production,—and nearly the first poetical Production,—of a very young Lady. I have not the Author's consent to publish it: and there is no time to ask it. But I cannot omit ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... Cambridge friends appear to have grown a little anxious, on seeing one who had distinction stamped upon his brow, doing what the world calls nothing; and Milton himself was watchful, and even suspicious. His second sonnet records ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... own. I find the kitchen the shrine of our civilization, the focus of all that is comely in life. The ruddy shine of the stove is as beautiful as any sunset. A well-polished jug or spoon is as fair, as complete and beautiful, as any sonnet. The dish mop, properly rinsed and wrung and hung outside the back door to dry, is a whole sermon in itself. The stars never look so bright as they do from the kitchen door after the ice-box pan is emptied and the whole place is 'redd ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... not without this literary folly. A Persian poet read to the celebrated Jami a gazel of his own composition, which Jami did not like: but the writer replied, it was notwithstanding a very curious sonnet, for the letter Aliff was not to be found in any one of the words! Jami sarcastically replied, "You can do a better thing yet; take away all the letters from ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... my view, All is strange, yet nothing new; Endless labour all along, Endless labour to be wrong; Phrase that time hath flung away, Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, and sonnet. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... reread the closing lines of the first sonnet, and then ran over the second. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed; "when I ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... "change," the worst in England, has given us many of these notable "securities." They live in his still echoing "Table-Talk," and are sprinkled generously over his writings—while what record is there of the "good," the best financial names of the day? One sonnet of Herbert was an especial favorite with Coleridge. It was that heart-searching, sympathizing epitome of spiritual ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... Fuller's "Church History of Britain." Compare also Wordsworth's "Sonnet to Wycliffe," and the lines, attributed to an unknown writer of Wycliffe's time: "The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea; And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad, Wide as the ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... about him—when he was young," Lady Brigit Mead continued, her thick-looking white eyelids, eyelids that the hapless Mr. Babington compared in his twenty-second sonnet to magnolia-petals, drooping till her lashes made ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... quickly rose, curious and anxious to learn who the disturbers were, and was amazed to behold a real knight, clad in full armor, dismount from his horse, while speaking words that indicated he was lovesick and in despair. Don Quixote hastened to call Sancho, who awoke to the tune of a love sonnet sung by the strange knight, and was as startled as his master had been, though, perhaps, not greatly thrilled at this promise of a new adventure in the ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... who seek for it. As to my being quite at my ease when I spoke to him, why how could you ask such a question? I trembled both in my soul and body. But he was very kind, and sate near me and talked to me as long as he was in the room—and recited a translation by Cary of a sonnet of Dante's—and altogether, it was quite a dream! Landor too—Walter Savage Landor ... in whose hands the ashes of antiquity burn again—gave me two Greek epigrams he had lately written ... and ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... personality drawing his judgment away from purely aesthetic standards? Again, consider the case of Keats. For us the facts of his life must color almost every line he wrote. How are we to determine whether his sonnet, When I Have Fears, is great poetry or not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love for Fanny Brawne, and his epitaph in ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... our supplement to-day a sonnet from the pen of Willie Shakespeare, son of our esteemed townsman, Squire John Shakespeare. Willie is now located in London, and is recognized as one of the brightest constellations in the literary galaxy of the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... have been made on the self-respect and delicate sensibility of a feminine soul by this other sonnet, which is clumsy and bombastic because it is full of inappropriate ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... pleasures of the table, though refined by the lofty and poetic discipline to which he had subjected himself. It is delicately implied in the refection in Paradise, and more substantially, though still elegantly, betrayed in the sonnet proposing to "Laurence, of virtuous father virtuous son," a series of nice little dinners in midwinter; and it blazes fully out in that untasted banquet which, elaborate as it was, Satan tossed up in a trice ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... for elegance, and fell into a mannered prettiness. While preserving something of the French spirit, he suffered from the frigid ingenuities which an imitation of Italian models suggested to him; but it cannot be forgotten that Saint-Gelais brought the sonnet from Italy into French poetry. The school of Marot, ambitious in little things, affected much the blason, which celebrates an eyebrow, a lip, a bosom, a jewel, a flower, a precious stone; lyrical inspiration was slender, but clearness and ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... through many sheets had shown Katharine that, by some coincidence, her attention had to be directed to many different anxieties simultaneously. In the first place, Rodney had written a very full account of his state of mind, which was illustrated by a sonnet, and he demanded a reconsideration of their position, which agitated Katharine more than she liked. Then there were two letters which had to be laid side by side and compared before she could make out the truth of their story, and even when she knew the facts ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... shabbiness and dishevelment. At the Villa Mellini is the famous lonely pine which "tells" so in the landscape from other points, bought off from the axe by (I believe) Sir George Beaumont, commemorated in a like connection in Wordsworth's great sonnet. He at least was not an unimaginative Briton. As you stand under it, its far-away shallow dome, supported on a single column almost white enough to be marble, seems to dwell in the dizziest depths ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... us-the self-existent, true, original love, the making love. But I have felt all you say. I used to lie in bed and imagine the earth alive and carrying me on her back, till I fell asleep longing to see the face of my nurse. Once, the fancy turned into a dream. I will try to recall a sonnet I made the same night, before the dream came: it will help you to understand it. I was then about nineteen, I believe. I did not care for it enough to repeat it to you, and I fear we shall find it ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... medley; but later her crafty instinct would seem to warn her that silence is more to her interest in the pursuit of her wily mission. In June, when so many an ecstatic love-song among the birds has modulated from accents of ardent love to those of glad fruition, when the sonnet to his "mistress's eyebrow" is shortly to give place to the lullaby, then, like the "worm i' the bud," the cow-bird begins her parasitical career. How many thousands are the bird homes which are blasted ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... reflected from the more dominant Mrs. Vandervelde. But it so happened, that a gifted young Italian lost his heart at sight to her red hair and green eyes, and discovering that she had no heart of her own—at least, none for him—he wrote, in a sort of frenzy of inspiration, a very fine sonnet sequence narrating his hapless passion. The poet had been as extravagantly assertive as poets in love usually are, and the sonnets were really notable; so the young man was swept into a gust of fame; all Italy read his verse and sympathized ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... verses, from a sonnet to the beautiful ears of a pretty cousin to the commencement of the tragedy of Panthea and Abradatus, were written at that time; but I owe The Poem of the World special gratitude, for it kept me from many a folly, and often held me for weeks at my ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... so original, so diverse, which could turn a sonnet or design a battleship (for the Ark Raleigh, built after his plans, was admittedly the best ship of our fleet that met the Armada), which had experienced the favour and disfavour of princes in the fullest degree, which had known triumph ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... should not do so; Brzezina, the musicseller, asked him for his portrait, but, frightened at the prospect of seeing his counterfeit used as a wrapper for butter and cheese, Chopin declined to give it to him; the editor of the "Courier" inserted in his paper a sonnet addressed to Chopin. Pecuniarily the concerts were likewise a success, although the concert-giver was of a different opinion. But then he seems to have had quite prima donna notions about receipts, for ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... active part in its work, which in his heart he considered beneath him, Adrian should have been in the office by nine o'clock. Not having risen before ten, however, nor eaten his breakfast until after eleven, this was clearly impossible. Then he remembered that here was a good chance of finishing a sonnet, of which the last lines were running in his head. It chanced that Adrian was a bit of a poet, and, like most poets, he found quiet essential to the art of composition. Somehow, when Foy was in the house, singing and talking, and that great Frisian brute, Martin, was tramping ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... definitions of this word; and a spurious twire, to sing, was inferred from a misreading 'twierethe' for 'twitereth' in Chaucer's Boethius, III m. 2. Modern authorities only allow twire, to peep, as in Shakespeare's 28th Sonnet, ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... new era and a desire to be abreast of the times, recently adopted the somewhat awkward title of the Nineteenth Century and After. Like the Fortnightly, it presented a brilliant array of names from the first. The initial number contained a Prefatory Sonnet by Tennyson, and articles by Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, Cardinal Manning, and the Dean of Gloucester and Bristol. It is sufficient to state that this standard has since been maintained by Mr. Knowles and has made ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... Englyshe as well for the utter subversion of that fained arte, as well for the better understandynge of the common people, unto whom the fyrst labour semeth not sufficient. Habet & musca splenem & formice sua bilis inest. 1560" 12mo. At the back of the title is a sonnet by Henry Bennet: followed in the next page by Painter's Address. On the reverse of this last page is a prose address "to his louyng frende W. F." dated "From Seuenoke XXII of Octobre," and signed "Your ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... of Whittier's glorious mountain sonnet, low, to herself, standing on the balcony again that next morning, in the cold, clear breeze; the magnificent lines of the great earth-masses rearing themselves before her sharply against a cloudless morning sky, defining ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... aloud the story as related by Pliny, a volume of whose letters he had put into his pocket, and Margery recited some lines of a beautiful sonnet on Pompeii which she had once learned, whose ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... Sonnet compare Hamlet's "Give me that man That is not passion's slave," etc. Shakespeare's writings show the deepest sensitiveness to passion:—hence the attraction he felt in the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Byron Stanzas for Music George Gordon Byron "When As a Lad" Isabel Ecclestone Mackay "Around the Child" Walter Savage Landor Aladdin James Russell Lowell The Quest Ellen Mackey Hutchinson Cortissoz My Birth-Day Thomas Moore Sonnet on His having Arrived to the Age of Twenty-Three John Milton On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year George Gordon Byron Growing Gray Austin Dobson The One White Hair Walter Savage Landor Ballade of Middle Age ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... Italian of Butler's "Seven Sonnets" (except Nos. I. and V.), by Ingroja. In manuscript. His translation of Sonnet I. is printed with the "Seven Sonnets." He could not manage Sonnet V. I think the repetitions of ...
— The Samuel Butler Collection - at Saint John's College Cambridge • Henry Festing Jones
... adopted son (he had no children of his own), which ends the collection, is very touching in the sincerity of its grief and its reminiscences of the dead boy's infancy. Perhaps the finest, certainly the most remarkable of all these pieces is the short poem (one might almost call it a sonnet) addressed to Sleep. This, though included in the last book of the Silvae, must have been written in earlier life; it shows that had Statius not been entangled in the composition of epics by the conventional ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... colors? Several times when it appeared as if the lady of your dreams were white, I fancied you were drawing a portrait of Isabelle Ray. All the girls, your old friends, to whom I have shown At Sea, send you their compliments, to which I join my own. Each of them will beg you to write her a sonnet; but first of all, in virtue of our ancient ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... like to think it was the Britons, for that gives him a family feeling for the place, since he read out of a book Warton's sonnet: ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... aid-de-camp, who died at Naseby manfully in his harness—now, contrasting strangely with the elaborately powdered peruke and delicate lace ruffles of Beau Livingstone, the gallant, with the whitest hand, the softest voice, the neatest knack at a sonnet, and the deadliest rapier at the court of good Queen Anne. Nay, you could trace it in the features of many a fair Edith and Alice, half counteracting the magnetic attraction of their ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... de Scudery, Le Fevre, talked, wrote, and spared no expense for their dear friend. Brebeuf, the poet, who had neither influence nor money, took to his bed and died of grief. Hesnault, author of the "Avorton," a sonnet much admired in those days, and translated with approval into English ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... He has one composed of lines of six syllables, others of eight, besides those considered regular in French, consisting, namely, of twelve syllables. The following sonnet addressed to Roumania appears ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... that wonderful sonnet?" I cried, hardly interrupting him, for when he came to the end of it, he paused with ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... smoothed itself; Captain Laramore, sitting with outstretched legs, and head hidden in clouds of tobacco smoke, rumbled from out that obscurity laughter and strange oaths. Even Mr. Peyton, after vainly trying to fix his attention upon the construction of a sonnet to his mistress's eyebrow, succumbed to the enchantment, and sat with parted lips, drinking in wonders; but the Surveyor-General, though he listened courteously, listened with forced smiles and with an attention which was hard to preserve ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... letter thereupon to Mr. Yates; trips abroad; his London residences; his last letter to Tennyson; revisits Asolo; Palazzo Rezzonico; his belief in immortality; his death, Thursday, Dec. 12th, 1889; funeral in Westminster Abbey; Sonnet by George Meredith; new star in Orion; R. Browning's place in literature; ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... hyperbole, the Eastern fertility of invention: Portuguese literature is completely classic in spirit, avoiding all exaggeration, all offences against taste, and confining itself to classic forms, such as the pastoral, the epic and the sonnet. Many Moorish customs survive in Portugal to this day, but they have not become so closely assimilated there as in Spain to the character of the people. The cruelty which has always marked the Spanish race is no part of the Portuguese national character, which is conspicuous rather for the "gentler-sexed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... idea," said Roland. "I have always wanted to see that famous fountain of Vaucluse, the Hippocrene of Petrarch. You know his sonnet? ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... Conrad, ask H.G. Wells, ask Murray Gilchrist, ask George Moore, ask Eden Phillpotts, ask "Q," ask Henry James. Lo! I say to all facile gabblers about the "art of the short story," as the late "C.-B." said to Mr. Balfour: "Enough of this foolery!" It is of a piece with the notion that a fine sonnet is more difficult than ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett |
