"Elegy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... elegy on Brooke, published in Huth's Inedited Poetical Miscellanies, brings charges of extreme penuriousness against him, but of his generous treatment of contemporary writers there is abundant testimony. His only works published during ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... rid of a burden. The true secret of their retirement revealed itself the morning after, when each of two great newspapers, with which they were severally connected, was found to contain long columns of elegy on the irreparable loss which the country had just suffered—compositions implying a suggestion on the part of each of the elegists that a poet existed who was not unfit to repair it. That same day after luncheon the two competitors departed. Our hostess and the other guests saw them off ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... all, was a hieroglyphical Elegy on the Dumps, consisting of one thousand and one lines; the characters,—herons, weeping-willows, and ravens, supposed to have been traced by a quill from ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Saunders, a plan for scaling the Heights of Abraham—news of the repulse and subsequent success of, received by Pitt on the same day (note)—presentiment of death upon the mind of, i. 297; impromptu stanzas composed by, on the eve of the attack—Gray's Elegy quoted by, on his way to the Heights of Abraham, i. 298; last words and death of, i. 299; and Montcalm, joint monument erected to the memory of—biographical notice of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... are at all times interesting, if not constantly reliable. After a reading of Gray's "Elegy" by a fourth standard class, the boys were asked what was meant by "fretted vaults," and one youth replied—"The vaults in which these poor people were buried; their friends came and fretted over them." ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... books generally give space to a mention of Urian Oakes, President of Harvard College, and to quotations from the crude and lengthy elegy which he published in 1667; and print examples from the execrable versified version of the Psalms made by the New England divines, and yet deny a place ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... regulation" in the reign of Henry I. The custom was still observed in many places, and we often heard the sound of the curfew bell, which was almost invariably rung at eight o'clock in the evening. The poet Gray commences his "Elegy written in a Country ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... must make an expedition to the library. What shall I bring? There is Mosheim's 'Ecclesiastical Ancient History'; that has a solid, venerable sound. Or, if you prefer poetry, I will get Gray's 'Elegy.' That cannot be a literary mushroom, for he was twenty years writing it. But perhaps it is Tupper you would like. That would suit your ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy Epitaph on Elizabeth L. H. Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke To the Memory of my Beloved Master William Shakespeare To Celia The Triumph of Charis In the Person of Womankind Ode Praeludium Epode An Elegy ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... Grammarian's Funeral" is an elegy of a typical pioneer scholar of the Renaissance period, sung by the leader of the chorus of disciples, and interspersed with parenthetical directions to them, while they all bear the body of their master to its appropriate burial-place on the highest mountain-peak. A humorous ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... thoughts. The English had not in his time attained the art of correct writing. But his serious compositions exhibit a strength and vigour which could not have been expected from the softness and effeminacy of his other pieces. He wrote an elegy on Oliver Cromwell, which, with all its faults, is nevertheless looked upon as a masterpiece. To understand this copy of verses you are to know that the day Oliver died was remarkable for a great storm. His poem ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... office of preceptor to one of the native princes of Hindostan. He died at Bhoog, in the kingdom of Cutch, on the 25th of September 1830; and if we add that he was a man of remarkable learning, his elegy may be ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Sepulchral altars.—Ver. 480. The 'sepulchralis ara' is the funeral pile, which was built in the form of an altar, with four equal sides. Ovid also calls it 'funeris ara,' in the Tristia, book iii. Elegy xiii. line 21.] ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... from the detective in the elucidation of baffling crime mysteries. It arose from an entirely different cause. Wolfe is supposed to have said that he would sooner have been remembered as the author of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" than as the conqueror of Quebec. Mr. Cromering would sooner have been the editor of the English Review than the chief constable of Norfolk. His tastes were bookish; Nature had intended him for ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... to this conclusion without much thought. She composed an Ode to Despair, an Elegy to an Unhappy Woman, and a Triolet to Interfering Dukes, before her mind was made up. She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a melancholy ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... was a literary province of the mother country." To this amazing statement one can only rejoin that if "The Biglow Papers," the "Harvard Commemoration Ode," "Under the Old Elm," the "Fourth of July Ode," and the Agassiz elegy are English provincial poetry, most of us need a new map and a new vocabulary. Of both series of "Biglow Papers" we may surely exclaim, as did Quintilian concerning early Roman satire, "This is wholly ours." It is true that Lowell, like every young poet ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... the quiet struggle; and "in the bleak December" the mortal remains were followed from the temple where his youth worshipped, to the snow-clad knoll at Greenwood; garlands and tears, the ritual and the requiem, eulogy and elegy, consecrated the final scene. By a singular coincidence, the news of his decease reached the United States simultaneously with the arrival of the ship in James River with the colossal bronze statue of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... versifiers, agreed that Grotius excelled in Poetry. Scaliger acknowledged his epigrams were admirable[46]. Casaubon being informed that Grotius had written some verses on the death of Theodore Beza, says, "he heard with infinite pleasure that so great a man had his elegy written by so great a poet[47]." Baudius calls him the darling friend of the Muses, and acquaints us that Scaliger thought some of his small poems equal to the best of the ancients[48]. Gerard Vossius speaks of him as the greatest poet of his age, and the prince of ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... and childhood,—poverty, wealth, station, vagabondage; the preacher's sacred learning and august ambition; fancies of dawning reason; hopes of intellect matured; memories of existence wrecked; household sorrows; untold regrets; elegy and epic in low, close, human sighs, to which Poetry never yet gave voice: all for the moment personified there before you,—a glimpse for the guess, no more. Lower and lower falls ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with Dr. Adams and his party, ten of us in all. We drove afterward to see the country church-yard, where Grey wrote his elegy and where he now lies buried. This was a most charming little trip and we all enjoyed it exceedingly. The young folks gathered leaves and flowers for ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Fatigue him, Intrigue him; &c. you must spread all upon Paper, and if you can procure a Scrap of Latin to put at the End, it will garnish it mightily: then having affixed your Name at the bottom with a Maestus Composuit, you will have an Excellent Elegy. ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... account arrived in England of Captain Cook's decease, two poems were published in celebration of his memory; one of which was an Ode, by a Mr. Fitzgerald, of Gray's Inn. But the first, both in order of time and of merit, was an Elegy, by Miss Seward, whose poetical talents have been displayed in many beautiful instances to the public. This lady, in the beginning of her poem, has admirably represented the principal of humanity by which the captain was actuated ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... him little help. In his late youth he had thought himself in love twice and had expressed his fiery emotions in a Latin epistle, an elegy, and a number of very correct Alcaics. They pleased his teacher, but frightened the spectacles off one bookish young woman, and drove the other to the arms of a prescription clerk, who knew no Latin except what was ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... into an elegy, plaintive and full of pain. In the Circus there was silence. After a while ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... at night, tone and words and gestures all fitting into harmony with the movement of his body. So came the chants and songs of work and of triumph. For the dead warrior the moan of lamentation fitted itself to the slower moving to and fro of the mourner, and hence came the elegy. In its first expression this was but inarticulate, half action, half music, dumbly voicing the emotion through the senses; its rhythms were all for the ear and it had little meaning beyond the crude representation of some simple ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... Hist. of Eng. Poet (III. p. 435) of an Elegy being prefixed to it on the death of Marlowe; but no such is found in either of those copies. In answer to my inquiries on this subject he informed me by letter, [crossed-out text] that a copy of this play was in Osborne's catalogue in the year ...
— The Tragedy of Dido Queene of Carthage • Christopher Marlowe
... that consecrated ground who has not reaped enjoyment from the labors of that man's life. And as the simple epitaph meets the eye, and is read in an audible tone, the heart-felt invocation, "Blessings on his memory!" is his oft-repeated elegy. ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... the great crisis which the dawn would bring, he repeated to the officers and midshipmen within hearing a number of the verses from the most finished poem in the English language, Grey's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and which had appeared a short time before. Probably the lines on ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... Commissioners of Array for this county, and on May 28, 1645, had the honour of entertaining his sovereign at Cotes, after which he was fined 1114l. by the parliamentary sequestrators. He was the last of the family who resided at Cotes; and amongst his poems is "An Elegy on the Death of my never enough lamented master, King Charles I." The others are chiefly of a melancholy turn. Sir Henry, his second son, died soon after his father, unmarried; whereupon his title and estate went to his next brother Sir Gray, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... most splendid villain, and positively, though perhaps not comparatively, deserved to fall. But it was enough for La Fontaine that Fouquet had done him a kindness. He took the part of the disgraced minister, without counting the cost. His "Elegy to the nymphs of Vaux" was a shield to the fallen man, and turned popular hatred into sympathy. The good-hearted poet rejoiced exceedingly in its success. Bon-homme was the appellation which his friends ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... here I leave the general concern, To track our hero on his path of fame: He must his laurels separately earn; For fifty thousand heroes, name by name, Though all deserving equally to turn A couplet, or an elegy to claim, Would form a lengthy lexicon of glory, And what is worse ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... the date of publication, however, is found in the fourth Eclogue. It contains a long poem called The towre of vertue and honour, which is really a highly-wrought elegy on the premature and glorious death, not of "the Duke of Norfolk, Lord High admiral, and one of Barclay's patrons," as has been repeated parrot-like, from Warton downwards, but of his chivalrous son, Sir Edward Howard, Lord High Admiral ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... that when Mr. Webster, one of the greatest of American statesmen, was on his death-bed, in October last, he requested his son to read to him that far-famed "Elegy" of Gray: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... "fell," he says, "into the flames of the Lutheran sect, which was then spreading far and wide." Two years of penury followed; and then three years of school-mastering in the College of St. Barbe, which he has immortalised—at least, for the few who care to read modern Latin poetry—in his elegy on "The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the Humanities." The wretched regent-master, pale and suffering, sits up all night preparing his lecture, biting his nails and thumping his desk; and falls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the sound of the four-o'clock ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... my thoughts, and enabling myself to communicate the knowledge I might amass. Of sermons I had written some dozens; and the most arduous of the efforts of poetry had been attempted by me; from the elegy to the epic poem, each had suffered my attacks. And, though I myself was not so well satisfied with my performances as to complete these daring labours, yet, I had so far familiarised myself to a selection of words, and phrases, as to be able to compose with much ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Penseroso the Puritan element. This is true only in a limited sense. It is true that the Puritan element in the Horton series of poems becomes more patent as we pass from the two lyrics to the mask of Comus, and from Comus to the elegy of Lycidas, just as, in the corresponding periods of time, the evils connected with the reign of Charles I. and with Laud's crusade against Puritanism were becoming more pronounced. But we can hardly regard Milton as having expressed any ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... what I can only call the sense of the Eternal. How beautiful, how consoling, that her last book should have been that translation, such as only one who was at once true poet and true scholar could have made, of the sweetest medieval elegy 'The Pearl'!" And Miss Bates, in her preface to the posthumous volume of "Folk-Ballads of Southern Europe", illumines for us the scholarship which went into ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... probable that this sad elegy would have continued for hours, had not a servant approached with letters, which he distributed, two to Arthur Mordaunt and one to Mr. Winterham. A close observer might have seen that two of the envelopes were identical. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... silver eglantine and pansy. A century later the prizes offered were an amaranthus of gold of the value of 400 livres, for the best ode, a violet of silver, valued at 250 livres, for an essay in prose, a silver pansy, worth 200 livres, for an eclogue, elegy or idyl, and a silver lily of the value of sixty livres, for the best sonnet or hymn in honor of the Virgin Mary,—for religion is mixed up with merriment, and heathen with Christian rites. He who gained a prize three times was honored ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Homer, parts of Thucydides, parts of Tacitus, parts of the tragedians, at school, but now he had it in his power to study a great author entire, and as a whole. Never before did he fully appreciate the "thunderous lilt" of Greek epic, the touching and voluptuous tenderness of Latin elegy, the regal pomp of history, the gorgeous and philosophic mystery of the old dramatic fables. Never before had he learnt to gaze on "the bright countenance of truth, in the mild and dewy air of delightful studies." Those who decry classical education, do so from inexperience of its real character ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... that it might find acceptance with the public, but also that it would confer lustre upon the memory of a poet whom he sincerely admired. No criticisms upon Shelley's works are half so good as his own. It is, therefore, interesting to collect the passages in which he speaks of an elegy only equalled in our language by "Lycidas", and in the point of passionate eloquence even superior to Milton's youthful lament for his friend. "The 'Adonais', in spite of its mysticism," he writes to Ollier, "is the least imperfect of my compositions." "I confess I should ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 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, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... scholar-soldier in the South who had given expression to the sentiment of his race and generation in an essay—one might almost say an elegy—so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that it moved me well-nigh to tears. Reading it at a public library, I found myself so visibly affected by it that my neighbor at the desk glanced at me in surprise, and I had to pull myself ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... expected to find a sense of proportion. Yet his conclusions would seem monstrous to a modern taste. "Shakespeare," he said, "never wrote six consecutive good lines." He would only admit two good verses in Gray's exquisite "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad ones. "Tristram Shandy" would not live. "Hamlet" was gabble. Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" was poor stuff, and he never ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... poet and author of the "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," was born on December 26, 1716, in London, and was the only survivor of twelve children. At Eton he formed friendships with Horace Walpole, Thomas Ashton, and Richard West, who were later his chief correspondents. At Cambridge, where Gray ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... inclined to the opinion that only a very small part of any man's writings is really immortal. Take out the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and how much is left of Gray for other generations to admire? And so of Goldsmith: besides the "Vicar of Wakefield" and the "Deserted Village," there is little in his writings that is likely to prove immortal. Johnson wrote ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Black Death (1361 and 1369), and a few years earlier the poet of the "Vision" had given voice to the sufferings of the poor. It was not, however, the mothers of the people crying for their children whom the courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the year 1369; the woe to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a princely widower temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first wife. In 1367 the Black Prince was conquering Castile ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the human heart, that his genius enabled him to embellish truth, and to present it with all its graces and attractions to the understandings of all those who are endowed with an innate love of the beautiful. His pictures, like Gray's Elegy in a Country Church-yard, may with equal truth be said 'to abound in images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... and passion, the precise hues of his mood for sombreness or radiancy? Well, he takes words, and by selecting them, by combining them, by harmonizing them with a master's hand, he sets before us certain magic phrases wrought into a song, an ode, an elegy, or whatsoever form of creation is most apt and true, and he makes us see just what he sees and feel just what he feels, printing it all upon our ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... On the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes Thomas Gray Verses on a Cat Charles Daubeny Epitaph on a Hare William Cowper On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bullfinch William Cowper An Elegy on a Lap-Dog John Gay My Last Terrier John Halsham Geist's Grave Matthew Arnold ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... engaged in a very perplexing and disagreeable mission to the unfriendly court of Philip II., where the mortifications which he encountered, joined to the insalubrity of the climate, so impaired his health that he found himself obliged to solicit his recall, which he did in an Ovidian elegy addressed to the queen. The petition of the poet was granted, but too late; he sunk under a lingering malady in October 1565, a ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... was left undone by his army. For my own part I feel great admiration for the diligence and skill of the general, and for the bravery of the soldiers, which enabled them to gain such successes. The poet Euripides, after their defeat and utter overthrow wrote this elegy upon them: ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... speech, the wail of tree, The words the winds and waters say, Make up that general elegy, Whose ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... well as mentally) from the back woods of America to the land of Columbus—from the vineyards of France to the valleys of Yorkshire—as almost to induce a belief in his power of ubiquity.—Allan Cunningham, sympathizing with the sorrows of one "who never told her love," and weaving a tearful elegy over her flower-strewn grave, or painting the fiercer incidents of piratical warfare, on the ocean's solitudes.—Felicia Hemans, her lyre musically blending the song of sounding streams with the spontaneous melody of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various
... composition; the place in which they are now commonly found restrains them to a particular air of solemnity, and debars them from the admission of all lighter or gayer ornaments. In this, it is that, the style of an epitaph necessarily differs from that of an elegy. The customs of burying our dead, either in or near our churches, perhaps, originally founded on a rational design of fitting the mind for religious exercises, by laying before it the most affecting proofs of the uncertainty of life, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... of an old shattered press and one small, worn-out font of English, which he was then using himself, composing an Elegy on Aquila Rose, before mentioned, an ingenious young man, of excellent character, much respected in the town, clerk of the Assembly, and a pretty poet. Keimer made verses too, but very indifferently. He ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... monorime, whose monotonous simplicity was preferred by the Troubadours for threnodies. It may serve well for three or four couplets but, when it extends, as in the Ghazal-cannon, to eighteen, and in the Kasidah, elegy or ode, to more, it must either satisfy itself with banal rhyme words, when the assonants should as a rule be expressive and emphatic; or, it must display an ingenuity, a smell of the oil, which assuredly does not add to the reader's pleasure. It can ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Lady Agnes Wenman; of the Lady Penelope Dynham; of Mrs. Jane Wenman. Verses on the Chapel of Wadham College consecration, St. Peter's Day, 1613; on Caversham or Causham House; of Witham House, Oxfordshire, the house of a noble Knight, and favourer of my Muse; and Elegy on a Bullfinch, 1648; of the Four Mile Course of Bayaides Green, six times run over, by two famous Irish footmen, Patrick Dorning and William O'Farrell.—It contains about 40 leaves, much corrected, and at ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... we may be sure he found admiring listeners. The young General had the romance of a boy on many matters. He delighted in music and poetry. On the last day of his life he said he would rather have written Gray's Elegy than have won a battle. We may be sure that with a gentleman of such literary tastes our friend George would become familiar; and as they were both in love, and both accepted lovers, and both eager for happiness, no doubt they must have had many sentimental ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the fame has managed to cross the Atlantic. We did not say that The Spoon River Anthology was a new book, but that it was a new book from America. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported from Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' People in England who heard of Main Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street; with the principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I practically identified the boarding-house of the Autocrat ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... conversation between the aged Mortimer in prison, and Richard Plantagenet, afterwards Duke of York, contains an exposition of the claims of the latter to the throne: considered by itself it is a beautiful tragic elegy. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... mind to return to Paris to his old studies, he was detained by the king, and made tutor to James his natural son. In the mean time, an elegy made by him, at leisure times, came into the hands of the Franciscans; wherein he writes, that he was solicited in a dream by St. Francis, to enter into his order. In this poem there were one or two passages that reflected on them very severely; which those ghostly ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... you and flattery falls sweet on your ear, and you are in danger of forgetting the final end of all ambition read "Grays Elegy." ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... self." It waked me to new ideas of duty and destiny, to wondrous thoughts and aspirations; and they would not down at my bidding. Over and over again I tried to banish them, but the inward and spiritual ear was open, and the sad strains of Schubert's "Elegy of Tears," and "The Wanderer," and the "Ave Maria," seemed my sorrow, my wanderings and my prayers. Sadness was not my nature; I was as cheerful as the bird that sings, save a mighty something which clung to me and overshadowed me like the enormous ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... for an invitation to go in, not being able to keep away in spite of a promise he had made to himself that he would spend no more money foolishly, delighted him. Speaking one day of Gray, the author of the Elegy, he said: "No poet ever came walking down to posterity with so small a book under his arm." He preferred Smollett to Fielding, putting "Peregrine Pickle" above "Tom Jones." Of the best novels by his contemporaries ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Kasidah, Ode or Elegy rhymed couplets numbering more than thirteen: If shorter it is called a "Ghazal." I have not thought it necessary to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... decisive instant, and laid it down on the table. When she remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but Arthur seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the fire in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy and brought it back ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... he was mad. He then secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy which begins thus:— ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... the chancellor read the Indian poems, and Goethe, in the meanwhile, talked to me about the Marienbad Elegy. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... overlooked; neither the names of the professors at the Bourges College, nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy, melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called Tristesse (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems Paquita la Sevillane and Le Chene de la Messe; three sonnets, a description of the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, with a tale called Carola, published as the work he was engaged on at the time ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... is free to confess that he does not admire Gray's 'Elegy,' and Macaulay to avow that he sees little to praise in Dickens and Wordsworth, why should not humbler folks have the courage of their own opinions? They cannot possibly be more wrong than Johnson and Macaulay were, and it is surely better to be honest, though it may expose ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... the indirect, and, perhaps, more effective, species of sacred poetry, we fear it must be acknowledged, to the shame of the last century, that there is hardly a single specimen of it (excepting, perhaps, Gray's Elegy, and possibly some of the most perfect of Collins's poems) which has obtained any celebrity. We except the writers of our own times, who do not fall within the scope ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Pope appeared again before the public as the author of the Temple of Fame, and the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. Much speculation has arisen on the question concerning the name of this lady, and the more interesting question concerning the nature of the persecutions and misfortunes which she suffered. Pope appears purposely to decline answering the questions of his ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... interviews, were all laid under contribution by the author, and served as sources of his authority. These he has woven together with such judgment in selection, skill in arrangement and force of style and diction, that just as "Gray's Elegy" alone has placed him in the front rank of poets, so this one work has given the author a high and permanent place among the historians of our country. The work attempted is so well done, and withal so accurate and ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... strange that —-, —-, and —-, should go on pouring out Poem after Poem, as if such haste could prosper with any but First-rate Men: and I suppose they hardly reckon themselves with the very First. I feel sure that Gray's Elegy, pieced and patched together so laboriously, by a Man of almost as little Genius as abundant Taste, will outlive all these hasty Abortions. And yet there are plenty of faults in that Elegy too, resulting from the very Elaboration which yet makes ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... Scarce"; and he at once wished to know more of this Mr. Shelley. After a perplexing search his mother found the desired poems, most of them in first editions, at the Olliers, Vere Street, London. She took home also three volumes by another poet, John Keats, who, she was told, was the subject of an elegy by Shelley. Browning never forgot the May evening when he first read these new books, to the accompaniment, he said, of two nightingales, one in a copper-beech, one in a laburnum, each striving to outdo the other in melody. A new imaginative world was opened to the boy. In Memorabilia ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... some uncouth lines on the death of the present laird's father, intituled 'Nature's Elegy upon the death of Donald Maclean of Col.' They are not worth insertion. I shall only give what is called his Epitaph, which Dr. Johnson said, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... not uninteresting question whether Emerson has bequeathed to the language any essay or poem which will resist the flow of time like "the adamant of Shakespeare," and remain a classic like the Essays of Addison or Gray's Elegy. It is a far more important question whether his thought entered into the spirit of his day and generation, so that it modified the higher intellectual, moral, and religious life of his time, and, as a necessary consequence, those of succeeding ages. Corpora ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... answered: "Why, Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray's Elegy: ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... earliest MS., written soon after my seventh birthday, I have no copy, and only a very confused memory: but I remember that my good mother treasured for years and showed to many friends something in the nature of an elegy which a broken-hearted little brother wrote on the death of an infant sister from his first school: this is only mentioned in case any one of my older readers may possibly supply such a lost MS. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... presentiment of death seems to have cast its shadow over him. A midshipman who was present, [Footnote: Afterwards Professor John Robison, of Edinburgh.] used to relate, that as Wolfe sat among his officers, and the boats floated down silently with the current, he recited, in low and touching tones, Gray's Elegy in a country churchyard, then just published. One stanza may especially have accorded with ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... revealed on every side—even on the marble columns worn by the constant friction of hands—this voice of gold that rises alone seems as if it were intoning the last lament over the death-pang of Old Islam and the end of time, the elegy, as it were, of the universal death of faith in the heart ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... Naples and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in 1864, and Mr. Gray (as he of the "Elegy" used to be called on his title-pages) found them in 1740. "The streets," he wrote home to his mother, "are one continued market, and thronged with populace so much that a coach can hardly pass. The common sort are a jolly, lively ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... time she comes she brings a book with her, gilt-edged and bound in green morocco like the Byron we read when we were children, or in red morocco like the Elegant Extracts out of which we used to translate Gray's "Elegy," and the "Battle of Hohenlinden," and Cunningham's ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... engross, indite, Transcribe, set forth, compose, address, Record, submit—yea, even write An ode, an elegy ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... who Hampden was, and what he had done to make him famous enough to be mentioned in such a poem as Gray's Elegy. Probably a great general, John decided, who had led ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... memory tests, all of us recited our reading lesson for the next day, especially the poetry pieces. I knew most of them, from hearing the big folks repeat them so often and practise the proper way to read them. I could do "Rienzi's Address to the Romans," "Casablanca," "Gray's Elegy," or "Mark Antony's Speech," but best of all, I liked "Lines to a Water-fowl." When he was tired, if it were not bedtime yet, all of us, boys too, sewed rags for carpet and rugs. Laddie braided corn husks for ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... passing the colleges at Eton, and seeing the boys out playing cricket; had an excellent opportunity to think how true Gray's poem on the Prospect of Eton is to boy-nature then, now, and forever. We were bent upon looking up the church which gave rise to his Elegy in a Country Churchyard, intending, when we got there, to have a little scene over it; Mr. S., in all the conscious importance of having been there before, assuring us that he knew exactly where it was. So, after some difficulty with our ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... William Shenstone, who, by the beauties which he made to appear on his paternal farm of Leasowes, fairly rivalled the best of the landscape-gardeners,—and who, by the graces and the tenderness which he lavished on his verse, made no mean rank for himself at a time when people were reading the "Elegy" of Gray, the Homer of Pope, and the "Cato" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... influence. Edward Young had just published his "Night Thoughts," Thomson, the poet and author of "The Seasons," and Isaac Watts had just passed away, Lord Littleton had written "The Conversion of St. Paul," Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" was being eagerly read by the people, Blackstone's famous "Commentaries on the Laws of England," had made a profound impression, Johnson had completed his "Dictionary" and Oliver Goldsmith was writing his immortal works. There were others who were in the ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... and Husayn al-Khali'a[FN151] and said to them, "Tell me a story you twain and do thou begin, O Husayn." He said, "'Tis well, O Commander of the Faithful;" and thus began: Some years ago, I dropped down stream to Bassorah, to present to Mohammed bin Sulayman al-Rabi'i[FN152] a Kasidah or elegy I had composed in his praise; and he accepted it and bade me abide with him. One day, I went out to Al-Mirbad,[FN153] by way of Al-Muhaliyah;[FN154] and, being oppressed by the excessive heat, went up to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... find the feeling of the poets, also, attaching itself with tenderness to graceful scenes of country life. Tito Strozza, about the year 1480, describes in a Latin elegy the dwelling of his mistress. We are shown an old ivy-clad house, half hidden in trees, and adorned with weather-stained frescoes of the saints, and near it a chapel, much damaged by the violence of the river ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... frequently quoted, than those of any other English poet. Where is the person who does not remember with feelings approaching to enthusiasm, the impressions made on his youthful fancy by the enchanting language of the "Elegy written in a Country Church-yard?" Who can ever forget the impressions with which he first read the narrative of the "hoary-headed swain," and the deep emotion felt on perusing the pathetic epitaph, "graved on the stone, beneath yon aged ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... hopes, joys, sorrows, rest within the grave Admiring nations to their relics gave. Hail, mighty shades! bright spirits of the past; Here may your ashes sleep while time shall last. Let kindred genius shed the pensive tear, And grace with votive elegy each bier. While far beyond this melancholy vale, When faded sorrow tells her mournful tale, "O'er this dim spot of earth," in regions fair Your spirits dwell, and joys ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... suffered a heavier fate. The latter class, consisting of his commentary on his consulship and his history of his own times, is altogether lost. Of the former, which consisted of the heroic poems Halcyone, Limon, Marius, and his Consulate, the elegy of Tamelastes, translations of Homer and Aratus, epigrams, etc., nothing remains, except some fragments of the Phaenomena and Diosemeia of Aratus. It may, however, be questioned whether literature has suffered ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... and in the expectation of your manners not to exact them: if you do, he wonders at your ill breeding, that cannot distinguish betwixt what is spoken and what is meant. No man gives better satisfaction at the first, and comes off more with the elegy of a kind gentleman, till you know him better, and then you know him for nothing. And commonly those most rail at him, that have before most commended him. The best is, he cozens you in a fair manner, and ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... of different colors, until the fashion gave way to cut-work and lace. Italy produced lace fabrics early in the fifteenth century; and the Florentine poet, Firenzuola, who flourished about 1520, composed an elegy upon a collar of raised point lace made by the hand of his mistress. Portraits of Venetian ladies dated as early as 1500 reveal white lace trimmings; but at that period lace was, professedly, only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... of the closing scene of poor Keats's life were not made known to me until the "Elegy" was ready for the press. I am given to understand that the wound which his sensitive spirit had received from the criticism of "Endymion" was exasperated by the bitter sense of unrequited benefits; the poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Wakefield' sixty years ago was 'uncollected'; a quarter of a century ago it sold for L5; ten years ago it was worth L10; in 1891 a remarkably tall and clean copy, in the original calf as issued, sold at Sotheby's for L94. Gray's 'Elegy,' 1751, sold for L1 16s. in 1888, and for L70 since then. Apropos of this 'Elegy,' there are only three uncut copies known, and one of these was obtained by Mr. Augustine Birrell, Q.C., a few years ago by a stroke of great good luck. He happened to be passing through Chancery ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... and Harry Esmond blushed that he had not a single tear for her, and fell to composing an elegy in Latin verses over the rustic little beauty. He bade the dryads mourn and the river-nymphs deplore her. As her father followed the calling of Vulcan, he said that surely she was like a daughter of Venus, though Sievewright's wife was an ugly ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he knew not the worth of Ferdousi." There is a slight delusion in this dazzling glory. What a fantastic whim the young lieutenants thought it, when General Wolfe, on the eve of battle, said of Gray's "Elegy," "Gentlemen, I would rather have written that poem than have taken Quebec." Yet, no doubt, it is by the memory of that remark that Wolfe will live the longest,—aided by the stray line of another poet, still reminding ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... It is in the light of a life story and its setting, however slight our knowledge, that creative work tends to assume proper proportions. It is in the surroundings of the author that we find the key to the creation. For, as Gray has pointed out in his "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," there are many in the dust and silence whose hands "the rod of Empire might have swayed, or waked to ecstasy the ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... poet can read, first Andre de Chenier's Idyll Neere, then Le Malade, following on with the Elegy on a Suicide, another elegy in the classic taste, and the last ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... his account. Boswell does not state of his own knowledge that Johnson was not acquainted with Savage when he wrote London. The death of Queen Caroline in Nov. 1737 deprived Savage of her yearly bounty, and 'abandoned him again to fortune' (Johnson's Works, viii. 166). The elegy on her that he composed on her birth-day (March 1) brought him no reward. He was 'for some time in suspense,' but nothing was done. 'He was in a short time reduced to the lowest degree of distress, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... England was prepared to outnumber the whole Canadian population, is a magnificent spectacle; and Montcalm laying down his life to lose Quebec is not less affecting than Wolfe dying to win her. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on the eve of his costly victory, the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," which he would "rather have written than beat the French to-morrow;" but it aches for the defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered, when told how brief his time was, "So much the better; then I shall not live to see ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... contrary to Milton's intention; for the phrase "Elegiarum Finis" follows those scraps in the volume, showing that he meant them to go with the Elegies, and that, in fact, he thought it permissible to call anything an Elegy that was written in the ordinary elegiac verse of alternate Hexameter and Pentameter. Accordingly, all his Latin poems in that kind of verse having been included in the Elegiarum Liber, all his other Latin poems, not in that kind ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... the bards of other days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could bring to that one simple phrase What were not rather loss than gain; That elegy so briefly fine, That epic writ in half a line, That little which so much conveys, Whose silence is a hymn of praise And throbs with ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... a high degree of civilization at a very early period. They have always been distinguished by a love of poetry, especially for the elegy, and they abound in tales, legends and proverbs. Until the middle of the twelfth century they had their own independent kings, since then they have been alternately conquered by the Russians and ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... we come upon a rhymeless couplet we know that it is an extract from a longer composition in monorhyme. The Kit'ah is a fragment, either an occasional piece or more frequently a portion of a Ghazal (ode) or Kasidah (elegy), other than the Matla, the initial Bayt with rhyming distichs. The Ghazal and Kasidah differ mainly in length: the former is popularly limited to eighteen couplets: the latter begins at fifteen and is of indefinite number. Both are built upon monorhyme, which appears twice ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the Princess Charlotte of Wales" was only surpassed in feebleness by Coleridge's "Israel's Lament." Campbell composed a laboured elegy, which was "spoken by Mr ... at Drury Lane Theatre, on the First Opening of the House after the Death of the Princess Charlotte, 1817;" and Montgomery wrote a hymn on "The Royal Infant, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... attractive of the boys. A splendid athlete, compared by Anthony with a Greek statue, he had sweetness as well as depth of nature. His drawings of horses were the delight of his family; and when his favourite hunter died he wrote a graceful elegy on the afflicting event. The influence of his genial kindness was never forgotten by his youngest brother; but there was a stronger and more dominating personality of which the effect was less beneficial to ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Andromache Amalia A Funeral Fantasie Fantasie—To Laura To Laura at the Harpsichord Group from Tartarus Rapture—To Laura To Laura (The Mystery of Reminiscence) Melancholy—To Laura The Infanticide The Greatness of the World Fortune and Wisdom Elegy on the Death of a Young Man The Battle Rousseau Friendship Elysium The Fugitive To Minna The Flowers The Triumph of Love (A Hymn) To a Moralist Count Eberhard, the Groaner of Wurtemburg To ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller |
