"Homer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I believe, which prevented one's observing that he was, in fact, like Homer's heroes, somewhat of a talker (UN PEU BABILLARD), though a sublime one. It is to their voices, their noise and gestures, that talkers often owe their reputation as such; for certainly one could not find a greater ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... dislike, when fatigue or illness has sharpened the nerves, hoardings covered with advertisements, the fronts of big theatres, big London hotels, and all architecture which has been made to impress the crowd. What blindness did for Homer, lameness for Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint you will, bad health did for him by making him ask no more of life than that it should keep him living, and above all perhaps by concentrating his imagination upon one thought, health itself. ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... its dancing-places, like the Dawn in Homer; there are terraces, with balustrades and marble fountains, where Ideal Beings smile at my approach; there are ilex-groves and beech trees in whose shadows I hold forth for ever; gardens fairer than all earthly gardens where groups of ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... is genius. Not the call Of Homer's or of Dante's heart sublime,— Not Michael's hand furrowing the zones of time,— Is more with compassed mysteries musical; Nay, not in Spring's or Summer's sweet footfall More gathered gifts exuberant Life bequeathes* ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... rejoined Lawless, flinging the book which Archer held out to him at a bust of Homer adorning the top of my bookshelves, which it fortunately missed—"Frank, old boy! it's all right—you're not to have a bullet through your lungs this time—shake hands, old fellow! I'm so ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... they celebrated the same national festival: mingled their deliberations in the same amphictyonic and subordinate assemblies, and sat together upon the free benches to hear their glorious history read aloud, in the prose of Heroditus, the poetry of Homer and of Pindar. We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we consult no common oracle but the Constitution. We can meet together to celebrate no national festival. But the thousand tongues of the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the Grecian muse unrivall'd reigns, To Britain let the nations homage pay; She felt a Homer's fire in Milton's strains, A Pindar's rapture in ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... must be—thought I—to whom my tremendous hero turns tail. The carrier saw the muzzle hanging, cut and useless, from his neck, and I eagerly told him the story, which Bob and I always thought, and still think, Homer, or King David, or Sir Walter alone were worthy to rehearse. The severe little man was mitigated, and condescended to say, "Rab, my man, puir Rabbie,"—whereupon the stump of a tail rose up, the ears were cocked, the eyes filled, and were comforted; the two friends were reconciled. "Hupp!" ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... worthy of note that Simonides, whose inflammatory writings had led to the withdrawal of our missionary brother from Athens, pretended about this time to have discovered certain Greek manuscripts of Homer, Hesiod, etc., which he claimed to be more ancient than any others, and some men of learning thought them to be genuine; but when they were discovered to be forgeries, the people regarded him ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... calls this "a most disgraceful and most contemptible wish;" but it may be paralleled out of Euripides, and still more closely out of Homer. "Talk not," says the shade of Achilles to Ulysses ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... most successful of all courtiers, the astute Lord Beaconsfield, used to engage her Majesty in conversation about water-colour drawing and the third-cousinships of German princes. Mr. Gladstone harangues her about the polity of the Hittites, or the harmony between the Athanasian Creed and Homer. The Queen, perplexed and uncomfortable, tries to make a digression—addresses a remark to a daughter or proffers biscuit to a begging terrier. Mr. Gladstone restrains himself with an effort till the Princess ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... advance of the Turk on the territories of the Emperors of Constantinople drove westward to the shelter of Italy and the Church, and to the patronage of the Medicis, a crowd of scholars who brought with them their manuscripts of Homer and the dramatists, of Thucydides and Herodotus, and most momentous perhaps for the age to come, of Plato and Demosthenes and of the New Testament in its original Greek. The quick and vivid intellect of Italy, which had been torpid in the decadence of mediaevalism ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... the visible presence of the Almighty among men remained fresh in the traditions of the East. The beautiful story of Ruth comes next, but ages later than its predecessor. Then follows the sonorous tale of Homer, clanging with a martial spirit that will echo to all time. Descending to more modern eras, we reach the legends of Haroun El Reschid; the tales of the Provencal troubadours; the romances of chivalry; and finally the novels of this and the past century. For nearly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... after a cruise to the westward, came back, and was ordered to proceed to the Greek Islands to assist in repressing piracy, an occupation to which the descendants of the heroes whose deeds were sung by Homer of old have of late ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... the politics to which we are attached. The "Archaeologic Epistle" I admire exceedingly, though I am sorry it attacks Mr. Bryant,[2] whom I love and respect. The Dean is so absurd an oaf, that he deserves to be ridiculed. Is anything more hyperbolic than his preferences of Rowley to Homer, Shakspeare, and Milton? Whether Rowley or Chatterton was the author, are the poems in any degree comparable to those authors? is not a ridiculous author an object of ridicule? I do not even guess at your meaning ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... no effort about it. She laughed tenderly at my fears, and sent me out for a walk with Maggie. I fear I was a gloomy companion. In the evening I went to sit with Alec a little. He was wakeful, large-eyed, and restless. He lay with a book of stories from Homer, of which he is very fond, in one hand, the other clasping his black kitten, which slept peacefully on the counterpane. He wanted to talk, but to keep him quiet I told him a long trivial story, full of unexciting incidents. He lay musing, his head on his hand; then he seemed ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... It comprehends a very full survey of the far-famed island which the hero of the 'Odyssey' has immortalized; for we really are inclined to think that the author has established the identity of the modern 'Theaki' with the 'Ithaca' of Homer. At all events, if it be an illusion, it is a very agreeable deception, and is effected by an ingenious interpretation of the passages in Homer that are supposed to be descriptive of the scenes which our traveller ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... thunder, in the cause of virtue and piety. The language seems to fall short of his ideas; he pours along, familiarizing the terms of philosophy, with bold inversions, and sonorous periods; but we may apply to him, what Pope has said of Homer: "It is the sentiment that swells and fills out the diction, which rises with it, and forms itself about it: like glass in the furnace, which grows to a greater magnitude, as the breath within is more powerful, and ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... I found it a failure! It was not Homer; it was nothing. It was a punishment, because I wished to outshine ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... the ancients, for example, art and poetry had gone through the whole circle of human interests before they turned to the representation of nature, and even then the latter filled always a limited and subordinate place. And yet, from the time of Homer downward, the powerful impression made by nature upon man is shown by countless verses and chance expressions. The Germanic races which founded their states on the ruins of the Roman Empire were thoroughly and specially fitted to understand the spirit of natural ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... he was almost Francis himself as he sat there on Francis' sometime throne; and these Sir Jollys were his subjects all—Marot, Caillette, Brusquet, Villot, and the lesser lights, jesters of barons, cardinals and even bishops! Rabelais, too, that poor, dissolute devil of a writer, learned as Homer, brutish as Homer's swine—all subjects of his, the king of jesters, save one; one whom he eyed with certain fear and wonder; fear, because she was a woman—and Triboulet esteemed all the sex but "highly perfected ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... could not make anything either of Byron or Cowper; and he did not even try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil which his father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the small copperplates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion to him. Afterwards he read Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," and he formed a great passion for Pope's ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... successful attempt to elevate The Dunciad comes in section two of his poem. Unlike Dryden, in whose Discourse the account of the "progress" of satire is confined almost exclusively to a few Roman writers, Harte begins his account of its progress with Homer and brings it down to Pope. Deriving the ancestry of The Dunciad from Homer, the greatest epic poet, obviously enhances Pope's satire. Perhaps less obviously, by extending Dryden's account to the present, Harte makes The Dunciad ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... Hermes is a god and has wings and flies, and so do many other gods. First of all, Victory flies with golden wings, Eros is undoubtedly winged too, and Iris is compared by Homer to a timorous dove.(1) If men in their blindness do not recognize you as gods and continue to worship the dwellers in Olympus, then a cloud of sparrows greedy for corn must descend upon their fields and eat up all their ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... came from Crete, that long, beautiful island south of Greece, called in the time of Homer the "Isle of One Hundred Cities." It has a most heroic history, remaining free long after Greece herself had become subject to Rome. Only in the year 68 B.C., after a long and determined effort upon the part of ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 18, March 11, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... Scott lived at his father's house in George Square, Edinburgh. His lameness and solitary habits had made him a good reader, and he used to read aloud to his mother, Pope's translation of Homer and Allan Ramsay's "Evergreen;" his mother had the happiest of tempers and a good love of poetry. In the same year he was sent to the High School, Edinburgh, under the celebrated Dr. Adam, who made him sensible of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... revealer of its genuine life: the range of its spiritual as well as of its intellectual outlook. This is the case even where poetry is imitative, for imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence. Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even though it be shackled by rules of traditional prosody, and has adopted the system of rhyme devised by writers in another language, whose words ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... This belted globe upon, once shone As shines the Morning Orb, long ere The Dawn the rosy East has kissed; High reared her sacred temples in Olympia's shady groves, and built There sacred altars to her gods. Old Zeus and Phoebus oft here sat In council with their fellow gods. And Homer, fiery bard, was first To smite the chords of nature's lyre; Sweet sang he till the earth was filled With rarest strains of rapturous song! Then art and letters blew and blushed, The fairest flowers of ages past, Whose ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... such splendid victories abroad. It was a time, too, when there were almost as many able writers as in Queen Elizabeth's time. The two books written at that day, which you are most likely to have heard of, are Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe, and Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad. ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is natural, for they had been in the world, had loved and suffered, so long before us that they seem a part of that antenatal mystery out of which we sprang. When they speak of their old love-stories, it is as though we were reading Homer. It sounds so long ago. We are surprised at the vividness with which they recall happenings and personalities, past and gone before, as they tell us, we were born. Before we were born! Yes! They belong to that mysterious epoch of time—"before we were born"; and unless we ...
— Different Girls • Various
... worthy to be named for authors. Homer, an old tedious, prolix ass, talks of curriers, and chines of beef. Virgil of dunging of land, and bees. Horace, of ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... imperceptibly it became what they had done. I spent much of my time staring reflectively at the titles of the boys' stories in the booksellers' windows, whistling for a breeze, so to say, for I found that the titles were even more helpful than the stories. We wrecked everybody of note, including all Homer's most taking characters and the hero of Paradise Lost. But we suffered them not to land. We stripped them of what we wanted and left them to wander the high seas naked of adventure. And all this was merely ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... Grecian muse unrivall'd reigns; To Britain let the nations homage pay: She felt a Homer's fire in Milton's strains, A Pindar's rapture in the ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... difference between the poetry of the school and the poetry of nature compare the faultless English and elegant sweetness of the Idylls of the King with the vigorous and expressive, but often ungrammatical, prose of Mallory, or compare Virgil with Homer, Horace with Sappho, a chorale by Mendelssohn with a chorale by Bach. Or compare a modern refrain dragged in for no other reason than because the poet has felt that the form requires a refrain of some kind and has tried to find one that is suitable—compare such a ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... mortal." In relation to his own power, no one will question the truth of this dictum, that "blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaimed, reinthroned in the true language of the gods; who never thundered nor suffered their Homer to thunder in rhyme." His want of mastery in rhyme is especially a drawback on the effects of his Satires; for epigrams and witticisms are peculiarly susceptible to the intrusion of a superfluous word, or to an inversion which implies constraint. Here, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... examinations in June. He had some difficulty with rules and forms, but the essential principles of things were fixed solidly in his mind, so that when the lists were published, Eric found his name third, and second in Mathematics. His rival was a young fellow, named Homer Tierre, from Webb Academy, who was entering as a cadet engineer. The two boys struck up a friendship outside the examination room, and Eric was delighted to find that his new acquaintance had passed, with him, so high in the list that the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... history of the first Crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. But in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of coloring quite unknown to the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and Tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness {71} and power. The Faery Queene, too, was a tale of knight-errantry. Its hero was King Arthur, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... it would be quite Ossianic—equal to any of the abusive scenes in Homer. But, my dear Harding, how are you? You are come to eat your Christmas dinner with ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... Argos, Rhodes, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, and several other cities claiming Homer, I conclude that Homer ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... to escape from the persecution of their suitors, the fifty sons of his brother AEgyptus. The Egyptian stranger was elected king by the natives, and from him the tribe of the Danai derived their name, which Homer frequently uses as a general appellation for the Greeks. Another colony was the one led from Asia by Pelops, from whom the southern peninsula of Greece derived its name of Peloponnesus. Pelops is ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... antiquaries to be the Capiterides; and the Abbe de Fontenu, in the Memoires de Literature, tom. vii. p. 126, proves, according to Vallancey, that the Phoenicians traded here for tin before the Trojan war. Homer frequently mentions this metal; and even in Scripture we have allusions to this land under the name of Tarshish (Ezekiel, c. xxvii., v. 12-25), being the place whence the Tyrians procured various metals, and among the rest, the English metal tin. It appears ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... Shakespeare, and Milton, and Dryden, employ the words "car" and "engine" and "train" in their writings; but living before the age of steam and railways they knew nothing of the meaning which these terms convey to us. And it is possible that Homer and Plato knew as little of the meaning of such words as aion and parakletos, as found in the revelation of Jesus Christ, by whom "the ages were framed" and the ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... story is as old as the Odyssey, but the moral and the colouring are comparatively modern. By avoiding the prolixity which marks the speeches and the descriptions in Homer, I have gained a rapidity to the narration, which I hope will make it more attractive and give it more the air of a romance to young readers, though I am sensible that by the curtailment I have sacrificed in many places the manners to the passion, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the rudiments of a good education,' remarked Mr. Hale. 'The quick zest with which you are now reading Homer, shows me that you do not come to it as an unknown book; you have read it before, and are only recalling your ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... had my great adventure," he said, "I have helped to fight the wild men, and in the days to come I can speak boastfully of it, even as the great Greeks in Homer spoke boastfully of their achievements, but once is enough. I am a man of peace and years, and I would fain wage the battles of learning ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... cover to cover at his mother's knee. His father, the "perfectly honest wine-merchant," seems to have been the one to foster the boy's aesthetic sense; he was in the habit of reading aloud to his little family, and his son's apparently genuine appreciation of Scott, Pope, and Homer dates from the incredibly early age of five. It was his father, also, to whom he owed his early acquaintance with the finest landscape, for the boy was his companion in yearly business trips about Britain, and later visited, in his parents' company, Belgium, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... myths and not feel that nature has a new language for him, and that though the tales may be thousands of years old, they are quite as true as they were in the days of Homer. If the trees and the flowers, the clouds and the wind, all tell wonderful stories to the child he has sources of happiness of which no power can ...
— Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children • Flora J. Cooke
... in England I have read—of course in a translation—the story of Helen of Troy, as told by the Greek poet, Homer. Well, Mameena reminds me very much of Helen, or, rather, Helen reminds me of Mameena. At any rate, there was this in common between them, although one of them was black, or, rather, copper-coloured, and the other white—they both ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... Browning, for example, cannot concede the name of poetry to any modern work which is not subtle and profound, metaphysical or analytical. But as a mere narrative poet few men whose judgment is of value will deny Scott the next place to Homer. As a poet he created an epoch. It filled no great space in point of time, but we owe to Sir Walter's impetus 'he Giaour,' 'he Corsair,' the 'Bride of Abydos.' In his second character of antiquarian romancist, he awoke the elder Dumas, and such a host of imitators, big and little, as no ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... of Marcus Aurelius, and for the translation and selections from the Greek tragic writers. I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. DANIEL W. WILDER, of Kansas, for the quotations from Pilpay, with contributions from Diogenes Laertius, Montaigne, Burton, and Pope's Homer; to Dr. WILLIAM J. ROLFE for quotations from Robert Browning; to Mr. JAMES W. MCINTYRE for quotations from Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Robert Browning, and Tennyson. And I have incurred other obligations to friends for here a little ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... rejoice: he has occasion to tremble, watch, and pray; for to be a faithful steward of God's property, requires perhaps more grace than to be a faithful steward of God's truth. We find many a faithful preacher of the Gospel where we find one Normand Smith, or Nathaniel R. Cobb, or one firm of Homes & Homer. The grace needed is so great, and the temptations to err so many, that almost all prove defaulters, and therefore it is that the world lies in ruins: not because the church has not wealth enough, but because God's stewards claim to ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... "It is a fabulous narrative," he himself says, "in the form of an heroic poem, like Homer's or Virgil's, wherein I have set forth the principal actions that are meet for a prince whose birth points him out as destined to reign. I did it at a time when I was charmed with the marks of confidence and kindness showered upon me by the king; I must have been not only ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... this every Sunday morning for two years. It was not exactly a lesson, for I never prepared for it, and while I was held within reasonable bounds of syntax, I was allowed much more freedom in translation than was permitted the next morning when I read Homer; neither did we discuss doctrines, for although it was with this same teacher that in our junior year we studied Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews, committing all of it to memory and analyzing and reducing it to doctrines within an inch of our lives, we never allowed an echo of this exercise ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... estimating the weight of a talent. Dr. Gill considers it about sixty pounds; this was the lesser Roman talent. Michaelis estimates the Jewish talent at thirty-two pounds and a half. The attic talent of gold used in Greece in the time of Homer is estimated at less than an ounce. The safest conclusion as to the weight of the hail-stones is, that they were enormous, and fell with a velocity to crush all animals to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... he turned to the public for the only consolation left him on this side of the grave. It was not sufficient to write, for it is he as the Homer of his Idyls ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... was good, and so was Homer too, Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again, What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true, Nor Shakespeare's books, ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... Homer Lee," said the Southerner. "I am a New Orleans boy. I've been only a month in your city. Judge," he began earnestly, but in a voice which still held the drawl of the South, "I met a man from home last week on Broadway. He belonged to that spiritualistic school on Carondelet Street. He ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... better equipped to understand his lyric flights than any similar assemblage that could be collected haphazard in some modern castle. They did not pretend—they knew. Even you, Lady Alice, could frame a neat verse in Latin and cap some pleasant jest with a line from Homer. When Milton dreamed aloud of bathing in the Elysian dew of the rainbow, of inhaling the scents of nard and cassia, 'which the musky wings of the Zepyhr scatter through the cedared alleys of the Hesperides,' they followed each turn and swoop of his fancy with an active ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... some song in his head. But no one suspects this, when he says, 'A wet morning shall not confine us to our beds.' This then is either a defect in poetry, or it is not. Whoever should decide in the affirmative, I would request him to re-peruse any one poem, of any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from Aeschylus to Shakespeare; and to strike out (in thought I mean) every instance of this kind. If the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him, or if he continued to deem the work improved by their total omission, he must advance reasons of no ordinary ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... originator of the doctrine of the oneness of the universe: he also maintained, it is said, the unity of the Deity; and also his immortality and eternity; denounced the transference of him into human form; and reproached Homer and Hesiod for attributing to him human weaknesses. He represented him as endowed with unwearied activity, and as the ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... world pities the blind, but despite their infirmities many have achieved the highest glory in every profession. Since Homer there have been numerous blind poets. Milton lost none of his poetic power after he had become blind. The Argovienne, Louise Egloff, and Daniel Leopold, who died in 1753, were blind from infancy. Blacklock, Avisse, Koslov, and La Mott-Houdart ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... you did—go to work to set the world right on this matter—you, to whom a date discovered is the highest palm (no pun intended, I assure you) of glory, and who would rather Shakespere had never written 'Hamlet,' or Homer the 'Iliad,' than that some miserable little forgotten scrap which decided a year or a place should have been consigned to flames before it fell into your hands? Why did you not bring the thunder of your abuse and the pop-gunnery of your ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... Christian era: the Amor and Psyche of Apuleius for instance. Indeed love in all its forms was familiar to the ancients. Where can we find a more beautiful expression of ardent passion than glows in Sappho's songs? or of patient faithful constancy than in Homer's Penelope? Could there be a more beautiful picture of the union of two loving hearts, even beyond the grave, than Xenophon has preserved for us in his account of Panthea and Abradatas? or the story of Sabinus the Gaul and his wife, told in the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... house. Up to the 29th day of the month, the Colonel was cared for as a friend, and exhibited as a phenomenon. Seven photographers disputed the possession of so precious a sitter. The cities of Greece did no more for our poor old Homer. His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, wished to see him in propria persona, and begged Herr Hirtz to bring him to the palace. Fougas scratched his ear a little, and intimated that a soldier ought not to associate with the enemy, seeming ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... there lived in a city of Asia Minor, not far from Mount Ida, as old Homer tells us in his grand and beautiful poem, a king who had fifty sons and many daughters. How large his family was, indeed, we cannot say, for the storytellers of the olden time were not very careful to set down the actual and exact truth, their chief object being to give the people something to ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... suspicion that he was the President's candidate. The Democratic Convention at San Francisco adopted a platform praising and indorsing the President's record in all details. The convention had to do that; the President's record was the party's record. Homer Cummings as Temporary Chairman kept the convention cheered up by a keynote speech of eulogy of that record, which moved the assembled Democrats to such enthusiasm that Secretary of State Colby, who had not been a ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... these superstitions: and everywhere by those even who reject them they are entertained with some degree of affectionate respect. That the ass, which in its very degradation still retains an under-power of sublimity, [Footnote: 'An under-power of sublimity.'— Everybody knows that Homer compared the Telamonian Ajax, in a moment of heroic endurance, to an ass. This, however, was only under a momentary glance from a peculiar angle of the case. But the Mahometan, too solemn, and also perhaps too stupid to catch the fanciful colors of things, absolutely by choice, under the Bagdad ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... crossed, and an air of profound contemplation, was surveying the long perspective of ocean, which rolled its successive waves up to the foot of the rock on which the ancient pile is founded. The Earl was suffering under the infliction of ennui—now looking into a volume of Homer—now whistling—now swinging on his chair—now traversing the room—till, at length, his attention became swallowed up in admiration of the tranquillity ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... ten mile from a dentist, young feller? you're too used to settin' in the middle of creation and jerkin' the reins for the hoss to go. Jonas E. Homer ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... "Troy-Book," with Henryson's "Testament of Cressid" (and in a sense even with Shakespere's drama on the theme of Chaucer's poem), may be said to belong to the second cycle of modern versions of the tale of Troy divine. Already their earlier predecessors had gone far astray from Homer, of whom they only know by hearsay, relying for their facts on late Latin epitomes, which freely mutilated and perverted the Homeric narrative in favour of the Trojans—the supposed ancestors of half the nations of Europe. Accordingly, Chaucer, in a well-known passage ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... with the object of learning the language, which by reason of its subtlety lends itself most readily to diplomatic purposes, the most expressive language, to my thinking, that the world has yet evolved, not excepting the much-vaunted tongue in which Homer wrote. Phillip and I had been boys together, and of all the comrades of my youth I should have selected him the last to distinguish himself in statecraft. He was a quiet, unobservant, and, as previously noted, self-absorbed man, ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... Many of these country places I came to know afterwards from the talk of the men, and many others I have travelled through, so that the names upon the banners have come to have a real meaning with me. Homer hath, I remember, a chapter or book wherein he records the names of all the Grecian chiefs and whence they came, and how many men they brought to the common muster. It is pity that there is not some Western Homer who could record the names of these brave peasants and artisans, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with a laugh. "But I wasn't always a tobacco- grower, and there were poets before Homer, who is about the only one I've ever read. It's true I've tried to lose the little education I ever had—that I've done my best to come down to the level of my own cattle; but I'm not an ox, after all, except in strength, and one has plenty of time to think when one works in ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... manners and customs. So, as I say, my work would be invaluable. The wastrel (as they say in England) has, of course, been celebrated in the literature of the past from time immemorial. I can't at the moment put my finger on any, but I have no doubt there are bums in the pages of Homer, That Persian philosopher who found paradise enow with a jug of wine and a book of verse beneath a bough, Falstaff, Richard Swiveller, how they flock to the mind, they of the care-free kidney! They are in the Books of the great Hebrew ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... was justified by his scholarship and the present editor has no such claim to attention: he, therefore, makes the confession frankly (to anticipate perhaps such criticism as Bentley's "a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but don't call it Homer") and offers the little book to those who love the country, and to read about the country amidst the crowded life of towns, with the hope that they may find in it some measure of the pleasure ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... gentleman said he was too fast. 'How can I help it,' says the Doctor, 'if the courtiers give me a watch that won't go right?' Then he instructed a young nobleman, that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English, for which he would have them all subscribe: 'For,' says he, 'he shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.' Lord Treasurer, after leaving the Queen, came through the room, beckoning Dr. Swift to follow him,—both went off just before prayers." ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the chief glory of our English school, and what are the great poets of all ages but landscape painters, and what are the best landscape painters but poets? Alike they reproduce for us aspects of nature translated into human thoughts and tinged with human emotion. When Homer shows us bees swarming out of the hollow rock and hanging in grapelike clusters on the blossoms of spring; when AEschylus flashes upon us the unnumbered laughter of the sea-waves; when Virgil in a single line paints for us the silvery Galaesus flowing now under dark boughs, and now through golden ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... quality; present, at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too seldom present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and epic. Fiction is the same case; it is no substantive art, but an element which enters largely into all the arts but architecture. Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction; and yet I do not suppose that either Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these two, entered in any degree into the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting lecture or Mr. James's charming essay. The art of fiction, then, regarded ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is always better composed than the real one Advantage that a calm temper gives one over men Art is the chosen truth Artificialities of style of that period Artistic Truth, more lofty than the True As Homer says, "smiling under tears" Difference which I find between Truth in art and the True in fac Happy is he who does not outlive his youth He did not blush to be a man, and he spoke to men with force History too was a work of art In every age we laugh at the costume of our ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... of books which had lain untouched since they were sent sown from Mr. Belamour's chambers at the Temple, and they were placed at her disposal. Here was Mr. Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad of Homer, which had appeared shortly before the fatal duel, and Aurelia eagerly learnt whole pages of it by heart for the evening's amusement, enjoying extremely the elucidations and criticisms of her auditor, who would dwell on a passage all ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... notes at the boar-hunt. 'Whether I am being shaved or having my hair cut,' he wrote, 'and whether I am riding or dining, I either read or get some one to read to me.' Some of his favourite volumes are described in terms of delightful affection. He tells us how Homer and Plato sat side by side on the shelf,—the prince of poets by the prince of philosophers. He only knew the rudiments of Greek, and was forced to read the Iliad in the Latin version. 'But I glory,' he said, 'in the ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... definite figures where everything is ready-made or can be re-made. You are, so to say, living in the home of poetry and being waited upon by the gods. During these last days I have again been looking into Homer, and there have read of the visit of Thetis to Vulcan with immense pleasure. There is, in the graceful description of a domestic visit such as we might receive any day, and in an account of any kind of handicraft, an infinity of material ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... or rabbit. Sophocles, in the latter end of his Ajax, alludes to a method of cheating in hats, and the scholiast on the place tells us of one Crephontes, who was a master of the art. It is observable likewise that Achilles, in the first Iliad of Homer, tells Agamemnon, in anger, that he had dog's eyes. Now, as the eyes of a dog are handsomer than those of almost any other animal, this could be no term of reproach. He must therefore mean that he had a hat on, ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... freedom of mood which is so essential to the artist, for he has no taxes to pay and no relations to worry him. The man who possesses a permanent address, and whose name is to be found in the Directory, is necessarily limited and localised. Only the tramp has absolute liberty of living. Was not Homer himself a vagrant, and did not Thespis go about in a caravan? It is then with feelings of intense expectation that we open the little volume that lies before us. It is entitled Low Down, by Two Tramps, and is marvellous even to look at. It is clear that art ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Yet the Homer of sex through the ages is still to come. But at all times the mystery evoked speculation and attempt at explanation. Acting upon their theories as to the nature and function of sex, men have, ever since the passing of the primeval matriarchates, segregated women, equalized them, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... is more combustible than the wood. This sulphur—which most people call brimstone—has been known from very early times. In the middle ages it was regarded as the "principle of fire." It is referred to by Moses and Homer and Pliny. A very distinguished chemist, Geber, describes it as one of "the principles of nature." Having fired my tinder, as you see, and blown upon it, I place my sulphur match in contact with the red-hot tinder. And now I want you to notice that the sulphur match does not catch fire ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... acquiring a love for the classics; for it was drill, paradigms, rules, exceptions, scansion, in short, all that pertains to the external apparatus of the Greek and Latin tongues. Often we spent two hours on eight lines of Homer. The father of literature became a Procrustean, grammatical bed on which we were to be stretched, and it did nearly exterminate every one of us. For my own part, I was possessed with an intemperate haste to read Homer straight through as fast as I could; ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... did no hurt many times, because they did but laugh at him to see him so mad. This Phaonius at that time, in spite of the door-keepers, came into the chamber, and with a certain scoffing and mocking gesture, which he counterfeited of purpose, he rehearsed the verses which old Nestor said in Homer: ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... the imagination. Thus Pisistratus is said to have been among the earliest of the Greeks, who projected an immense collection of the works of the learned, and is supposed to have been the collector of the scattered works, which passed under the name of Homer. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Tarbox was thirteen years old. In that year he took the examinations for entrance to Princeton University and received the Grade A—excellent—in Caesar, Cicero, Vergil, Xenophon, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Sanscrit, or a Hindostanee, or a Persian treasure will do equally well as a pretext. If she had announced a taste for the differential calculus, I should have said the same. Only dig her, as Maurice dug me apropos to Homer. I wouldn't bother you, only you see no one else could either do it, or be ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ceremonies of the church had been introduced a semi-pagan religion of art—the worship of moral and sensuous beauty. Illiteracy was no longer the style at court. Elizabeth herself set the example in the study of Greek. Books and manuscripts were eagerly sought after, Scholars became conversant with Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the great tragic poets Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus; and translations for the many of Vergil, Ovid, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca poured forth from the printing-presses of London. The English mind was strongly tempered by the idealistic philosophy ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... every collector; but to adhere so rigidly to that one class of literature as to exclude from our library the great books of the world, is to deprive ourselves of all the advantages which a library can offer. 'There are some books, as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Milton, Shakespeare, and Scott, which every man should read who has the opportunity; should read, mark, learn and inwardly digest. To neglect the opportunity of becoming familiar with them, is deliberately to sacrifice the position in the social ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... curis acuens mortalia corda. Cookery is the first of arts. Chemistry is a mere subordinate science, whose chief value is that it enables man to impart greater relish and gust to his viands. The greatest poets, such as Homer, Milton, and Scott, treat the subject of eating and drinking with much seriousness, minuteness of detail, and lusciousness of description. Homer's heroes are all good cooks,—swift-footed Achilles, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... Greek and the Latin Congreve first brought himself to the attention of Dryden, who pronounced the youthful Congreve "more capable than any man I know" to translate the whole of Homer. Congreve never completed that proposed translation, but years later he was singled out by Pope for the dedication of his Homer. That Congreve's genuine interest in the classics continued throughout his life is attested by the constant ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... genius is a certain divine dulness. The people we used to call the masters—Shakespeare, Raphael, Milton, and so forth—had a certain simplicity Crichton lacks. They do not scintillate nearly so much as he does, and they do not give that same uncomfortable feeling of internal strain. Even Homer nods. There are restful places in their work, broad meadows of breezy flatness, calms. But Crichton has no Pacific Ocean to mitigate his everlasting weary passage of Cape Horn: it is all point and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne: Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Englishmen do not seem to think it is worth their while. Nor would I fail to include, in the course of study I am sketching, translations of all the best works of antiquity, or of the modern world. It is a very desirable thing to read Homer in Greek; but if you don't happen to know Greek, the next best thing we can do is to read as good a translation of it as we have recently been furnished with in prose.[83] You won't get all you would get from the original, but you may get a great deal; and to refuse ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... situated on the coast of Asia Minor, not far from the entrance to what is now the Sea of Mar'mo-ra. It was besieged for ten years by a vast army of the Greeks (natives of Greece or Hel'las) under one of their kings called Ag-a-mem'non. Homer, the greatest of the ancient poets, tells about this siege in his famous poem, the Il'i-ad. We shall see later on how the siege was brought to an end by the capture and destruction of the city, as well as how AEneas escaped, and what afterwards happened ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... harmony, beauty, truth and religion With them, dancing bore a relation to walking and the ordinary movements of the limbs similar to that which poetry bears to prose, and as our own Emerson—himself something of an ancient—defines poetry as the piety of the intellect, so Homer would doubtless have defined dancing as the devotion of the body if he had had the unspeakable advantage of a training in the Emerson school of epigram. Such a view of it is natural to the unsophisticated pagan ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... it up, we might hope to construct a similar work of art before the eyes of our countrymen, by giving up or changing the substance. The immeasurable result which has followed works wherein the form has been retained—such as the Homer of Voss, and the Shakespeare of Tieck and Schlegel—is an incontrovertible evidence of the vitality of ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... he sat by her bedside holding the thin hands (for the blind see by the sense of touch), and they talked for hours—or were silent, which served as well. Then she would read to the blind man and he would recite to her, for he had the blind Homer's memory. She grew better, and the doctors said that if she had taken her medicine regularly, and not insisted on getting up and walking about as guide for the blind man, she might have ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... no heroes. They look back on no Heroic Age, no Achilles, no Agamemnon, and no Homer. The past is vacant. The have not even a 'Wacht am Rhein' or 'Marseillaise' to chaunt in chorus with quickened step and flashing eye. No; nor even a ballad of the hearth, handed down from father to son, to be sung at ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... exploits is of thrilling interest, but the real value of the book consists in the graphic and accurate picture which it gives of the world as it was a thousand years before the Christian Era. King David, King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, and even Homer are among the characters Captain Mago meets ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of her modest and spotless Christian life, was little aware what storms were brewing in two bosoms upstairs in the study—in Pen's, as he sate in his shooting jacket, with his elbows on the green study-table, and his hands clutching his curly brown hair, Homer under his nose,—and in worthy Mr. Smirke's, with whom he was reading. Here they would talk about Helen and Andromache. "Andromache's like my mother," Pen used to avouch; "but I say, Smirke, by Jove ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that are rather tedious by their similarity, and offensive from the smell of the shambles; and which any quick-witted stripling with the knack of rhyming might perhaps have done as well, and less coarsely, after reading Chapman's or Ogilby's Homer, or the fighting scenes in Spenser, the Border Ballads, &c. But even this composition is not unconscious of the true afflatus, such as is incommunicable by learning, not to be inhaled by mere imitative powers, and which might be vainly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... aspiration. Yet, though triumphant for a time, this policy necessarily contained the seeds of its own ignominious destruction. A day must inevitably come when so grievous a wrong to the human race must be exposed, and execrated, and punished—a day in which the poems of Homer might once more be read, the immortal statues of the Greek sculptors find worshippers, and the demonstrations of Euclid a consenting intellect. But that unfortunate, that audacious policy of usurpation ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... soon becomes a kind of task-reading, and it requires some effort and resolution to carry us on to the end of his long performance. This effect, of which every one is conscious, is usually ascribed to the change of manners: but manners have more changed since Homer's age; and yet that poet remains still the favorite of every reader of taste and judgment. Homer copied true natural manners, which, however rough or uncultivated, will always form an agreeable and interesting picture; but the pencil of the English poet was employed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... and Roman writings no mention is made of either the coffee plant or the beverage made from the berries. Pierre (Pietro) Delia Valle[28] (1586-1652), however, maintains that the nepenthe, which Homer says Helen brought with her out of Egypt, and which she employed as surcease for sorrow, was nothing else but coffee mixed with wine.[29] This is disputed by M. Petit, a well known physician of Paris, who died in 1687. Several later British authors, among them, Sandys, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... represents them, among the habitual spoils of the grocer.[8] It is sad, and is suggestive of many inquiries, that this abundance was followed, at least in the West, by a famine of more than a thousand years. And it is hard, even after all allowances, to conceive that of all the many manuscripts of Homer which Italy must have possessed we do not know that a single parchment or papyrus was ever read by a single individual, even in a convent, or even by a giant such as Dante, or as Thomas Acquinas, the first of them unquestionably ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... let me finish what I have to tell you of the style of southern engraving. What sudden bathos in the sentence, you think! So contemptible the question of style, then, in painting, though not in literature? You study the 'style' of Homer; the style, perhaps, of Isaiah; the style of Horace, and of Massillon. Is it so vain to study the ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... highest; there were those who ranked him above Phidias. Thus Xenophon represents [Footnote: Memorabilia I., 4, 3 (written about 390 B. C).] an Athenian as assigning to Polyclitus a preeminence in sculpture like that of Homer in epic poetry and that of Sophocles in tragedy; and Strabo[Footnote: VIII., page 372 (written about 18 A. D.).] pronounced his gold and ivory statues in the Temple of Hera near Argos the finest in artistic merit among all such works, though inferior to those of Phidias in size and costliness. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... Hebrews, the Greeks and Romans have left us no trace. However, as substantiating the regard shown for needlework by the Greeks and Romans, the following two pleasing myths have come down to us: one, the "Story of Arachne," as related by Ovid; the other from the "Odyssey" of Homer. ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... of little consequence. What the Egyptians meant, who called her "Neith,"—or Homer, who called her "Athena,"—or Solomon, who called her by a word which the Greeks render as "Sophia," you must judge for yourselves. But her testimony is always the same, and all nations have received it: "I was by Him as one brought up with Him, and I was daily His delight; rejoicing ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin |
