"Hugo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are all furious. You must make up your minds to it nevertheless—the Empire is certain, and the feeling of all but unanimity (whatever the motive) throughout France obvious enough. Smooth down the lion's mane of the 'Examiner,' and hint that roaring over a desert is a vain thing. As to Victor Hugo's book, the very enemies of the present state of affairs object to it that he lies simply. There is not enough truth in it for an invective to rest on, still less for an argument. It's an inarticulate cry of a bird of prey, wild and strong ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... yet loftier purposes shall guide us still; whilst to the nations whose eyes are fastened upon that army it offers some cause for gratulation or relief, that in this problem, whose vast issues, vista receding behind vista, men so wide apart as Napoleon I. and Victor Hugo pondered spell-bound; that in this arena where conflicts await us beside which, in renunciation, triumph, or despair, this of to-day seems but a toy; that in this crisis, a crisis in which the whole earth is concerned, the Empire has intervened, definitely and for all time, which more ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... when I came to Paris were MM. de Chateaubriand, Jouy, Lemercier, Arnault, Etienne, Baour-Lormian, Beranger, Charles Nodier, Viennet Scribe, Theaulon, Soumet, Casimir Delavigne, Lucien Arnault, Ancelot, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Desaugiers, and Alfred de Vigny. After them came names half literary, half political, such as MM. Cousin, Salvandy, Yillemain, Thiers, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, Mignet, Vitet, Cave, Merimee, and Guizot. Others, who were not yet known, but were coming forward, were Balzac, Soulie, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... English novel-reader would say that there is hardly any plot at all. Turgenev disdained the tricks of the sensational novelists. Yet, for a Russian at least, it is easier to lay down before the end a novel by Victor Hugo or Alexander Dumas than Dmitri Rudin, or, indeed, any of Turgenev's great novels. What the novelists of the romantic school obtain by the charm of unexpected adventures and thrilling situations, Turgenev succeeds in obtaining by the brisk admirably concentrated action, and, above ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... Sea," a poetic evocation of the sea's stupendous majesty that is unparalleled outside the ancient sagas. Conrad describes it with a degree of graphic skill that is superb and incomparable. He challenges at once the pictorial vigour of Hugo and the aesthetic sensitiveness of Lafcadio Hearn, and surpasses them both. And beyond this mere dazzling visualization, he gets into his pictures an overwhelming sense of that vast drama of which they are no more than the flat, lifeless representation—of that inexorable and uncompassionate struggle ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... B: Hugo Willobeius eques auratus.] [Sidenote C: Martinus Frobisherus eques auratus.] [Sidenote D: Antonius Ienkinsonus.] [Sidenote E: Franciscus Dracus eques auratus.] ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... right," replied Hugo. "I come from beyond Durham, from the priory of St. Wilfrid, the prior whereof is my uncle, I having no other kin so near ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... American Anti-Slavery Society was organized. In large measure these organizations were an outgrowth of the great liberal and humanitarian spirit that by 1830 had become manifest in both Europe and America. Hugo and Mazzini, Byron and Macaulay had all now appeared upon the scene, and romanticism was regnant. James Montgomery and William Faber wrote their hymns, and Reginald Heber went as a missionary bishop to India. Forty years afterwards the French Revolution was bearing ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... Victor Hugo gives the following impressive description of a death in the quicksand off certain coasts of Brittany, ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... appear as "Esmeralda," assisted by a performing goat, especially trained by the gifted actress. The goat would dance, play cards, and perform those tricks of magic familiar to the readers of Victor Hugo's beautiful story of the "Hunchback of Notre Dame," and finally knock down and overthrow the designing seducer, Captain Phoebus. The marvelous spectacle would be produced under the patronage of the Hon. Colonel Starbottle and the Mayor ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... les ttes couronns de l'Europe, notre philosophe s'amuse, en passant, rpandre du ridicule sur les ouvrages de Hugo Grotius. J'oserais croire qu'il n'en sera pas cru sur sa parole, et que le Droit de la guerre et de la paix ira plus loin la postrit que l'Essai ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... extent the monasteries, were throughout this century great customers for the bulky books of scholastic divinity (Duns Scotus, Albertus, and the like) and the later generation of commentators on the Bible, such as Nicolas de Lyra and Hugo de S. Caro. Many shelves are filled ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... brilliant critic and litterateur, a man of travel and wide acquaintance with the world. Then indeed you will appreciate what an enormous change had come over music. A mere mention of the authors from whom Berlioz drew his subjects: Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Scott, Virgil, Hugo, shows the wide range of his reading and the difference in output which would inevitably result. The previous impersonal attitude towards music is shown by the very names of compositions which, broadly ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... me no little Latin and Greek, and early instilled into my mind those principles necessary for the soul's salvation. I have often thought with regret on the pranks I played him. More than once at lesson-time have I gone off with Hugo and young Harvey for a rabbit hunt, stealing two dogs from the pack, and thus committing a double offence. You may be sure I was well thrashed by Mr. Carvel, who thought the more of the latter misdoing, though obliged to emphasize the former. The doctor would never raise his hand against me. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Victor Hugo, in one of his rhapsodies, exclaims: "The most sublime psalm that can be heard on this earth is the lisping of a human soul from the lips of childhood," and the rhythm within whose circle of influence the infant early finds himself, often leads him precociously into the realm of song. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... that strange journey seemed interminable. There were times when the girls were sure the man who called himself Hugo Billings was not taking them toward Three Towers Hall at all. It seemed impossible that they could have wandered such a ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... well-known poet among the literary school, the author of Wigalois) is brought face to face with an incarnation of the World and its vanity. Volumes on volumes of moral poetry date from the thirteenth century, and culminate in the somewhat well-known Renner[123] of Hugo von Trimberg, dating from the very last year of our period: perhaps the most noteworthy is the Bescheidenheit of Freidank, a crusader trouvere who accompanied Frederick II. to the East. But in all this Germany ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Victor Hugo says somewhere in his works that he who drains a marsh must necessarily expect to hear the frogs croak. I had graduated, and of course the newspapers had to have a say about it. Some of the articles are really amusing. I couldn't help laughing at ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... Guards, supported by the Coldstreamers, advanced down the valley beyond Loos and gained the lower edge of Bois Hugo, near the chalk-pit, while the Scots Guards assaulted Puits 14 and the building in its group of houses known as the Keep. Another body of Guards, including Grenadiers and Welsh, attacked at the same time the lower ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... born and reared under the shadow of Strasburg Cathedral. The majestic spire, a world in itself, became indeed a world to this imaginative prodigy. He may be said to have learned the minster of minsters by heart, as before him Victor Hugo had familiarized himself with Notre Dame. The unbreeched artist of four summers never tired of scrutinizing the statues, monsters, gargoyles and other outer ornamentations, while the story of the pious architect Erwin and of his ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... tell how a brother resolved, at Shrovetide, to make pancakes, and not only to make, but also to toss them. Those who chanced to be in the room stood prudently aside, and the brother tossed boldly. But that was the last that was seen of his handiwork. Victor Hugo sings in La Legende des Siecles of disappearance as the thing which no creature is able to achieve: here the impossibility seemed to be accomplished by quite an ordinary and a simple pancake. It was clean gone, and there was an end of it. Nor could any explanation of this ceasing of a pancake ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... satisfactory, many men revolted from it, and in the seventeenth century a Dutchman, Hugo Grotius, a lawyer, brought forth another interpretation, which is known in theology as "the governmental theory." He would not admit that Christ was punished. His sufferings were not penal, but illustrative. "God is the moral governor," ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... HUGO DE WELEWYCK, styled Clericus, succeeded in 1296 on the resignation of Paganus and was the last rector, the benefice having in his time been reduced to a vicarage by the appropriation of the rectorial-house, tithes, and glebe to the College of St. Elizabeth. The PRETENCES ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... draw his intensely living, animated, dramatic, and yet thoroughly true "Stories of the Merovingian Times" from the colourless, diffuse, ill-composed history of Gregory of Tours? Did not Sauval's unreadable work become "Notre-Dame de Paris" in Victor Hugo's hands? Did not Walter Scott, by his novels, Shakespeare by his dramas, render the greatest services to history by giving life to dead chronicles, by putting into flesh and blood heroes on whom forgetfulness had scattered its dust in the solitude of libraries? Does any one suppose ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... thing for a dramatic author to write prefaces to his plays. We are fortunate in possessing a series of personal opinions in this form that constitute a valuable asset in determining individual attitude and technical purpose. Read Schiller's opening remarks to "The Robbers," Victor Hugo's famous opinions affixed to "Cromwell" and his equally enlightening comments introducing "Hernani," and you can judge ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura • Augustus Thomas
... forward their mail. Indeed, it seems necessary that a man should have "run away" at least once, in order afterward to attain eminence. Moses, Lot, Tarquin, Pericles, Demosthenes, Saint Paul, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Voltaire, Goldsmith, Hugo—but the list is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... Miserables." It made a deep impression on me, and I am inclined to believe it started a train of thought which gradually grew into a purpose so all-absorbing that I might have been overwhelmed by it, had not my over-active imagination been brought to bay by another's common sense. Hugo's plea for suffering Humanity—for the world's miserable—struck a responsive chord within me. Not only did it revive my latent desire to help the afflicted; it did more. It aroused a consuming ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... Chateau d'Eau the crowd surrounded me. Some young men cried out, "Vive Victor Hugo!" One of them asked me, "Citizen Victor Hugo, what ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... were everywhere welcomed as deliverers. Thus was France enabled to surround herself with a girdle of commonwealths. She conquered Europe not by her armies, but by her ideas. "An invasion of armies," says Victor Hugo, "can be resisted: an invasion of ideas ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... literary forms, to something comparable to Greek and Latin. Mr. Saintsbury says they "made modern French—made it, we may say, twice over"; by which he means that French, in their time, was revolutionized, and that, in the Romantic movement of 1830, Hugo and his associates were armed by the work of the Pleiade for their revolt against the restraints of rule and language that had been imposed by ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... came foremost battailous and bold, Late led by Hugo, brother to their King, From France the isle that rivers four infold With rolling streams descending from their spring, But Hugo dead, the lily fair of gold, Their wonted ensign they tofore them bring, Under Clotharius great, a captain ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... I turned to peruse Hugo von Halbwitz's admirable book, Easy Marks, or How the German Government Borrows its Funds; and after that I had read Karl von Wiggleround's Despatches and Barnstuff's Confidential ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... as Keble says, "to have our thoughts lift up to that world where all is beautiful and glorious,"—but it is well to realise also how much of this world is beautiful. It has, I know, been maintained, as for instance by Victor Hugo, that the general effect of beauty is to sadden. "Comme la vie de l'homme, meme la plus prospere, est toujours au fond plus triste que gaie, le ciel sombre nous est harmonieux. Le ciel eclatant et joyeux nous est ironique. La Nature ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... place that, had I not been fortified by communion with my omnipresent God, I do think my reason would have suffered in that thick darkness and solitude. I repeated thousands of lines of Homer, Virgil and the Greek dramatists; then I came to Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine and Victor Hugo; then I tried to think of a text and compose a sermon; but the minutes seemed hours, leaden hours, and they weighed my head down and my heart down, and so did the Egyptian darkness, till I sought refuge in prayer, ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... some other Papers in your Magazine: as those on V. Hugo, {85a} and Tennyson's Queen Mary: {85b} I doubt not that Criticism on English Writers is likely to be more impartial over the Atlantic, and not biassed by Clubs, Coteries, etc. I always say that we in the Country are safer Judges than those of even better Wits in London: not being prejudiced ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... we shall make many a pleasing excursion into the far spaces and win stimulating glimpses into the infinities. In our physical geography we shall read marvelous stories that outrival the romances of Dumas and Hugo. And geography as a whole will reveal herself as the cherishing mother of us all, providing us with food, and drink, and shelter, and raiment, giving us poetry, and song, and story, and weaving golden fancies for the ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... chargeable against the next volumes to be chronicled. Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, 1891, and Miss Mitford's Our Village, 1893, are still regarded by many as the artist's happiest efforts. I say "still," because Mr. Thomson is only now in what Victor Hugo called the youth of old age (as opposed to the old age of youth); and it would be premature to assume that a talent so alert to multiply and diversify its efforts, had already attained the summit of its achievement. But in these two books he had certain unquestionable advantages. ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... privilege of the English realistic school, which we may call without hesitation the school of Dickens, that it has been the first to strike the key-note with a firm and skillful hand. Its excellence would stand out with undimmed lustre had it not, as its gloomy background, the French school of Victor Hugo and Balzac, that opposite of "the poetry of despair," as Goethe calls it. Here again, in this new English school, has the genius of Kingsley alighted. Most of his novels belong to it. And, besides himself and ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... this again, my boy. My own sons——" He paused, sighed, and then laughed, tapping John's cheek with his slender, finely-formed fingers. But he passed on without finishing his sentence. John knew that, of Caesar's brothers, Hugo, the eldest, was Secretary of Legation at Teheran; Bill "devilled" for a famous barrister; Lionel wore her Majesty's livery. Strange that none had elected to serve his ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... brought Like a trip-hammer down on his bulbous knee, And he roared: "Her Nanny? By gum, we'll see If the public's time she dares devote To the educatin' of any dam goat!" "You do not entirely comprehend— Hernani's a play," said his learned friend, "By Victor Hugo—immoral and bad. What's worse, it's French!" "Well, well, my lad," Said Smith, "if he cuts a swath so wide I'll have him took re'glar up and tried!" And he smiled so sweetly the other chap Thought that himself was a Finn or Lapp Caught in a storm of his native snows, With a purple ear ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... the attendants were appealed to, but they had not been near enough to hear Wamba's directions. At length Brian remarked, what had at first escaped him in the twilight; "Here is some one either asleep, or lying dead at the foot of this cross—Hugo, stir him with the butt-end of ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... vast knowledge of me, says I have the swamp-cedar trick of flaring up into sudden and explosive attractiveness. Then, he says, I shower sparks. As I've already told him, I'm a wild woman, and will be hard to tame, for as Victor Hugo somewhere says, we women are only ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... years. He has all the common claims to charity, being old, poor, and infirm, in a great degree. He has likewise another claim, to which no scholar can refuse attention; he is by several descents the nephew of Hugo Grotius; of him, from whom perhaps every man of learning has learnt something. Let it not be said that in any lettered country a nephew of Grotius asked a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the deceased prior, who had been executed for adherence to the Stuart family in 1745-6; and the motto, HAUD OBLIVISCENDUM, seemed to intimate a tone of mundane feeling and recollection of injuries, which made it at least doubtful whether, even in the quiet and gloom of the cloister, Father Hugo had forgotten the sufferings and injuries ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... to these thrilling revelations that Victor Hugo intended to apply these so wonderfully appropriate lines? Was it he who bestowed upon Fabre, according to a poetic tradition, the name of "the Homer of the insects," which fits ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... head at the Rostra, a thing not unlikely to have been done by a man to whose nature such grim irony was thoroughly congenial. [Sidenote: Stories of Sulla.] He evinced it on this occasion in another way, which may have suggested to Victor Hugo his episode of Lantenac and the gunner. He gave the slave who betrayed Sulpicius his freedom, and then had him hurled from the Tarpeian Rock. After this he set to work to restore such order as would enable him ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... Elizabeth Barrett Browning was ever moved by the demands of liberty, whether the immediate impulse was a child in the sweatshops of England, an Italian wishing to be free of Austria, or the exiled Victor Hugo, and there was no exaggeration in the tribute placed on the wall of Casa ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... governor under such conditions, therefore, meant constant embarrassment, if not unceasing humiliation. These reasons were carefully presented to Richmond. Moreover, Seymour was conscious of inherent defects of temperament. He did not belong to the class of politicians, described by Victor Hugo, who mistake a weather-cock for a flag. He was a gentleman of culture, of public experience, and of moral purpose, representing the best quality of his party; but possessed of a sensitive and eager temper, he ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... "Ernani" was probably the best; then he entered upon the second period of his achievement as a composer, and the first work that marked the transition was "Rigoletto." The story was adapted from a drama of Hugo's, "Le Roi S'Amuse," and as the profligate character of its principal seemed too baldly to exploit the behaviour of Francis I, its production was suppressed. Then Verdi adjusted the matter by turning the character into the Duke of Mantua, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... The late Professor Hugo Mnsterberg wrote a popular book on this subject called On the Witness Stand.] For experience seems to show that he himself brings something to the scene which later he takes away from it, that oftener than not what he imagines to be the ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... Bellevue inn, overlooking the river, and await the tub's deliberate return, while the tugs and the barges trailed past. Save for modifications brought about by steam, the scene can be now little different from that in the days when Hugo Grotius was ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... unrelated, unassociated. The science he turns to will be a science of crudest fact; the passion extravagant, a passionate love of passion, varied through all the exotic phases of French fiction as inaugurated by Balzac; the art exaggerated, in matter or form, or both, as in Hugo or Baudelaire. The development of these conditions is the mental story of the nineteenth century, especially as exemplified ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... hear all this!" said Wilhelm. "You would make your fortune with her! The dear girl! she has the best head at home, but she loves effect. Hoffman and Victor Hugo are her favorites. Byron rests every night under her pillow. If you related such things of the west coast of Jutland, and of heaths and moors, you might persuade her to make a journey thither. One really would not believe that we possessed in our own country ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... an ocean-voyage (then no ten-day pleasure-trip) for a cause that still hung in the balances of success? Viewed practically, the help offered was even more deserving of praise. The French are not an adventurous nation: they are not fond of travelling. Hugo says Paris is the world, and to the average Frenchman it embodies the world it comprises: it is the world. Expatriated, he would rather dwell, like the poet, on a barren island within sight of the shores ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... reputation has suffered some damage in their own country. There are also a few exiles of a more honorable kind,—French liberals, who have taken refuge from imperial tyranny under the shield of English law,—the most illustrious of whom is Victor Hugo. The Emperor would fain get hold of these men, and he is now trying to force upon us a modification of the extradition treaty for that purpose. But the sanctity of our asylum is a tradition dear to the English people, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... First was totally unacquainted with nautical affairs, having possessed no fleet when King of Scotland, disputes constantly arose respecting the honour of the flag, which the English claimed, and this induced the famous Hugo Grotius to write a treatise, in which he endeavoured to prove the futility of their title to the dominion of the sea. England, however, still maintained her right to be saluted by the ships of all other nations, and the learned Selden supported the English, asserting ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... such a guide. From the entire and diligent perusal of the Greek text, I have a right to pronounce that the Latin and French versions of Grotius and Cousin may not be implicitly trusted; yet the president Cousin has been often praised, and Hugo Grotius was the first scholar of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... 'Alexander's Feast' is an admirable trumpet-blast, in which metre and sound impress upon the nerves the emotions of the mind, a master-piece of rapture and of art, which Victor Hugo alone has ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... brewers shows supreme by reason of the luxury of its carvings and the care wherewith its beauty and solidity have been maintained throughout the centuries. In one of the simplest houses of the square Victor Hugo first took refuge after the great catastrophe of the coup d'etat. It bore the number 27. A tobacco-shop occupied the ground floor. The poet's parlor was furnished in a style of bald simplicity, with chairs and a sofa covered with black haircloth. But he was wont to say, pointing to the Hotel de ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... the two towers which looks upon the Greve, just beside the frame for the bells, a very secret little cell, into which no one, not even the bishop, entered without his leave, it was said. This tiny cell had formerly been made almost at the summit of the tower, among the ravens' nests, by Bishop Hugo de Besancon* who had wrought sorcery there in his day. What that cell contained, no one knew; but from the strand of the Terrain, at night, there was often seen to appear, disappear, and reappear at brief and regular intervals, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... method for Analyzing the Action of Slide-Valves, moved by Eccentrics, Link Motions, and Cut-off Gears, offering easy means for properly designing Valves and Valve-Gears, and for establishing the comparative merits of their various constructions. By HUGO BILGRAM, ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... pertain to it, are sometimes such as to bring the sublime in perilous proximity to the ridiculous. How such a fantastic creation can be so treated as to do less violence to the laws of artistic harmony and reserve may be seen in Hugo's Valjean, which was undoubtedly suggested by Balzac's Vautrin. In the play of Vautrin, the main character, instead of appearing sublime, becomes absurd, and the action is utterly destitute of that plausibility and coherence which should make the most ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... journalist in Paris. It is Grace the cricketer for whom the hundred thousand subscribe their shilling: fancy a writer thus rewarded, even after scoring his century of popular novels. The winning of the Derby gives a new fillip to the monarchy itself. A Victor Hugo in London is a thought a faire rire. A Goethe at the court of Victoria, or directing Drury Lane Theatre, is of a comic-opera incongruity. Our neighbours across the border have a national celebration of Burns' birthday—they ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of man into conflict and death ... who will make the gallows glorious," and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recorded in his diary, "This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new revolution." Far away in France, Victor Hugo declared, "The eyes of Europe are fixed on America. The hanging of John Brown will open a latent fissure that will finally split the union asunder.... You preserve your shame, but you kill ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... periods—I read our nineteenth-century poets that way, sixteen hours a day; I read Shakespeare in three weeks that way, and finished the month with Milton. So when I got German, I read Goethe and Schiller, and Molire and Hugo again. ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... few men, in modern times, who exceed Victor Hugo in all that is noble and great. He is not simply a man of genius, a poet, and an orator, he is in its full sense a man. Too many of the brilliant men of France have lacked principle, have been ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder. It has not ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... All writers, Victor Hugo as much as M. Zola, have insistently claimed the absolute and incontrovertible right to compose—that is to say, to imagine or observe—in accordance with their individual conception of originality, and that is ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... itself the most preposterous supernatural powers. It would appear that he had been some sort of travelling charlatan, whose performing horse and dog were taken for evil spirits, like Esmeralda's goat in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame. Even Melanchthon and Luther seem to have shared the common view of him, and at last there was published at Frankfurt the Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus. The date of this work is 1587, and a translation ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... Hermit, when one of their number, Greene surnamed the Witless, mortgaged his lands in order to supply his poorer companions with the sinews of war. The family estate, however, appears to have been redeemed and greatly increased by his great-grandson, Hugo de Greene, but was again jeoparded in the year 1456, when Basil Greene, being commissioned by Henry the Sixth to enrich his sovereign by discovering the philosopher's stone, squandered the greater part of his fortune in unavailing experiments; while his ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... methinks, you stoop your wing. Of your dramas I have little room, and less skill, to speak. "Antony," they tell me, was "the greatest literary event of its time," was a restoration of the stage. "While Victor Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe and costume, the sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the coffins of Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room in an inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... threw soberer hue Over the blue sky, and the few Poplars that grew just in the view Of the hall of Sir Hugo de Wynkle: "Answer me true," pleaded Sir Hugh, (Striving to woo no matter who,) "What shall I do, Lady, for you? 'Twill be done, ere your eye may twinkle. Shall I borrow the wand of a Moorish enchanter, And bid a decanter contain the Levant, or The brass from the face of a Mormonite ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... Even Victor Hugo added his hero-worship, in this curious letter: "The giant salutes the giant! The enemy salutes the enemy! The friend sends the ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... spirit of Corneille. By nature, there can be little doubt that Corneille was a romantic. His fiery energy, his swelling rhetoric, his love of the extraordinary and the sublime, bring him into closer kinship with Marlowe than with any other writer of his own nation until the time of Victor Hugo. But Corneille could not do what Marlowe did. He could not infuse into the free form of popular drama the passion and splendour of his own genius, and thus create a type of tragedy that was at once exuberant and beautiful. And he could not do this because the literary ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the novels of Richter, Thackeray, Dickens, Scott, Eliot, and Victor Hugo. He should know intimately the great verse which involves spiritual problems, and human strife and aspiration,—Milton, Beowulf, Caedmon, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, ballads, sagas, the Arthur-Saga, the Nibelungenlied, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... Constance, and the mitres of Coire, Rheinau, Stein, Wuertzburg, and Worms; he could touch the hands of Eckhard of Richenau, of the Abbot of the Convent of All Saints at Schafhouse, and of William de Hirschau, the most exemplary man of his day. Welf, Otto of Nordheim, Berthold of Carinthia, and Hugo, Count Palatine of Tuebingen, were ready to support him with their lives, as they marched on proudly at the head of their vassals and soldiers. Glittering at his side were raised the lances of Marquard of Bregenz, Hartman of Dillingen, Burchard of Nellemburg, ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... Hugo van der Goes, Memling, and others, which the Florentines had seen, may have appeared, in the eyes of some severe judges (for example, those who daily studied the frescoes of Masaccio), to indicate a certain connection between oil painting and minuteness, if not always of size, yet of style. The ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... aristocratic bearing, regular, handsome features, and smooth brown hair, a regular Adonis. The following year he came again, drawn by strong cords to Christian Winther's home, loving the old poet like a son, as Swinburne loved Victor Hugo, sitting at Mistress Julie Winther's feet in affectionate admiration and semi-adoration, although she was half a century old and treated him as a ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Wagner which are beyond discussion—every new work inspired by the Wagnerian spirit was accepted. And so the Wagner-Vereine would have had a useful task to fulfil if they had set themselves to defend all the young and original forces in art. Sometimes they did so, and Bruckner or Hugo Wolf found in some of them their best allies. But too often the egoism of the master weighed upon his disciples: and just as Bayreuth serves only monstrously to glorify one man, the offshoots of Bayreuth were little churches in which Mass was eternally sung ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... was connected with money on all sides, but could only obtain it in rare and minute quantities. Any one of a dozen relations-in-law could, if they had wished, have trebled her annual income without feeling it. But they did not so wish. They disapproved of Mrs Drassilis. In their opinion the Hon. Hugo Drassilis had married beneath him—not so far beneath him as to make the thing a horror to be avoided in conversation and thought, but far enough to render them coldly polite to his wife during his lifetime and almost icy to his widow after his death. Hugo's eldest brother, the ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... prose. This prose is, in 'Les Confidences,' too often but the paraphrase of his verses, which were themselves become, toward the last, paraphrases of his feelings." Amends are made to Lamartine on another occasion, when, citing some recent French sonnets, he says: "Neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Vigny wrote sonnets. The swans and the eagles, in trying to enter this cage, would have broken their wings. That was for us, birds of a less lofty flight and less amplitude of wing." This is better ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... fair lands by the Seine, free from clutch of merchant and Jew. I have founded a convent, and slain some hundreds of Breton marauders. Need I say that I am in high favour? Now it so chanced that a cousin of mine, Hugo de Magnaville, a brave lance and franc-rider, chanced to murder his brother in a little domestic affray, and, being of conscience tender and nice, the deed preyed on him, and he gave his lands to Odo of Bayeux, and set off to Jerusalem. There, having prayed at the tomb," ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Drouyn de Lhuys. The reform school at Mettray. My visit to Thiers; his relations to France as historian and statesman. Duruy; his remark on rapid changes in French Ministries. Convention on copyright. Victor Hugo. Louis Blanc, his opinion of Thiers. Troubles of the American Minister; a socially ambitious American ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... prevented any immediate relish of a lighter vintage of delicate fragrance. Admiration did not here fall upon one with lightning speed; it was slowly, irresistibly that one grew charmed. And the contrast was like that of Racine beside Corneille, Lamartine beside Hugo, the eternal pair, the masculine and feminine genius coupled through centuries of glory. With Raffaelle it is nobility, grace, exquisiteness, and correctness of line, and divineness of harmony that triumph. You do not find in him merely the materialist symbolism so superbly thrown off by Michael ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... came to Paris, where he contracted an intimate friendship with the Abbe de Lyonne, who settled a pension on him, taught him Spanish, and bequeathed to him his library—consisting, among other works, of several Spanish manuscripts—at his death. His generous benefactor was the third son of Hugo, Marquis de Lyonne, one of the most accomplished and intelligent men in France. In 1656 he was set on a secret mission to Madrid; the object of this mission was soon discovered in the peace of the Pyrenees 1650, and the marriage of Maria Theresa of Austria, eldest daughter of Philip IV., with Louis ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... Flaubert, Hugo, Baudelaire, Paul de Kock, Theophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Zola, Coppee, George Sand, Guy de Maupassant, and Sarah Bernhardt, all have been credited with many clever or witty ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... forth in indignant accents against the coup d'etat of Brumaire. What profound illusions underlay the assertion that "France lay fair in Messidor's great sun''! And other illusions no less profound underlay such verdicts as that of Victor Hugo concerning this period. We have seen that the "Crime of Brumaire'' had as an enthusiastic accomplice, not only the Government itself but the whole of France, which it delivered ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... foundation of retired Benedictines, situated in the Appenines, about eighteen miles from Florence, owes its original to Giovanni Gualberto, a Tuscan nobleman, whose brother Hugo having been killed by a relation in the year 1015, he resolved to avenge his death; but happening to meet the assassin alone and in a solitary place, whither he appeared to have been driven by a sense of guilt, and seeing him suddenly drop down at his feet, and without uttering a word produce from ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... neither very favourable, nor very unfavourable. But there was suppressed tittering among the audience when he continued, "I have been on the Continent, and have examined the heads of Louis Napoleon, Victor Hugo, Garibaldi, and Louis Kossuth. This head, I may venture to say, rather touches upon those." I felt that the Professor had got out of his reckoning in making these comparisons; for although I had done a little soldiering, and was a poet in my own rough ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... 1815). Killed in command of the Union Brigade of Cavalry (Royals, Scots Greys, Inniskillings) at Waterloo. There is good reason for Theed representing him undraped, as his body was stripped by some of those camp followers mentioned by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables. The horse falling, as represented, was the cause of his death. "I have to add the expression of my grief," wrote Wellington, "for the fate of an officer who had already rendered ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... Napoleon at St. Helena, by Latimer. The Surrender of Napoleon, by Rear-Admiral Sir Frederick Maitland. Napoleon in Exile, by Barry O'Meara. The Drama of St. Helena, by Paul Frembeaux. History of a Crime, by Victor Hugo. History of the Captivity of Napoleon, by Count Montholon. Warden's Letters from St. Helena. With Napoleon at St. Helena, by Dr. John Stokoe. Napoleon's Last Voyages, by Sir Thomas Usher. Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, by Clement Shorter. An Exposition of Some of the ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... fanes wherein the very air seems redolent of devotion, and peopled with phantoms of the past! 'Spite of all disparagement, there is something grand and solemn about them. After service, I ascended one of the towers to the gallery immortalised by Victor Hugo's wonderful romance. The day was declining, and sunset had already commenced. The galleries were crowded with students and respectable operatives and bourgeois, with their wives and children. Every face was bathed in the purple light of the departing sun, and many eyes ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... something very "Frenchy" in this scene,—a remark, though, which can hardly be considered as derogatory, when we remember that altogether the most readable fiction of the day is French itself. Our author is evidently a great admirer of Victor Hugo, though he is no such careful artist in language: he seldom closes with such tremendous subjects as that adventurous writer attempts; but he has all the sharp antithesis, the pungent epigram of the other, and in his freest flight, though he peppers us as prodigally with colons, he never becomes ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of fifteen years enlisted as a Volunteer in 1806. Junot found him intelligent, made him his secretary, and took him to Spain. The young man won his epaulettes under Colonel Hugo in 1811. He was made prisoner on the capitulation of Guadalajara in 1812, but escaped with two of his comrades whom he saved at the peril of his own life. Love, or pity, led a young Spanish girl to aid in this heroic episode, and for several days the legend threatened to become a romance. But ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... need not be profound, but may be superficial, and yet discover that Jean Valjean is fashioned after the likeness of Jesus. Michael Angelo did not more certainly model the dome of St. Peter's after Brunelleschi's dome of the Duomo than Hugo has modeled his Valjean after Christ. We are not necessarily aware of ourselves, nor of our era, until something discovers both to us, as we do not certainly know sea air when we feel it. I doubt if most men would recognize ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... on tricksters, and delude the arrogant, particularly those who alone believe they possess truth and knowledge! Number eight in the catalogue. Victor Hugo. He split himself into countless parts. He was a peer of France, a Grandee of Spain, a friend of Kings, and the socialist author of Les Miserables. The peers naturally called him a renegade, and the socialists ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... his individuality to the end, developing his style, however, and evincing new ideas in each succeeding work. His untimely death at the age of thirty-seven, a short life—like those of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Hugo Wolf—has robbed the world of one of its noblest singers, one of those few men of modern times who found expression in the language of musical song, a ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... perhaps I would have found the day tedious if Kermit had not lent me the Oxford Book of French Verse. Eustache Deschamp, Joachim du Bellay, Ronsard, the delightful La Fontaine, the delightful but appalling Villon, Victor Hugo's "Guitare," Madame Desbordes-Valmore's lines on the little girl and her pillow, as dear little verses about a child as ever were written—these and many others comforted me much, as I read them in ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... when, in April, 1635, he was informed of Chancellor Oxenstiern's arrival. Louis XIII. awaited him at Compiegne. The chancellor was accompanied by a numerous following, worthy of the man who held the command of a sovereign over the princes of the Protestant League; he had at his side the famous Hugo Grotius, but lately exiled from his country on account of religious disputes, and now accredited as ambassador to the King of France from the little queen, Christina of Sweden. It was Grotius who acted as interpreter between the king and the chancellor of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... both you and Hugo Grotius! What have I to do with Hugo Grotius? He was an Arminian. What in the devil have laws to do with us that people make way off in Armenia? Henrich, put them straight out the ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... musical sense of the term, to the movements of his soul; and being somewhat prone to melancholy, his taste seems to have favoured sombre landscapes, stormy and tragical. The entire romantic school was born from him, Victor Hugo and George Sand, Theophile Gautier who draws from the French tongue resources unequalled in wealth and colour, and even M. Zola himself, whose naturalism, after all, is but the last form and, as it were, the end of romanticism, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... Woulters, alias Hugo Woulters, the third of the three subpoenaed men, is a naturalized citizen of German extraction. He went to work in the Navy Yard within one day of Dieckhoff. Before that, both had worked on the same four American destroyers at ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... station. Their titles and their pride of ancestry give them robes and plumes, and a troop follows its officers more readily when they are gorgeously uniformed. Only, it is required that this privilege shall not be abused; no favor to mediocrities, no nepotism. Victor Hugo was more proud of his title of vicomte Hugo than of his greatest work, and Balzac's obstinacy in clinging to his particle of de has lately been shown to have been completely unfounded. To Sainte-Beuve, who infuriated him by constantly speaking of him as M. Honore Balzac, he wrote: "My ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... habiliments?" A note of envy crept into Blackie's voice. "His name is Hugo Luders. Used t' be a reporter on the Germania, but he's reformed and gone into advertisin', where there's real money. Some say he wears them clo'es on a bet, and some say his taste in dress is a curse descended upon him from Joseph, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... also imagined him to be completely forgotten forty-five years after his death. But this was not the case. Some young men of letters had discovered him, mostly as a remarkable translator of Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny, to whose drama Chatterton, translated by himself, he had written an eloquent Preface defending the poet's deep humanity and his ideal of noble stoicism. The political side of his life was being recalled too; for some men of his time, his co-workers in the task of ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... "Victor Hugo mounted the tribune. He failed to achieve success. He was listened to as Felix Pyat was listened to, but he did not obtain as much applause. 'I don't like his ideas,' Vaulabelle said to me, speaking of Felix Pyat,' but he is one of the greatest writers ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon |
