"Poetry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suffrage from the people; neither have I much faith in that enthusiasm for the beaux arts, which shows its produce in execrable music, detestable pictures, abominable sculpture, and a droll something that I believe the French call POETRY. Dancing and cookery,—these are the arts the French excel in, I grant it; and excellent things they are; but oh, England! oh, Germany! you need not be ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... may always be depended upon to write a story in which poetry, charm, tenderness and humor are combined into a clever and entertaining book. Her characters are delightful and she always displays a quaint humor of expression and a quiet feeling of pathos which give a touch of active realism to all her ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... truth of an observation in his Art of Poetry, discussed, i. 134. a passage from him of similar import to one ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... living convictions, and to keep alive the spirit of honorable devotedness; if you hold it to be a good thing to refine the habits, to embellish the manners, to cultivate the arts of a nation, and to promote the love of poetry, of beauty, and of renown; if you would constitute a people not unfitted to act with power upon all other nations; nor unprepared for those high enterprises, which, whatever be the result of its efforts, will leave a ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... North wind holds the same place in Oriental metaphor and poetry as does the West wind ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... thought of gambling, this time the great legalised game of hazard, wherein he was as little likely to prosper as among the blacklegs of Brussels. Rolfe liked him for his ingenuousness, and for the vein of poetry in his nature. The love affair still went on, but Morphew seldom alluded to it, and his seasoned friend thought of it as a youthful ailment which would pass and ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Arthur would hardly have been so patient of hearing so much poetry, if it had not been for the delight he always took in seeing his wife's opinion sought by a clever man, and he was glad to turn for amusement to Percy's curiosities. Over the mantel-piece there was a sort of trophy in imitation of the title-page to Robinson Crusoe, a thick hooked ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Michel well, and, like the writer, have spent several days upon the island, cannot but feel that such a scheme would not only be a frightful disfigurement, but would entirely destroy all the associations and the poetry of the place. Practical people will say, "Modern improvement cannot stop in its march forward to consider poetical associations and mere artistic whims and fancies." Now, this would be a possible argument if Mont St. Michel were a busy, thriving town, a commercial ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... an idea is energy which has escaped conversion into thought, from precisely the same cause." Dr. Lombard's experiments have shown that the amount of heat developed by the recitation to one's self of emotional poetry, was in every case less when recitation was oral; this is of course accounted for by the muscular expression. Chemistry teaches that thought-force, like muscle-force, comes from the food, and demonstrates ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... causes at work. Among these a prominent place should be given to an alteration in the intellectual interests of the Italians themselves. The original impulses of the Renaissance, in scholarship, painting, sculpture, architecture, and vernacular poetry, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... emotional injuries which might be cured by the introduction of religious ideas, but he will not give to them a value different from the introduction of any other ideas and emotions, for instance, those of art and music and poetry, those of social company or civic interest, of travel or sport or politics. Each may have its particular value and to cure every mind with religious emotion would be from a psychological point of view as one-sided as it would be to cure every disturbed stomach by milk alone. Moreover in very ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... seen, even in Venice," Mrs. Erwin explained. "But she's rich, and her conversazioni are perfectly brilliant. She's very artistic, and she writes poetry,—Polish poetry. I wish she could hear you sing, Lydia! I know she'll be frantic to see you again. But I don't see how it's to be managed; her house isn't one you can take a young girl to. And I can't ask her: ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... most expert and scientific method of angling. It is the poetry of fishing. The fly fisherman usually wades in the brook or stream where he is fishing, although it is sometimes possible to cast a fly from the bank or a boat. It is useless to go fly fishing while there is snow water in the brooks but just as soon as the first warm ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... was going to say that I think the piece above the average of second-class poetry, and that a few of the lines touch the first-class standard. You have caught something of the 'divine afflatus' that the drunken old fellow said he could not cage. But I do not think that you will ever ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... HOW TO BECOME A SPEAKER.—Containing fourteen illustrations, giving the different positions requisite to become a good speaker, reader and elocutionist. Also containing gems from all the popular authors of prose and poetry, arranged in the most simple ...
— The Bradys Beyond Their Depth - The Great Swamp Mystery • Anonymous
... an interesting sort of person. Possibly she was like some of the heroines in the writer's stories. It would be interesting to meet her. He had written a poem once himself. It was about spring, and had been published in the local paper. He wondered if the writer's daughter liked poetry. ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... be looked upon as the editor of the whole book. It is very dreary doggerel, it must be confessed, but no worse than most of the poetry indited in England at that uninspired moment in the national history. A short example—a flower culled from any of these promiscuous thickets—will suffice to give a general notion of the garden. Here is part of the lament ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... of the most brilliant American newspaper "columnists," now in charge of the department known as "The Sun Dial" on the New York "Evening Sun," was also at one time on the "Journal," as was likewise Grantland Rice, America's most widely read sporting writer. Lollie Belle Wiley, whose poetry has a distinct southern quality, is, I believe, a member of the "Journal's" staff. As the eminent Ty Cobb once wrote a book, it seems fair to mention him also among Georgian authors, though so far as I know he never worked on an Atlanta paper. And if Atlanta's three celebrated golfers have not ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... answered. "But the one thing which no man can mistake is death. Listen, and I will quote some poetry to you. I think—it is ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... teach one of my cripples—Daunt's second girl. In the next, the police are on the alert. And last—who on earth would dare to attack Monk Lawrence? The odium of it would be too great. A house bound up with English history and English poetry—No! They are ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... himself, and is, as it were, the architect of all science, having rule over all, are attached to Wisdom. Hoh is ashamed to be ignorant of any possible thing. Under Wisdom therefore are Grammar, Logic, Physics, Medicine, Astrology, Astronomy, Geometry, Cosmography, Music, Perspective, Arithmetic, Poetry, Rhetoric, Painting, Sculpture. Under the triumvir Love are Breeding, Agriculture, Education, Medicine, Clothing, ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... umbrella, with the rain coming down in sheets and the spray and mist rising up, feeling that I must do one or both of two things—write poetry or commit suicide. I had ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... called a "Puseyite." Her opinions were formed on the highest High Church model, and her Church opinions made the greatest part, and indeed nearly the whole of her life. Theodosia had no Church opinions at all, High or Low! All her mind and interests were, at all events at that time, turned towards poetry and art. Subsequently she interested herself keenly in political and social questions, but had hardly at that time begun to do so. But she made ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of so many thoughtful travellers is by no means an unnatural one. We go to Rome in order to see and to feel, rather than to study and to think. The past crowds upon us overladen with history and poetry; and the present is so full of new forms of life that it is only when we come to sit down at a distance and gather up our recollections that we ask ourselves how all the instruments of that gorgeous pageantry are put together ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... open to admit a man of about five-and-twenty, whose darkly-handsome face and careless costume had something of that air which was once wont to be associated with the person and the poetry of George Gordon Lord Byron. The new-comer was just one of those men whom very young women are apt to admire, and whom worldly-minded people are prone to distrust. There was a perfume of Bohemianism, a flavour of the Quartier Latin, about the loosely-tied cravat, the wide trousers, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... I should think so; how the deuce should they be forgotten, when one is bored with them morning, noon, and night, for everlasting, by old Sam, and all the other pastors and masters in the kingdom? Hang me, if I can read this trash; the only poetry that ever was written ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... one titled client. Long ago her husband was a grocer. She writes sentimental poetry, and her idea of dignity is to snub her type-writer. But I couldn't concentrate my mind on the pleasure of astonishing Lady Hutchinson. I was thinking what a wonderful ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... three main ways of story-telling, by the epic poem, the drama and prose fiction, the epic seems to be the oldest; poetry, indeed, being the natural form ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... me of Ronny, a medical student I knew once. He was small and round and eager. You had to like him, but you couldn't take him very seriously. He was a pacifist; he wrote poetry and pulled it out to read aloud at ill-timed moments; and he stuttered when he ...
— The Carnivore • G. A. Morris
... brought before him for trial. He said he was not much acquainted with law cases, as he was but young, and had only been a short time in office; and also, of all things, he said what he least understood to judge about was poetry. "But let us hear what it was." ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... has a beauty that Greece itself never excelled,' resumed Arbaces. 'But that is not all: she has a soul worthy to match with mine. She has a genius beyond that of woman—keen—dazzling—bold. Poetry flows spontaneous to her lips: utter but a truth, and, however intricate and profound, her mind seizes and commands it. Her imagination and her reason are not at war with each other; they harmonize and direct her course as the winds and the waves direct ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... when played upon by the wind, yield forth a variety of tones. Mrs. Hemans once asked Sir Walter Scott if he had noticed that every tree gives out its peculiar sound. 'Yes,' said he, 'I have; and I think something might be done by the union of poetry and music to imitate those voices, giving a different measure to the oak, the pine, the willow, &c.' The same journal from which we take this anecdote mentions, that in Henry Taylor's drama, 'Edwin the Fair,' there are some pleasing lines, where the wind is feigned to feel the want of a voice, and ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... the miracle of young beauty she really was. Chance sparks kindle chance tinder; and so here. I am far from alleging the heart of Messer Alessandro to be dry tow; but I do repeat it, Padua was a freakish cityful, Ippolita lovely exceedingly, amorous poetry in the air. ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... being a public character," said the Hatter. "I'm not going to sacrifice my career just because you're too ignorant to see what I'm driving at. I don't mind telling you though, Alice, that outside of poetry a Copperation is a Creature devised by Selfish Interests to secure the Free Coinage of ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... grave, grand, and argumentative, and rises to the majesty of poetry. As a commentary upon the stupendous facts which exist in the universe, it is truly a work which merits our admiration, and we unhesitatingly refer our readers ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... denunciations, believe me,—it will take years of vigorous education to relegate these ideas into the limbo of exploded fantasies. And the people won't be comfortable without them. You take away the poetry, which is an essential element in the Gaelic character, and you make the people prosaic and critical, which is the worst thing possible for them. Thiggin-thu? But I beg your pardon. You ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... beautiful daughter." Mr. Gusher placed his hand to his heart again, bowed his head gracefully, and assumed a sentimental air. "Oh, I shall be so happy to have my home like zis. And your beautiful daughter—she would sing to me, and she would play me sweet music, and read to me some poetry. You shall zee I am so proud of ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... of children educated by the School-Boards should receive attention. Their bodies should be brought to as near perfection as possible; every muscle should be brought into play. To explain his meaning, he called upon the Bounding Brothers of Bohemia to illustrate the poetry of motion. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... our present task to define and specify the details of a school in which girls should be educated for womanhood, for motherhood, and the future, it would not be difficult, I think, to show how the services of painting and sculpture, of poetry and prose, should be enlisted. A word or two ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Boyne had said truly that the French fleet meant to come soon. Dyck must not be able to give the thing away before it happened. The chief thing now was to prime him with the drugged wine till he lost consciousness, and then carry him away to the land of the guillotine. Dyck's tempestuous nature, the poetry and imagination of him, would quickly respond to French culture, to the new orders of the new day in France. Meanwhile, he must be soaked in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... so many weights to tally and observations to record on reaching camp that I feel sure he took no reading matter. Bleak House was the most successful book I ever took away sledging, though a volume of poetry was useful, because it gave one something to learn by heart and repeat during the blank hours of the daily march, when the idle mind is all too apt to think of food in times of hunger, or possibly of purely imaginary grievances, which may become distorted into real foundations of discord under the ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... severe on what he terms his affectation in disclaiming the compliments bestowed on his learning by some of his friends. The expressed estimate of his acquirements and works which so offended Lord Macaulay was that "there is nobody so superficial, that, except a little history, a little poetry, a little painting, and some divinity, he knew nothing; he had always lived in the busy world; had always loved pleasure; played loo till two or three in the morning; haunted auctions—in short, did not know so much astronomy as would carry him to ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... great achievement was to recall devout and loving contemplation to the image of the crucified Christ, and to found that worship of our Saviour as the "Bridegroom of the Soul," which in the next centuries inspired so much fervid devotion and lyrical sacred poetry. The romantic side of Mysticism, for good and for evil, received its greatest stimulus in Bernard's Poems and in his Sermons on the Canticles. This subject is dealt with ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... should be said concerning the Collier controversy. John Payne Collier was a lawyer, born in 1789, and is known as the author of an excellent history of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakspeare and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration. In the year 1849, he came into possession of a copy of the folio edition of Shakspeare, published in 1632, full of emendations, by an early owner of the volume. In 1852 he published these, and at once ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... poetry in the machinery of this present age, is not to see poetry in the life of the age. It is not ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... shake all Europe: down below, in silence, are forging the thunderbolts and the firebrands. Penetrating into this huge circuit, where all is out of measure, gigantic, the mind cannot repress some movement of terror and wonder; the imagination recals those dread temples which Poetry, of old, had consecrated to the Avenging Deities.' (Toulongeon, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... teachers in primary and secondary schools throughout Canada at their annual gatherings; and one of his favourite pleas on these occasions was for the rightful place of English Literature—and especially Poetry—in the school curriculum. He magnified the office of the teacher and deplored the apathy of the public towards those entrusted with the training of the future manhood and womanhood of the nation. 'No expenditure,' ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... dreamer of dreams. He loved the Old Testament, particularly those books which consisted of thunderous prophecies and passionate lamentations. The poetry of Isaiah, The visions of The Apocalypse, formed his emotional outlet, his escape into the world of imaginative literature. The songs he loved best were those which described chariots of flaming clouds, the sound of the resurrection trump—or the fields of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... wrote—the ideas refused to flow at his call; and the only effort at connecting his feelings which even partially succeeded, was in the verses which I am about to place before the reader. It is a common property of poetry, however imperfectly the gift be possessed, to speak to the hearts of others in proportion as the sentiments it would express are felt in our own; and I subjoin the lines which bear the date of that evening, in the hope that, more than many pages, they will ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... study of a scholar, it is the bower of a poet. The pines lean against the windows, and to the student deeply sunk in learned lore or soaring upon the daring speculations of an intrepid philosophy, they whisper a secret beyond that of the philosopher's stone, and sing of the springs of poetry. ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... a few days before, a very loving, comforting, trustful letter, and she thought she would read it again. It had been laid within a book which Phyllis had given her, and she brought it to the fireside. It was a volume of poetry, and Elizabeth was not poetical. She could not remember having read a page in this volume, but as she lifted the letter her ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... interest, and throughout the whole, moral principles are clearly and powerfully evolved. 'The Idleberg Papers' is the general title of another capital series, and the work is otherwise filled with excellent prose and generally good poetry. The 'Editor's Table' is by far the most racy and entertaining collection of anecdotes, humorous and pathetic passages, slight criticisms, etc., to be met in any magazine. We cordially commend the old and excellent ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... or Book of Poetry, consists of a collection of 300 songs, selected by Confucius from a mass ten times as great. Some of these pieces ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... Spanish kingdoms, and the creation of the Latin Empire at Constantinople. In the princely fiefs of the French Crown, and above all in Normandy, they seized on men's minds. Chivalrous life and hierarchic institutions, dialectic and poetry, continual war at home and ceaseless aspirations abroad, were here fused into ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... by nature than Anne de Bourbon; but, as we have just remarked, her heart and her imagination created in her the necessity of pleasing and of being beloved; and it was that want, early cultivated by poetry, romances, and the theatre, and somewhat later corrupted by the example of the society in which she lived, which lured her far from the domestic hearth, and hurried her into the brilliant and adventurous career amidst which we find her in 1651. Then her greatest ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... is a work of genius and, as always with works of genius, it is difficult to analyze the elements that have gone to make it. There is poetry here and fantasy and humor, a little pathos but, above all, a number of creations in whose existence everybody must believe whether they be children of four or old men of ninety or prosperous bankers of forty-five. I don't know how Mr. Lofting has done it; I don't ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... impressed in no very essential manner by curriculum or college mates. With learning per se he was always dissatisfied and never had much to do; his course was distinguished not so much by erudition as by culture. He easily won the Newdigate prize in poetry; his rooms in Christ Church were hung with excellent examples of Turner's landscapes,—the gift of his art-loving father,—of which he had been an intimate student ever since the age of thirteen. But his course was interrupted by an illness, apparently of a tuberculous nature, which necessitated ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the constitutional party in Africa, Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, and Crete; the Latin lyre—ill-tuned doubtless— on which the town-poets of Corduba as early as the Sertorian war sang the praises of the Roman generals; and the translations of Greek poetry valued on account of their very elegance of language, which the earliest extra-Italian poet of note, the Transalpine Publius Terentius Varro of the Aude, published ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... both," said my new acquaintance, "acting in co-operation." "It may be so," said I; "the magic influence does certainly not proceed from the meadow alone; for since I have been here, I have not felt the slightest inclination to sleep. Does the book consist of prose or poetry?" "It consists of poetry," said the individual. "Not Byron's?" said I. "Byron's!" repeated the individual, with a smile of contempt; "no, no; there is nothing narcotic in Byron's poetry. I don't like it. I used to read it, but it thrilled, agitated, and kept me awake. No, this is not Byron's poetry, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... from the great mass of hymn-writers; although Watts and the Wesleys furnish the foundation, and the materials of the superstructure are largely drawn from Doddridge, Cowper, Toplady, Montgomery, and others of kindred spirit, yet many beautiful things have been added from the later religious poetry, which are no less fervid in feeling, while less pronounced in doctrinal expression. These hymns are arranged in judicious general divisions, which are again analytically separated into special topics placed in logical sequence. After the hymns follow thirty-eight doxologies, the editor having ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... mansion. It represented a man of middle age. There was nothing remarkable in the costume, or in the countenance, but THE EYES, John felt, were such as one feels they wish they had never seen, and feels they can never forget. Had he been acquainted with the poetry of Southey, he might have often exclaimed ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... By your profligacy)—Ver. 1036. It is probably this ebullition of Comic anger which is referred to by Horace, in his Art of Poetry: ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... DO teach in schools. You'll have to write better than that. Lads learn nothing nowadays, but how to recite poetry and play the fiddle. Have you seen his writing?" he asked of ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... destruction of all the images to the exhibition of buffooneries of which I speak," continued the young man. "Seeing it, one may justly advocate a return of religious worship to the august simplicity of olden times. But no; let us not renounce the admirable aid which all the arts, beginning with poetry and ending with music, lend to the relations between man and God. Let the arts live; let the utmost pomp be displayed in religious ceremonies. I am a partisan ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... taken together, gave an impulse to thought which few, if any, ages can equal. The discussion, though not wholly free, was yet far freer than in the average of ages and countries. Accordingly, every pursuit seemed to start forward. Poetry, science, and architecture, different as they are, and removed as they all are at first sight from such an influence as discussion, were suddenly started onward. Macaulay would have said you might rightly read the power of discussion 'in the poetry of Shakespeare, in ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... indirect influence in the maintenance of the high standards of literary honesty, accuracy, and taste in which he had been brought up. This was done partly by means of his own contributions to the paper, which covered a field which included history, travel, art, poetry, and archaeology in two languages, and partly through "his comments and suggestions on the proofs," of which Mr. C. A. Cook, a former acting editor, writes with abiding gratitude. Other newspaper proprietors have doubtless ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... poetry written? 2. What circumstance induced her to write it? 3. What is the meaning of monomaniac? Ans. One who is deranged in a single faculty of the mind, or with regard to a particular subject, the other faculties ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... interest even one who had shut herself from the whole world, whose hope was death, and who lived only with the departed. His personal beauty; his conversation which glowed with imagination and sensibility; the poetry that seemed to hang upon his lips and to make the very air mute to listen to him were charms that no one could resist. He was younger, less worn, more passionless than my father and in no degree reminded ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... involuntarily made humid the eyes of the beautiful Marion de Lorme. Nature had taken possession of her heart, despite her head; poetry filled it with grave and religious thoughts, from which the intoxication of pleasure had ever diverted her. The idea of virtuous love appeared to her for the first time in all its beauty; and she ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... autobiographies written later in life cannot give us the absolute truth of childhood. We see our early experiences through the mists, golden or gray, of the years that lie between. It is poetry as well as truth, as Goethe recognized in the title of his own self-study. Nevertheless the individual who has lived the life can best bring us into touch with it, and the very poetry is as true as the fact because interpretative of ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... the [Greek: Eirhene], in which Dr. Dee and his Scarabeus figured so successfully. The world is turned away from that[1]; but here is the magnificent wealth of our own old dramatic literature, in which is contained the richest poetry of our language. It was never intended to be read, but to be heard in living presentment. For the most part it lies almost unknown, except in the case of Shakespeare, and him the world knows far too little. Who does not feel what a treasure in the memory are passages of fine ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... Michael Daragh is going to be frightfully pleased with me for wiping the orphan's tear; but he'll make me see that there's just as much poetry and more punch in ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the shapes of men, and even of friends or comrades. This is a case much dwelt on by the old travellers, and which throws a gloom over the spirits of all Bedouins, and of every cafila or caravan. We all know what a sensation of loneliness or 'eeriness' (to use an expressive term of the ballad poetry) arises to any small party assembling in a single room of a vast desolate mansion: how the timid among them fancy continually that they hear some remote door opening, or trace the sound of suppressed footsteps from some distant ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... poetry was received, to whom and to how many it gave pleasure, we have not the means of knowing. The book, like all other good books, had to take its chance. Good poetry is never exactly unpopular—its difficulty is to get ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... Young Man, sitting under the stars beside this beautiful little creature of another world, searched into his memory and for her who never before had known that words could rhyme, opened up the realm of poetry. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... of Egyptian poetry left to us is a celebration of the prowess of Usertesen III in confining the turbulent Negro tribes to the territory below the Second Cataract of the Nile. The Egyptians called this territory Kush, and in the farthest confines of Kush lay Punt, the cradle of their ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... perhaps, enough in prose, but the fame of Marion and his men has been fitly enshrined in poetry, and it will not be amiss to quote a verse or two, in conclusion, from Bryant's stirring poem ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... on vegetable diet, are not, as has been often asserted, a very gentle race: a glance into their history, or into their erotic poetry, shows them to be quite ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... to spiritual expression. The hymns and the religious poems of Furness, Hedge, Longfellow, Johnson, Clarke, Very, Brooks, and Miss Scudder,[13] have an interior and spiritual quality seldom found in devotional poetry. They are not the mere utterances of conventional sentiments or the repetition of ecclesiastical symbolisms, but the voicing of deep inward experiences that reveal and interpret the true life of the soul. Of the same character are the hymns and religious poems of ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... they toiled and moped. And so, to satisfy the cravings of his lonely heart, he had created and peopled an unreal world of his own, in which he dwelt most of the time. As his interest in the real world ceased, his imagination more vividly portrayed the shadowy one, till at last, in the scenes of poetry and fiction, and the splendid panorama of history, he thought he might rest satisfied, and find all the society he needed in converse with those whom, by a refinement of spiritualism, he could summon to his side from any age or ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... There was poetry in the scene—frequently disturbed, perhaps, by the inconceivable oaths of the man to whom was entrusted the heavy task of baling out the water from the canoe, which leaked badly. She was fissured from end to end, and we had no effective means of preventing ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... With grand poetry the prophet pictures the Assyrian power as a forest consumed like thistles and briers by the fire of God. The text suggests solemn truths about the divine ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... ON SHEEP.—The keeping of flocks seems to have been the first employment of mankind; and the most ancient sort of poetry was probably pastoral. The poem known as the Pastoral gives a picture of the life of the simple shepherds of the golden age, who are supposed to have beguiled their time in singing. In all pastorals, repeated allusions are made ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... quiet, too," said King. "He hardly ever laughed all the time he was here. Except the night we wrote the valentines. Then he laughed, cause we made him write poetry and he couldn't." ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... bad as that, I hope!" cried Raed. "Don't go to getting poetical, Kit. How about dinner? That's of more consequence just now than poetry. Time enough to make verses on this rather awkward episode when we're safe in Boston. Make a proposal for dinner, ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... of books and tracts, relating to the history, literature, and poetry, of Portugal: forming part of the library of John Adamson, M.R.S.L. etc. ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.19 • Various
... Bahrâmgor and Dilârâm. Bahrâmgor was said to have been killed while hunting the wild ass (gor), by jumping into a pool after it, when both quarry and huntsman disappeared for ever. He is said to be the father of Persian poetry. ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... in interest is the Commedia. Any attempt to explain it, by narrowing that interest to politics, philosophy, the moral life, or theology itself, must prove inadequate. Theology strikes the keynote; but history, natural and metaphysical science, poetry, and art, each in their turn join in the harmony, independent, yet ministering to the whole. If from the poem itself we could be for a single moment in doubt of the reality and dominant place of religion in it, the plain-spoken prose of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... I like his ways, and—oddly enough—our opinions also agreed. Afterwards he came to me and I had the pleasure of talking with him alone for nearly an hour. We spoke about everything in heaven and earth—about poetry, painting, religion, Socialism, and the Lord ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... grouped in great circles, with the ale-horns and flagons passing merrily from hand to hand; shouts of drink-hael and was-hael, bursts of gay laughter, snatches of old songs, old as the days of Athelstan,—varying, where the Anglo-Danes lay, into the far more animated and kindling poetry of the Pirate North,—still spoke of the heathen time when War was a joy, and ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... you the witchery and colouring and poetry of the East, but I do offer you the biggest love there has ever been in a man's heart for ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... as the hidden possibility that pervades all things. One or the other must abate something: either the image must become less sacred, or the meaning narrower; for the language of painting is not figurative, like the language of poetry, but figure, and unless the form bear on its face that it is not all that is meant, its inherent limitations are transferred to the thought itself. When Dante tells us that Brunetto Latini and his companions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Shrewsbury about 1520, the son of a farmer. He received a good education, and, having speedily dissipated at court the money with which his father provided him, he entered the household of Henry Howard, earl of Surrey. There he remained for four years, learning something of the art of poetry from his patron; some of the poems he contributed later (1557) to Songes and Sonettes may well date from this early period. In 1541 he began his career as a soldier of fortune, being, he said, "pressed into the service." He fought his way through nearly every campaign in Scotland ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... was young, which there is good reason to think he is not very proud of, as they say he buys up all the copies he can find in the shops. No matter what they say, I can't help agreeing with him about this great flood of "poetry," as it calls itself, and looking at the rhyming mania much ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... better prepared than you did," she said. "Perhaps I could lend you some of my books. I have novels, plays, poetry, and one very interesting volume called Progressive Education under Rim Star Conditions. But," she lowered her voice to a whisper, "I must tell you a ...
— The Passenger • Kenneth Harmon
... I quoted. Quoting poetry in a snow-storm while you stumble through a woodland behind a girl who shows no interest in either your prose or your rhymes has its embarrassments, particularly when you are breathing a trifle hard from the swift pace ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... I'd go ahead and write poetry, Marthy—a whole book of it with pictures. But I do love to make bread—and people have to eat bread. Which would you be, Marthy; a poet, ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... knee, slap cheek), and farewell to anything like concentration of thought; you ponder on the sailing moon (clap again, right and left, above, below), always unpleasantly interrupted. It won't do at all: you are teased and phlebotomised out of all poetry and patience. ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... which seldom fails to attend internal dissension. The Highlanders, who formed the principal strength of Charles Edward's army, were an ancient and high-spirited race, peculiar in their habits of war and of peace, brave to romance, and exhibiting a character turning upon points more adapted to poetry than to the prose of real life. Their prince, young, valiant, patient of fatigue, and despising danger, heading his army on foot in the most toilsome marches, and defeating a regular force in three battles—all these were circumstances fascinating to the imagination, and might ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... writer, but a "murder mystery" man, and the best of his kind in New York, but the regular staff correspondent of his paper, the Leader, being ill, he had been sent in his place. He was a Harvard graduate and a gentleman with a taste for poetry, but he had a peculiar mind, upon which a murder mystery acted as an irritant—he could not rest until he had solved it—and his paper always put him on the great cases, such as those in which a vast metropolis like New York ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... the sea wave is perfectly simple and true; 'changing' is as familiar as may be; 'foam that passed away', strictly literal; and the whole line descriptive of the reality with a degree of accuracy which I know not any other verse, in the range of poetry, that altogether equals. For most people have not a distinct idea of the clumsiness and massiveness of a large wave. The word 'wave' is used too generally of ripples and breakers, and bendings in light drapery or grass: it does not by itself convey a perfect image. But the word ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... productive, fulfilled and united people, and a stronger America—an America that will lead the technological revolution, and also open its mind and heart and soul to the treasures of literature, music, and poetry, and the values of faith, courage, ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... "gam," and on parting fired guns; but those good old days have gone. People have hardly time nowadays to speak even on the broad ocean, where news is news, and as for a salute of guns, they cannot afford the powder. There are no poetry-enshrined freighters on the sea now; it is a prosy life when we have no time to bid ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... fox. And ever after that he was wont to boast that his first and last day of fox-hunting, which was an unusually exciting one, had been got though charmingly without any fox at all. It is even said that Queeker, descending from poetry,—his proper sphere,— to prose, wrote an elaborate and interesting paper on that subject, which was refused by all the sporting papers and journals to which he sent it;—but, this not being certified, we do not record ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... word "uncle" explains it as meaning "Rutherfoord, who should have married the Lady Baldoon, was Baldoon's uncle." The poetry of this satire on Lord Stair and his family was, as already noticed, written by Sir William Hamilton of Whitelaw, a rival of Lord Stair for the situation of President of the Court of Session; a person much inferior to that great lawyer in talents, and equally ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... following, and especially to our own time, that we are to look for the shaping and enormous influence upon human life of the genius of this poet. And it is measured not by the libraries of comments that his works have called forth, but by the prevalence of the language and thought of his poetry in all subsequent literature, and by its entrance into the current of common thought and speech. It may be safely said that the English-speaking world and almost every individual of it are different from what they would have been if Shakespeare had never lived. Of all the forces that have survived ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the pressure of preparing for the London matriculation barred the way; and on the voyage of the Rattlesnake he spent many hours making out Dante with the aid of a dictionary. No doubt, also, he must have read some Italian poetry with his wife during their engagement and early married days, for she had a fair acquaintance with Italian, as well as equalling his knowledge of German. When he was past sixty and ill-health, cutting short his old activities, had sent him to seek rest and change in Italy, he took up ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... the letters which he wrote from Antwerp within a week of his arrival there. With his subsequent history, his appearance and long residence at the French court as ambassador of Sweden, his memorable labours in history, diplomacy, poetry, theology, the present narrative is not concerned. Driven from the service of his Fatherland, of which his name to all time is one of the proudest garlands, he continued to be a benefactor not only to her but to all mankind. If refutation is sought of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Help for Daily Need. A Selection of Scripture Verses and Poetry for Every Day in the Year. Crown 8vo, ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... West was a farmer's wife who lived to the age of ninety-three, and left behind her eighteen volumes of novels, plays, and poetry. ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... Scherzo, with its Intermezzo alla burla, has life and character. But the Allegro, which follows the poetical introduction, and the Finale are patchy, and at times laboured. It must not, however, be supposed that they are uninteresting. The music has poetry and passion, and the strong passages atone for the weak ones. There were composers at that time who could produce sonatas more correct in form, and more logical in treatment, yet not one who could have written music so filled with the spirit ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... poetry is more ancient than the lyrical, and yet none shows so little sign of having outlived the requirements of human passion. The world may grow tired of epics and of tragedies, but each generation, as it sees the hawthorns blossom and ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... Watson?" hiccupped her master. "Lend us a light—all right; that's poetry, and no mistake—ha, ha, ha! capital, Jacob, my boy, ain't it?" and he tumbled over one side of his horse, only saving himself from falling to the ground by catching hold of one of the posts of the verandah. ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... Mitchell. Miss Mary Cadwalader brought him to see us in our Corcoran Street home and during the visit announced her engagement to him. He was then the highly eminent physician alone, as he had not yet entered the arena of fiction and poetry in which he has since attained such wide-spread distinction. It gives me pleasure to add that he suggested to me, while I was visiting in Philadelphia many years later, that I should ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... with the enthusiasm at once of poetry and of devotion, may, I think, teach us a great deal ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... harsh language, I am quite prepared to hear my 'poetic rendering' branded as a 'falsehood' and a 'fib.' The vituperation is unmerited, for poetry or ideality, and untruth are assuredly very different things. The one may vivify, while the other, kills. When St. John extends the notion of a soul to 'souls washed in the blood of Christ' does he 'fib'? Indeed, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... times I attended the services of the Young Men's Christian Association; and while they often touched me, I cannot say that they always edified me. I am especially fond of the psalms attributed to David, which are, for me, the highest of poetry; and I am also very fond of the great and noble hymns of the church, Catholic and Protestant, and especially susceptible to the best church music, from Bach and Handel to Mason and Neale: but the sort of revival hymns which are generally sung in Christian ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... to time. It is provisional, tentative, classic, but will serve our turn till we are ready to substitute a better. It is the definition which Heine gives in his brilliant little book on the Romantic School in Germany.[2] "All the poetry of the Middle Ages," he adds, "has a certain definite character, through which it differs from the poetry of the Greeks and Romans. In reference to this difference, the former is called Romantic, the latter Classic. These names, however, are misleading, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... gift of divine song in a vision of the night; and after the recognition by the abbess and others of his heavenly call, became a member of the religious fraternity, and devoted the rest of his life to the composition of sacred poetry. ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... External Soul, which Sir James G. Frazer has studied in his Balder, London, 1913, pp. 95-152. The Fight with the Dragon is celebrated outside folk-tales in the lives of the saints (whence St. George, the titular saint of England, gets his emblem) in the saga of Siegfried, and in the poetry of Schiller, where it is made the subject of a moral apologue. The Medusa-witch, who transforms into stone, or destroys life in other ways, is quite a familiar figure in folk tales, but is usually thwarted, as here, by some means ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... Settles Controversies Talking about our Troubles Faith Patience An Apology Belief, Unbelief, and Superstition Judas Iscariot Sir Walter Scott's Use of the Supernatural September, 1798 Some Notes on Milton The Morality of Byron's Poetry. "The Corsair" Byron, Goethe, and Mr. Matthew Arnold A Sacrifice The Aged Three Conscience The Governess's Story James Forbes Atonement My Aunt Eleanor Correspondence between George, Lucy, M.A., and Hermione Russell, B.A. ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... trees, in the middle of which was a fountain, and, by its margin, seated on a delicate Persian carpet, a venerable Turk. Some slaves were near him, one of whom, at a little distance, was playing on a rude lyre; in the master's left hand was a volume of Arabian poetry, and he held in his right the serpentine tube of his narghileh, or Syrian pipe. When he beheld me, he saluted me with all the dignity of the Orient, pressing his hand to his heart, but not rising. ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... was a gentleman of spirit, and good-looking, and held his head up when he walked, and had what you may call Fire about him. He wrote poetry, and he rode, and he ran, and he cricketed, and he danced, and he acted, and he done it all equally beautiful. . . . He was a gentleman that had a will of his own and a eye of his own, and ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes |
