"Homeric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... before I met you, Dick," replied Warner. "I read his book on the Indians of the Northern Mississippi Valley. Not merely their history and habits, but their legends, their folk lore, and the wonderful poetic glow so rich and fine that he threw over everything. There was something almost Homeric in his description of the great young Wyandot chieftain Timmendiquas or White Lightning, whom he acclaimed as the finest type of savage man the ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and banner, and its head war-chief (Teuctli), who was its general military commander. They went forth to battle by phratries. The organization of a military force by phratries and by tribes was not unknown to the Homeric Greeks Thus, Nestor advised Agamemnon to "separate the troops by phratries and by tribes, so that phratry may support ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... should be as worn out in three months as a pair of old boots," said the poet, smiling. "But stay, you shall not come from Havre to Paris to see Canalis without carrying something back with you. Warrior!" (Canalis had the form and action of an Homeric hero) "learn this from the poet: Every noble sentiment in man is a poem so exclusively individual that his nearest friend, his other self, cares nothing for it. It is a treasure which ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... his monotonous duties, Starratt stood, shading his eyes, watching the stately exit of this maritime giant. This was a morning for starting adventure...for setting out upon a quest!... He had been stirred before to such Homeric longings ... spring sunshine could always prick his blood with sharp-pointed desire. But to-day there was a poignant melancholy in his flair for a wider horizon. He was touched by weariness as well as longing. He was like a pocket hunter whose previous borrowings ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... don't agree with you. But there I am perhaps somewhat of a pedant. Did not the recollection of the heroic simplicity of the Homeric life ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... His Homeric laughter must have shattered the Trunk Telephone system of Great Britain, for after that there was silence cold and merciless. Well, perhaps it was just as well, for if we had been allowed to converse further I might have told him that another female woman, Doria ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... treatment of the parricide and incest, not as moral offences capable of being rationally judged or even excused as unintentional, but as monstrous and inhuman pollutions, the last limit of imaginable horror: all these things take us back to dark regions of pre-classical and even pre-homeric belief. We have no right to suppose that Sophocles thought of the involuntary parricide and metrogamy as the people in his play do. Indeed, considering the general tone of his contemporaries and friends, we may safely assume that he did not. But at any rate he has allowed no breath of later enlightenment ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... Medwin, or the Gisbornes, he was simply happy; and nothing could be further from the truth than to paint him as habitually sunk in gloom. On the contrary, we hear quite as much about his high spirits, his "Homeric laughter," his playfulness with children, his readiness to join in the amusements of his chosen circle, and his incomparable conversation, as we do about his solitary broodings, and the seasons when pain or bitter memories over-cast his heaven. Byron, who had some right to express ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... excited prelude to procreation widely spread."[28] Such a stage, indeed, as Groos points out, is usually necessary before any markedly passionate discharge of motor energy, as may be observed in angry dogs and the Homeric heroes. While, however, in other motor explosions the prelude may be reduced to a minimum, in courtship it is found in a highly marked degree. The primary object of courtship, Groos insists, is to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... (in my opinion), commensurate with his material, his mundus representandus. This adequacy of the artist to his world, this command of the latter by him, seems to me to be what constitutes a first-class poetic epoch, and to distinguish it from such an epoch as our own; in this sense, the Homeric and Elizabethan poetry seems to me of a superior class to ours, though the world represented by it was far ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... himself, but were outnumbered. Word was sent to the cabecilla, Martinez, at Lesaca, and he arrived with reinforcements at the double, and encompassed Loma with such a cloud of sulphurous smoke that the Republicans had to fall back upon San Sebastian. The casualties in this Homeric combat were not appalling; there was more gunpowder than blood expended. The losses on the Republican side were one killed and fifteen wounded. On the Carlist side they were less, for the Carlists kept under cover of the fern and furze. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... mouth, but collapsed in a fit of retching, as from right and left, and from the darkness all around him, a roar of Homeric laughter woke the echoes of the Cove. Men rolled about laughing. Men leaned against one another ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... certain works of genuine fame can only cease to act for mankind, when men themselves cease to be men, or when the planet on which they exist, shall have altered its relations, or have ceased to be. Lord Bacon, in the language of the gods, if I may use an Homeric phrase, has expressed ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... of verses,[4] yet there is no instance of any attempt to alter or supersede the originals. Nor could any attempt have succeeded. There are specimens which exist, independent of those collected by Macpherson, which present a peculiarity of form, and a Homeric consistency of imagery, distinct from every other species of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... to tell me a girl did it?" He threw back his head in a roar of Homeric laughter. "Ever hear the beat of that? A damn li'l' Injun squaw playin' her tricks on Bully West! If she was mine I'd tickle ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... mention of a medical charm in classic literature, and hence originated the phrase "Homeric Cure," as applied to healing by ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... ever Homeric (which I cannot think he often is), in spite of Sir Francis Doyle's able criticism,—(he is too short, too sharp, and too eagerly bent on his rugged way, for a poet who is always delighting to find loopholes, even in battle, from which to look ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... over, deliciously tired and pleasantly sore, you eat what seems ambrosia, be it only tinned beef; and drink nectar, be it only distilled from terrestrial hops or coffee berries, and inhale as culminating luxury balmy fumes which even the happy Homeric gods knew naught of. ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... period; it does all except to keep up in the race; it is short-lived. An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I cherish the fancy that Port speaks the sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode. Or put it, that Port is the Homeric hexameter, Burgundy the pindaric ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... times invites to it her various Eminent Hands. It is a round table,—that is, rounded by the principle of rotation,—for how could she settle points of precedence with the august heads of her various Departments without danger of the dinner's growing cold? Substantial dinners are eaten thereat with Homeric appetite, nor, though impletus venter non vult studere libenter, are the visits of the Muse unknown. At these feasts no tyranny of speech-making is allowed, but the bonbons are all wrapped in original ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... were caught they began to throw down their arms and cry for mercy. The gallant Canadians gave it, but in the hot rush of the charge they did not wait to disarm their foe. The second lines merged into the first and the fight in the dim forest became Homeric. Then the cowardly Germans whose lives had been spared, plucked up their courage. They picked up their rifles and began like the Arabs in the desert to shoot the men in the back who had spared their lives. Colonel Boyle ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... have doubted whether the Homeric poems are the work of any single mind. This arises from the difficulty of believing that poems of such length could have been committed to writing at so early an age as that usually assigned to these, an age earlier than the date of any ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... Ages the second-rate Virgil was held to be a much greater genius than Homer, and it was in England, as Professor Christ notes (69), that the truer estimate originated. Pope's translation of the Homeric poems, with all its faults, helped to dispel the mists of ignorance, and in 1775 appeared Robert Wood's book, On the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, which combated the foolish prejudice against the poet, due to the coarseness of the manners he depicts. Wood admits (161) that ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of Glooskap's home as it is felt in the original by men far more familiar with the forest in all its loveliness at all seasons than any white writer can be. The naivete or simplicity of the pilgrims is as striking as that of the narrator or poet, to whom fine clothes—a Homeric trait—are as wonderful as all the deeds of ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... secret origins and significance were known unto men. The sounds of harps and cymbals and lyres and timbrels blended with those of conch-shells and antelope horns. Sighs and laughter and curses and weeping mingled with the wild strains of Homeric song and mystic rites of Chaldea and Babylon, and the sacred chant of Isis. The Voodoo danced to the rattle of shells and antelope hoofs before the shrines of Ethiopia's dark woman, crowned with the ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... The Homeric question which Wolf had propounded in connection with Goethe, and which at that time stirred the whole learned world, had also moved Langethal so deeply that, even when an old man, he enjoyed nothing more than to speak of it to us and make us familiar with the pros and cons which rendered him an ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that Homer knew "no destiny fighting with the gods, or unless in the shape of death, defying them,"—and that the "Nemesis often inaccurately rendered as revenge, was after all but self-judgment, or sense of moral law." Even in the dim Homeric dawn, Conscience ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... meridian light of philosophic religion. Like the myths of Christianity, it had grown up in an age of superstition, when men, blind to the wondrous order of the universe, believed that supernatural beings, like the Homeric gods, actually interfered in the affairs of mortals. Science had revealed the irrevocability of the laws of nature—was man alone to be exempt from them? No. The time would come when it would be as ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... strike Mr. Elkins as the best practical joke he had ever heard of; and Cornish suggested that for a man to stop in Homeric laughter on Broadway might be pleasant for him, but was embarrassing to his companions. By this time Cornish himself was better-natured. Jim took charge of our movements, and commanded us to a dinner with him, in the nature of a ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... peat embers. We insisted on our hostess partaking of supper, which we served up to her in bed; then Sandie and I, the girl and the man, set ourselves down by the table and stretched forth our hands, in the Homeric phrase, 'to the good things ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... and costumed themselves in scenery as he wrote them, I venture to affirm that none can so read them without the conviction that their author is a true poet. In the first place, the general conception of his chief operas, taken together, is in the largest sense poetic, and I might even say Homeric. This man has transmitted an entire religion to poetry, and then set it to music. And it is one of the greatest of religions,—what Nature engraved on the heart of our own Teutonic ancestors. It is all there,—its thousand phantasmal ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... the vorspiel. Mother Nature must have fed color to Healy. He did not paint, play nor write, but the rest of that curse dropped with raw pigment, like a painting of Sorolla. Prisms of English flashed with terrible attraction. It was a Homeric curse of all nations. Parts of it were dainty, too, as a butterfly dip. Cairns was hot and courageous under the spell. The whole train of mules huddled and fell to trembling. A three-legged pariah-dog sniffed, took on a sudden obsession, and went howling heinously ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... or Syro-Arabian family, comprising, besides, the Syrians, Jews, Arabians, and in part the Abyssinians. They were at a very early period a trading and mercantile nation, and the variegated robes and golden ornaments fabricated at Sidon were prized by the Homeric heroes. They habitually traversed the AEgean Sea, and formed settlements on ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Dorothea," which Schiller pronounced the acme not only of Goethean but of all modern art, was written professedly as an attempt in the Homeric[7] style, motived by Wolf's "Prolegomena" and Voss's "Luise." It is Homeric only in its circumstantiality, in the repetition of the same epithets applied to the same persons, and in the Greek realism of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... graciously as of yore. For the North, philosophy and freedom are essentials to human happiness; in the lands which Aphrodite rose from the waves to govern, as the Seasons, hand in hand, stood to welcome her on the shores, Nature is all sufficient. (Homeric Hymn.) ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... them together in your exhibition, they succeed each other amusingly enough, like prints of the London Cries, wrapped upon rollers, with a glass before them. In this at least they resemble the monsters in Ovid's Metamorphoses; but your similies, I suppose, are Homeric? ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... knowledge at a time when knowledge, indeed, such as lies beyond the bounds of actual experience, was extremely limited, but when life was singularly fresh, vivid, and expansive. The only poems of Homer we possess are the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," for the Homeric hymns and other productions lose all title to stand in line with these wonderful works, by reason of conflict in a multitude of particulars with the witness of the text, as well as of their poetical inferiority. They ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... his day, or perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred and fifty years after the event. That the single authorship of the Homeric poems should be doubted is not so strange, for Homer is almost prehistoric. But Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the time of his death the first English colony in {109} America was already nine years old. The important known facts ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... upon this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... took her hand, because their feet were wetted now; "the trap and its small prey are not commensurate. The stage is set for a Homeric death-scene, and we two profane an over-ambitious background. For who are we that Heaven should have rived the world before time was, to trap us, and should make of the old sea a fowling-net?" Their eyes encountered, and he said, with a strange gush of manliness: "Yet Heaven is kind. I am bound even ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... well to the front of controversy in Julian's days. When the rescript came out which forbade the Galileans to teach the classics, they promptly undertook to form a Christian literature by throwing Scripture into classical forms. The Old Testament was turned into Homeric verse, the New into Platonic dialogues. Here again Apollinarius was premature. There was indeed no reason why Christianity should not have as good a literature as heathenism, but it would have to be a growth of many ages. In doctrine ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... profound. Was it Homer or Shelley that grasped Reality? This is not a question of literary excellence; it is a question of the sense of life. And—oddly enough—it is a question to which the intellect has no answer. The life in each of us takes hold of it and answers it empirically. The normal man is Homeric, though he is not aware of the fact. Especially is the American Homeric; naif, spontaneous, at home with fact, implicitly denying the Beyond. Is he right? This whole continent, the prairies, the mountains and the coast, the trams and trolleys, the sky-scrapers, the factories, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Christian faith in a Son of man, who is at once utterly human and utterly divine. Man is made in the likeness of God—is the root-idea, only half-conscious, only half-expressed, but instinctive, without which neither the Greek Tragedies, nor the Homeric Poems, six hundred years before them, could have been composed. Doubtless the idea that man was like a god degenerated too often into the idea that the gods were like men, and as wicked. But that travestie of a great truth is not confined to those old ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... arms akimbo; with what amazing dexterity, in all the evolutions of the dance, he avoided touching the bits of iron; nay, with what intrepidity, at the most critical moment, he held his arms aloft and victoriously snapped his thumbs, it wants a Homeric chronicler to tell. It needs only be said here that, after it, Neil's 'Highland Fling' was a comparative failure, though he, better than most, could give that outflung quiver of the foot which few can properly acquire, and without which the dancer ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... exist apart from the fleshly body.' Such were the doctrines of Epicurus and Lucretius, but to these human nature opposed 'facts'; we see, people said, men long dead in our dreams, or even when awake: the Homeric Achilles, beholding Patroclus in a dream, instantly infers that there verily is a shadow, an eidolon, a shadowy consciousness, shadowy presence, which outlasts the death of the body. To this Epicurus and Lucretius reply, that the belief is caused by fallacious inferences from facts, ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Mr. Gladstone deals especially with the historic element in Homer, expounding that element, and furnishing by its aid a full account of the Homeric men and the Homeric religion. It starts, after the introductory chapter, with a discussion of the several races then existing in Hellas, including the influence of the Phoenicians and Egyptians. It contains chapters on the Olympian system, with its several deities; ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... Leros, Calymnus and Cos, a sanjak of the Archipelago vilayet. Chios is about 30 m. long from N. to S., and from 8 to 15 m. broad; pop. 64,000. It well deserves the epithet "craggy" ([Greek: paipaloessa]) of the Homeric hymn. Its figs were noted in ancient times, but wine and gum mastic have always been the most important products. The climate is healthy; oranges, olives and even palms grow freely. The wine grown on the N.W. coast, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... twenty-first idyll of Theocritus. In this the fisherman Asphalion relates how in a dream he hooked a large golden fish and describes graphically, albeit with some obscurity of language, how he "played" it. Asphalion used a rod and fished from a rock, much after the manner of the Homeric angler. Among other Greek writers, Herodotus has a good many references to fish and fishing; the capture of fish is once or twice mentioned or implied by Plato, notably in the Laws (vii. 823); Aristotle deals with fishes in his Natural History, and there are one or two fishing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... how he did, and whether he had decided on another trip to Greece. Once on that subject, he gave free expression to his sentiments; and, I assure you, 'twas a veritable feast of ambrosia to me. The spells of the Sirens (if ever there were Sirens), of the Pindaric 'Charmers,' of the Homeric lotus, are things to be forgotten, after his truly divine eloquence. Led on by his theme, he spoke the praises of philosophy, and of the freedom which philosophy confers; and expressed his contempt for the vulgar error which sets a value upon wealth and renown and dominion and ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... John, pamphleteer. Harsnett, Bishop, the exposer of Darrell. Hartley, exorcist, friend of Darrell. Haudicquer, genealogist. Helot, poet. Hemmerlin, Felix, satirist. Heron, Robert, voluminous author. Histriomastix. Homeric victims. Huss, John, reformer and martyr, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... voluminous. Homeric salvos shook the air. And never one of the fire-eaters upon the steps lived long enough to live down the hateful cry of that day, "HEAD HIM OFF!" which was to become a catch-word on the streets, a taunt more ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... Homeric period the gods really went at it, using humanity as players in their battles, like a game of chess, actually. Come to think of it, chess did originate in the realm of the gods after the laws. Things were quite a mess back then, though, with a whole ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... varied it with pig-meat—good old country meat, let me tell you, pig-meat—such as spare-rib, griskin, blade-bone, and that mysterious morsel, the "mouse." The chine he always sent over for Iden junior, who was a chine eater—a true Homeric diner—and to make it even, Iden junior sent in the best apples for sauce from his favourite russet trees. It was about the only amenity that survived between father ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... who landed here, found any prehistoric remains on the spot; I should doubt it. On another Mediterranean island, that of Ponza, I myself detected the relics of what would formerly have been described as the residence of that second Homeric witch, Circe. [30] ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... no argument ready, and etiquette was waived. "Time!" she repeated, and then the two battering-rams, revolving their fists country-fashion, engaged. Half-forgotten Homeric phrases began to flit from a faraway schoolroom back into the little teacher's mind and she began to be consoled for the absence of gloves—those tough old ancients had used gauges of iron and steel. The two boys were evenly matched. After ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... it; they are capital, and you are a regular genius, as we all agree," cut in the Homeric ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... which he would see swinging up, and easily dodge, Dam swiftly side-stepped and summoning every ounce of strength, rage, and mad protesting frenzy against the life-long torturing tyrant, he delivered a Homeric blow at the champion's head, beside and behind the ear. (Since he was indestructible by the ordinary point-of-the-chin knock-out, let him make the best of that fearful blow upon the base of the brain and spinal ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... The leader came to me and said, "This is the Maori fashion. Come, my friend, and sit with us," and deposited three bottles of beer at my feet, while provisions enough for Dan Lambert were stored around—a sort of Homeric way of honouring me, and perhaps they made a Benjamin of me. However, I had already eaten a mouldy biscuit and had a glass of beer at the house of the Chinawoman, so I only said grace for them, and after talking a little while, I shook hands all round ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of human attainment there is to be an advancement of age beyond age, surely there is to be a progress in the spirit and language of prayer. From some forming hand and heart, by the united aid of consecrated genius, wisdom, and piety, something is to come greater than we have yet seen. No Homeric poem or vision of Dante is so grand as that will be. What is the highest idea of God, excluding superstition, anthropomorphism, and vague impersonality alike, what is the fit and true utterance of the deepest and divinest heart to God, this, I must think, may well occupy the ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... public treachery; and I know there was joy in that granite heart when circumstances brought me, at last, in my innocence, before the bar of her offended country. On that fourth morning, however, the mood of Sycorax seemed to change; there was a ghastly gayety in her manner, and on her rigid lips an Homeric smile, more terrible than a frown. Then I pondered within myself—"If her hate be heavy to bear, what—what—would her love be?" The unutterable horror of the idea gave me courage that I might otherwise have lacked, to confess my intentions of absconding. But I avow that ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... brother, that such as these are beasts. They do not consider that those rules serve principally as a frame for the Homeric poetry, and for other similar to it, and they set up one as a great poet, high as Homer, and disallow those of other vein, and art, and enthusiasm, who in their various kinds are equal, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... applied to a majesty so divine!—the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, "hyacinthine!" I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose—and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the same harmoniously ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... The ante-chambers are devoted to Orpheus and Hesiod, and the ornaments are in the oldest Greek style; severely simple; archaic, but not rude; the figures of the friezes in outline, and without relief. The saloon of reception, on the contrary, is Homeric; and in its colouring, design, and decoration, as brilliant, as free, and as flowing as the genius of the great Maeonian. The chamber of the throne is entirely adorned with white bas-reliefs, raised on a ground of dead gold; the subjects Pindaric; not inferior in many instances ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... an open secret in the county), and the doom which it was currently supposed they had intended for the others, struck and stirred popular imagination. Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a foe who deals hard knocks, In a combat scarce Homeric: It's not the Boer, who snipes from rocks, But fever ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... splendid sight, both horse and rider, as they rose together over the green swells of the prairie; a picture more like that of some Homeric hero than a savage ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... organisation. That is to say, it is now a matter of brain rather than muscle. Writers of the school of Carlyle may protest that all modern warfare is tame when compared with the splendidly rampant animalism of the Homeric fights. In the interests of Humanity it is to be hoped that the change will go on until war becomes wholly scientific and utterly unattractive. Meanwhile, the soldier-caste, the politician, and the tax-payer have to face the fact that the fortunes of war are very largely decided by humdrum ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... Aristotle rightly calls him tsagichhotatos. The tower-scene, where Helen comes into the presence of Priam and the old Trojans, displays one of the most beautiful pictures anywhere to be seen. Priam's speech[254] on that occasion is a striking proof of the courtesy and delicacy of the Homeric age, or, at least, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... generally given to the fact of the English cavalry having, in a happy moment, fallen on and destroyed the artillery which was being brought up to sweep the English squares at close quarters. At Waterloo, as in so many other combats, the account of Ney's behaviour more resembles that of a Homeric hero than of a modern general. To the ideal commander of to-day, watching the fight at a distance, calmly weighing its course, undisturbed except by distant random shots, it is strange to compare Ney staggering through the gate of Konigsberg all covered with blood; ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Thebes,—the city of a hundred gates, another monument to Negro genius and civilization, and more ancient than the cities of the Delta,—until Greece and Rome stood transfixed before the ancient glory of Ethiopia! Homeric mythology borrowed its very essence from Negro hieroglyphics; Egypt borrowed her light from the venerable Negroes up the Nile. Greece went to school to the Egyptians, and Rome turned to Greece for law and the science of warfare. England dug down into Rome twenty centuries to learn to build and plant, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a man or woman who was like the gods; and who, from that likeness, stood superior to his or her fellow-creatures. Gods, heroes, and men, is a threefold division of rational beings, with which we meet more than once or ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... his little band into a knot in the center of the inclosure. Then the brazen sun looked down upon a Homeric struggle. Bulger, brawny warrior of the iron hook, swung his musket like a flail, every now and again shooting forth his more sinister weapon with terrible effect. Desmond, slim and athletic, dashed in upon the enemy with his half pike as they recoiled before Bulger's whirling musket. The rest, ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... author of the "Ethiopics," "whose writings"—says Huetius—"the subsequent novelists of those ages constantly proposed to themselves as a model for imitation; and as truly may they all be said to have drunk of the waters of this fountain, as all the poets did of the Homeric spring." To so servile an extent, indeed, was this imitation carried, that while both the incidents and characters in the "Clitophon and Leucippe" of Achilles Tatius, a work which, in point of literary merit, stands next to that of Heliodorus, are, in many passages, almost ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... section of the down-pipe came away in his hand, so that he was left clinging to the gutter with one foot in the air and twelve feet of piping swaying in his arms—then our control gave way and we let ourselves run before a tempest of Homeric laughter. We clasped one another; we leaned against walls; we stamped upon the ground; we fought for breath; tears streamed from our eyes. All the time, in a loud militant voice, Berry spoke of building and architects and mountain goats, ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... were gathered by Peter Stuyvesant for the expedition to avenge upon the Swedes the defeat at Fort Casimir, and their appearance on the march, give some notion of the military prowess of the Dutch. Their appearance, when they were encamped on the Bowling Green, recalls the Homeric age:— ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... of being superior to them! The idea that man has risen is considered base, degrading, and positively wicked; the idea that he has fallen is considered to be immensely inspiring, ennobling, and beautiful. For myself, I have somehow always preferred the boast of the Homeric Glaucus that we indeed maintain ourselves to be much better men than ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... strong, Sounded the clarion of Homeric song. "Alcides, forcefullest of all the brood Of men enforced with need of earthly food." Punch will sing gallant Herschelles, than whom Who was more worthy of Alcmene's womb Or Jovian parentage? Behold him stand With lion-hide ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... woodland and the fine frenzy of an Homeric Quixote had wrought the miracle. Of course the soil was good, and had been ruthlessly harrowed and ploughed into the very pink of condition to receive such seed. For months Lyveden's enterprise had been stifled: for months Necessity had kept his intellect chained to a pantry-sink: such ambition ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... moments so full of sweetness and splendor come to them. They were all the sweeter because blended with the homely duties that fell to Antonia's hands. As she went about ordering the breakfast, and giving to the table a festal air, Dare thought of the old Homeric heroes, and the daughters of the kings who ministered to their wants. The bravest of them had done no greater deeds of personal valor than had been done by the little band of American pioneers and hunters with whom he had fought the last four days. The princes ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... enough." "Nay, nay," said Hall, "Why take the style of those heroic times? For nature brings not back the mastodon, Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel models? These twelve books of mine Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth, Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt." "But I," Said Francis, "picked the eleventh from this hearth, And have it: keep a thing, its use will come. I hoard it as a sugar-plum for Holmes." He laughed, and I, though sleepy, like a horse That hears the ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... Pococurante's remarks to Candide about the works of Homer. He ought not to have left in so many combats; they were as like one another and as tedious as those in the Iliad, besides being much noisier, at least we are not told that the Homeric heroes were accompanied by a muscular pianist, fully armed, and by the incessant stamping of clogged boots. Nevertheless the majority of the audience enjoyed the fights, for no Sicilian objects ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... her that he would have thought it equally sensible if she had spoken, like Hans Andersen, of the tragedies of a toy-shop or the Homeric ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... work for the parent, but against the parent. Modern education means handing down the customs of the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority. Instead of their Christlike charity, their Shakespearean laughter and their high Homeric reverence for the dead, the poor have imposed on them mere pedantic copies of the prejudices of the remote rich. They must think a bathroom a necessity because to the lucky it is a luxury; they must swing Swedish clubs because their masters are afraid of English ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... One self-contained, Homeric figure, of the remote countryside in which I was born, had the true Spirit of Democracy and shed its light abroad in the Senate of the United States and the Capitol at Albany. He carried the candle ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... labored, and other men, better trained than he, have entered into his labors. The material for study is constantly accumulating, and constant progress is being made in classifying and interpreting this material. A civilization antedating the Homeric poems stands now dimly revealed to us. Mycenae, the city "rich in gold," the residence of Agamemnon, whence he ruled over "many islands and all Argos," [Footnote: Iliad II, 108] is seen to have ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... moment one or another of the men demanded a fresh portion of beef, another pint of wine, another half-loaf of bread. For upwards of an hour the gang ate. It was no longer a supper. It was a veritable barbecue, a crude and primitive feasting, barbaric, homeric. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... position they take up is really quite unreasonable. If any ordinary journalist or man of general reading alludes to Villon or to Homer, they consider it a quite triumphant sneer to say to the man, "You cannot read mediaeval French," or "You cannot read Homeric Greek." But it is not a triumphant sneer—or, indeed, a sneer at all. A man has got as much right to employ in his speech the established and traditional facts of human history as he has to employ any other piece of common human information. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... the game had resolved itself into an Homeric combat between the two protagonists, of which the main bodies of the Balbus and Caramel armies were merely neutral spectators—neutral, that is, so far as they had not been hired out for some dastard service by one or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... (Homeric quotations are almost all taken from Lord Derby's "Iliad" and Butcher and Long's "Odyssey." The first is indicated by the letter I, the second ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... killing many officers and men and cutting off their army from its supplies. We have seized a goodly number of cannon and valuable stores and reclaimed New Jersey and stiffened the necks of our people. It has been, I think, a turning point in the war. Our men have fought like Homeric heroes and endured great hardships in the bitter cold with worn-out shoes and inadequate clothing. A number have been frozen to death. I loaned my last extra pair of shoes to a poor fellow whose feet had been badly cut and frozen. When I tell you that ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... tortured her. The scorpion sting was beginning to lose its venomous power. She suffered still, but her suffering was softened by resignation. There is a limit to the capacity for pain in every mind. Diana had borne her share of grief; she had, in Homeric phrase, satiated herself with anguish and tears; and to those sharp throes and bitter torments there had succeeded a passive sense of sorrow that ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... be called "A bird of Homeric song," appears so harsh to modern ears, that an emendation of the text has been proposed: but surely the learning of the ancients had been long ago obliterated, had every man thought himself at liberty to corrupt the lines which he did not understand. If we imagine that Varius had been by ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... larger work than like anything else—a precis in which all the literary merit has, with unvarying infelicity, been omitted. Nothing can be more childish than the punctilious euhemerism by which all the miraculous elements of the Homeric story are blinked or explained away, unless it be the painstaking endeavour simply to say something different from Homer, or the absurd alternation of fighting and truces, in which each party invariably gives up its chance of finishing the war at the precise time at which that chance ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... I might describe the Homeric conflict that followed, but it was too full of action for anyone to grasp the details. A furry pinwheel revolved in varying planes, smearing the stubble with gore and filling the air with cries of mingled pain and defiance, for what seemed to an astounded and perturbed ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... of the conventional epic. Apollonius seems to have carefully studied Homeric glosses, and gives many examples of isolated uses, but his choice of words is by no means limited to Homer. He freely avails himself of Alexandrian words and late uses of Homeric words. Among his contemporaries Apollonius suffers from ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... bloom decayed, Shrank with a shudder from the blue-eyed race Whose force rough-handed should renew the world, And from the dregs of Romulus express Such wine as Dante poured, or he who blew Roland's vain blast, or sang the Campeador In verse that clanks like armor in the charge, 280 Homeric juice, though brimmed in Odin's horn. And they could build, if not the columned fane That from the height gleamed seaward many-hued, Something more friendly with their ruder skies: The gray spire, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... duel. Over battle and rout and slaughter the two chiefs would glare each at the other, blade in hand and panting, but either ever ready for the stroke that should thrust through the army to the heart of its general. Such a struggle needed only antiquity and a bard to be Homeric. No Greek could equal either champion in cunning, nor Trojan in prowess, nor both in grim persistence and rugged hate. It was truly a fight to have a hand in, and with big, lusty zest, the Storm Centre bounded into ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... no such evidences to recall them. From this statement, however, the "hymn" should be excepted; to each line of it, except the last, a wampum string was devoted. With this exception, all was left to the memory of the orator. The Homeric poems, the hymns of the Vedas, the Kalewala, the Polynesian genealogies, and many other examples, show the exactness with which a composition that interests a whole nation may be handed down; but it is not ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... knew or believed as did their author. And it is both curious and instructive to note how much information as to that distant period Mr. Gladstone was able to gather from the circumstances, incidents, and implications of the Homeric poetry. The value of such deductions no one can question. We may reject as myths the Trojan War or the wanderings or personality of Ulysses, but from these poems we certainly learn much of the method of warfare, navigation, agriculture, ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... Zolaesque coarseness with a total lack of Zola's genius, insight, purpose, or philosophy. But when he comes to speak of a Thackeray or a Scott, his attitude is one that, to put it in the most complimentary form that I can think of, reminds us strongly of Homeric drowsiness. The virtue of James is one thing and the virtue of Scott is another; but surely admiration for both does not make too unreasonable a demand on catholicity of palate? Mr. Howells could never write himself down an ass, but surely in his criticism of the "Wizard ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... convinced that Antony would not so much as think of giving any molestation to a woman like this; on the contrary, she would be the first in favor with him. So he set himself at once to pay his court to the Egyptian, and gave her his advice, "to go," in the Homeric style, to Cilicia, "in her best attire," and bade her fear nothing from Antony, the gentlest and kindest of soldiers. She had some faith in the words of Dellius, but more in her own attractions, which, having formerly ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... honor placed her hands over her ears and screamed again. Max gazed at her, and, with a short, Homeric laugh, lowered ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... writers of some classical culture—can claim to appreciate Homer far better than the contemporaries of Pope. But our appreciation involves a clear recognition of the vast difference between ourselves and the ancient Greeks. We see the Homeric poems in their true perspective through the dim vista of shadowy centuries. We regard them as the growth of a long past stage in the historical evolution; implying a different social order—a different ideal of life—an archaic conception of the world and its forces, only to be reconstructed ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... proceeding. Irish Members massed below Gangway howled with delight. Their turn come now. Long they groaned under Prince ARTHUR'S iron heel. Now they've got him down, and dance round him with shouts of exultation and Homeric bursts of laughter. Hardly can his voice be heard above the din; but he pegs along, finally turning his back on jubilant mob below Gangway; addresses himself to SPEAKER, edging in a sentence amid comparative pauses in uproar. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... and how much we have gained, is bound up with the question of the intrinsic value of knowledge and great ideas. Let us appraise knowledge as we would the Homeric poems, as some- ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... himself principally with the site of Troy. Well versed in the Iliad, he sought for, and believed he identified, the various localities mentioned in the Homeric poem. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... artist had painted her nether parts with so much skill and truth that no one could have wished for anything more beautiful; I was delighted with that portrait; it was a speaking likeness, and I wrote under it, "O-Morphi," not a Homeric word, but a Greek one after all, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... role of wheeling it from Fort Smith to the Big Timbers, and was expected to push it before him to the edge of the Pacific Ocean! It was evident that Patrick was tired of his task: for they had not made much progress in their Homeric supper, before he once more returned ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... the big dog seized the other, and fairly lifted him off the ground, shaking him violently—a proceeding that had the effect of thoroughly rousing Aleck's temper. And then began a most Homeric combat. At first the bull-dog was dreadfully mauled; his antagonist's size, weight, and length of leg and jaw, to say nothing of the thick coat by which he was protected, all telling against him. But he took his punishment very quietly, never so much as uttering a growl, in strange contrast to ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... of ships.]—Homeric ships had prows shaped and painted to look like birds' or beasts' heads. A ship was always a wonderfully live and vivid thing to the Greek poets. (Cf. ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... a little rivulet. Arms were piled; some gathered wood and lighted fires, others fetched water from the brook, and the more handy opened the baskets of provisions we had brought from Tempio and spread them on the grass. A wild boar was cut open, and, in Homeric style, the choicest portions of the intestines were torn out, and, broiled on wooden skewers, offered to the hunting-knives of the guests. The wine cup went round, and the hunters' feast was ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Lupeaulx, interrupting him with a burst of Homeric laughter. "Why, that's the daily bread of every remarkable man in this glorious kingdom of France! And there are but two ways to meet such calumny,—either yield to it, pack up, and go plant cabbages in the country; or else rise above it, march on, fearless, and ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... irrigator's ditch or by the dry-farmer's plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada we may find the cowboy, it is true, even today: but he is no longer the Homeric figure that once dominated the plains. In what we say as to his trade, therefore, or his fashion in the practice of it, we speak in terms of thirty or forty years ago, when wire was unknown, when the round-up still ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... knees by two attendants. Quick as lightning came the comment, "When she was younger she was able to rise on her own merits." Was ever so exquisitely funny and unexpected a turn given to the dull word "merits"? Another perfect thing from this diverting piece, followed also by Homeric cachinnations, was the mock-serious apophthegm: "If a cloud is going to support a lady of substantial proportions, you must make it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... dislocate the shoulder of any lesser man. "Hold," he cried: the elephant-like machine stopped. He took and hauled the great ball into a new position. "Go on," he shouted: the elephant machine went on, and again the red sparks flew as though a thousand Homeric blacksmiths had been striking in unison, until it was time again to thrust the half-welded cheese into the fiery furnace, and again it was dragged forth, and the jolly giant bent, and tugged, and sweated, and commanded,—he did not swear over his task. At length having succeeded in making the ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... bull-terrier's blood is up, and his soul unsatisfied; he grips the first dog he meets, and discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric phrase, he makes a brief sort of amende,[101-1] and is off. The boys, with Bob and me at their head, are after him; down Niddry street he goes, bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow—Bob and I, and our small men, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... approaching, and, calculating the distance, would give it a start. Dropping down behind the bushes, they would watch the dramatic effect upon the church-goers as the great missile shot across the road a few yards before them. This was Homeric sport, but they carried it too far. Stones that had a habit of getting loose so numerously on Sundays and so rarely on other days invited suspicion, and the "Patterollers" (river patrol—a kind of police of those days) were put on the watch. So the boys found other diversions until ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... O. is Homeric in the simplicity of his tastes. A house is a place in which to sleep, clothes are to keep one warm, food is to eat and the manner of its service is an indifferent matter. He enjoys with almost huge pleasure good things to eat and good things to drink, but as he puts it, "I am as much ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... and each man presented a rounded development of muscular power, which would have done credit to any of the homeric heroes; but there was a look of grand intelligence and refinement in Petroff's countenance, which would probably have enlisted the sympathies of the villagers even if he ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... exactly alike, both printed with the Macpherson plaid. One was his, the other mine, which he had seen lying round, and naturally took for his own, thrusting it into his pocket, where it found its twin-brother from the same workshop. In memory of which event we exchanged boxes, like two Homeric heroes. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... information as to the present position of affairs at Tewa, before setting out for it in a body. Max, yesterday, finished his miniature ship, and exhorted me to "wind up" our history forthwith, with a Homeric description of the great battle at the islet, and our heroic defence of the banyan tree. He declares it to be his intention to enclose the manuscript in the hold of the vessel and launch her when half-way to Tewa, in the assured confidence that the winds and waves will waft it to its ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... copying the best verses, dramatic phrases and orations of ancient authors, and then to show his superiority of epigrammatic, incisive style, he could paraphrase the poems of other writers into his own divine sentences, using the crude ore of Homeric and Platonic philosophy, resolving their thoughts into the best form of classic ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... gay insolence, light but vivid psychological penetration, an almost profound sense of the ridiculous, joyous fooling; above all, that first essential of satire, to be himself amused by what he wrote to amuse others; all these he possessed in a high degree. Rabelais has been called the Homeric buffoon, Lucian ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... rather like an outlaw in the woods, he met a curious agile youth with hair brushed up off his head. Seeing each other, they promptly hit each other simultaneously and had a fight. Next day they met again and fought again. These Homeric conflicts went on for many days, till one morning in the crisis of some insane grapple, the subject of this biography quoted, like a war-chant, something out of Macaulay's Lays. The other started and relaxed his hold. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... even in no great mood, the force of his leadership was recognised and reserve power of the man fully felt. Like every Achilles, Gladstone was held by the heel when dipped. One may well feel that he came short as a theologian. The scholars slight his Homeric disquisitions. Consistency was a virtue which he probably too often scouted, but his high purpose, his spotlessness of spirit, and strong control of men no one can gainsay. In the slang of the street of that time he was the "G.O.M.," the Grand Old Man as well to those who fought him as to ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... globe, and the aerial ocean by which it is surrounded, man should have been impressed by the aspect of the vault of heaven, and the uniform and regular movements of the sun and planets. Thus the word Cosmos, which primitively, in the Homeric ages, indicated an idea of order and harmony, was subsequently adopted in scientific language, where it was gradually applied to the order observed in the movements of the heavenly bodies, to the whole universe, and then finally to the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... distinctly a primitive poem, one which can scarcely be classed either as idyl or epic, though, in spite of its scenes being mainly rural, it perhaps approaches more nearly to the epic. There is an Homeric simplicity in its descriptions of half-drunken warriors with their superb physique, their bravado, their native dignity and singleness of character. Marianka, the beautiful heroine, passes from one picture to another in her quiet, regular ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... might discern Nature's real intentions in the matter of pain if they would examine a boy's punishments and sorrows, for he prolongs neither beyond their actual duration. With a boy, trouble must be of Homeric dimensions to last overnight. To him, every next day is really a new day. Thus, Penrod woke, next morning, with neither the unspared rod, nor Mr. Kinosling in his mind. Tar, itself, so far as his consideration of it went, might have been an undiscovered substance. His mood was cheerful ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... at Eton and Camb., wrote learnedly, but paradoxically, on mythological and Homeric subjects. His chief works were A New System or Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774-76), Observations on the Plain of Troy (1795), and Dissertation concerning the Wars of Troy (1796). In the last two he endeavoured to show that the existence of Troy and ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... had not. They read him in Pope and Cowper. Let them read him offhand, and fluently, continuously, as they do Marmion, or the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and I cannot but think they will be struck with the Homeric resemblance in the poems of Sir Walter Scott. Both great poets had, too, the same relish for natural scenery, the same close observation; did we not pass over such passages lightly, we should, I am persuaded, find in both the same ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... seized with unaccountable laughter. He literally strained his lungs with that Homeric outburst. When he wiped the tears from his eyes, at length, the shadow on the opposite side of the doorway had disappeared. He found his companion leaning over him, and this time he could catch the dull glint of starlight on both ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... natural superiors. These men, rude of speech and of manner, were resourceful, bold, far-seeing. They were conscious of their power. They were laying the foundations of cities and of states and they knew it. They were as boastful as Homeric heroes, and for the same reason. There was in them a rude virility that found expression in word as ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... an invitation to work, shovels were made fast along the coamings of the hatch. The six men took these, and with shouts dropped down upon the grain. And then began a period of Homeric toil. The fireman and the coal-trimmer set the pace, and with a fine contempt for the unhandiness of amateurs did not fail to give a display of their utmost. Kettle and Dayton-Philipps gamely kept level ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... the driver. And as he whipped up the horses again, his Homeric laughter mingling with the curses of the man in the ditch, she sank back trembling and gasping. It was her first experience of the vileness of man, for the men of her day respected the women of their own class unless met half way, or, violently enamoured, given ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... Divine nature is infused by mechanical means. Sacraments and the like have a magical or miraculous potency. The Homeric hymn to Demeter insists only on ritual purity as the condition of salvation, and we hear that people trusted to the mystic baptism to wash out all their previous sins. Similarly the baptism of blood, the taurobolium, was supposed ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... for its values chiefly upon its form. To say that the Psalms and the Gospels have no value or little value for the world apart from the original form and language in which they were written would, of course, be absurd. Is it any less absurd to say that the study of the Homeric poems, the Attic tragedies, the works of Thucydides and Plato would have little value for students unless this literature were studied in the original language? These questions cannot properly be ignored any longer by teachers of ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... sublime in epic strain"; "Blest Dwight"; Dwight of "Homeric fire." Colonel Humphreys is fully up to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... text of the "Homeric Hymns" my chief debt—and it is a heavy one—is to the edition of Allen and Sikes (1904) and to the series of articles in the "Journal of Hellenic Studies" (vols. xv.sqq.) by T.W. Allen. To the same scholar and to the ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... Italy and Turks in Turkey, consumes more malt liquor than they drink of all other liquors. The intellectual race that has produced Kant, Goethe and Helmholtz, Bismarck, Moltke, Mommsen, and Richard Wagner in a century, swallows Homeric draughts of beer at breakfast, dinner and supper. That other nations do not follow their example, and laugh at their potations is of little consequence. Even if the Germans do not to some extent owe their national characteristics ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... favorite objects with an infectious and reckless ardor, whose wisdom is no child of slow prudence. We love Achilles more than Diomedes, and Ulysses not at all. But these are standards left over from a ruder state of society: we should have passed by this time the Homeric stage of mind—should have heroes suited to our age. Nay, we have erected different standards, and do make a different choice, when we see in any man fulfillment of our real ideals. Let a modern instance serve as test. Could any man hesitate to say that Abraham Lincoln ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... among the great French realists. No other French writer has written as graphically as she did with her needle, of the life and customs of their day. That long scroll of tapestry, for truth and a naive perfection of sincerity—where will you find it equalled or even approached? It is a rude Homeric epic; and I am not quite certain that it ought not to rank higher than even some of the more famous epics of the world—since Mathilde had to create the mould of art into which she poured her story. For who had thought before ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... history of the ancient religions of the widely extended Aryan or Indo-European race, to which we ourselves belong, we shall find in the earlier writings of the Hindus an exhibition of it decidedly more archaic even than that which is presented in the Homeric poems. Then, the growth—the historical development—of Hinduism is not less worthy of attention than its earlier phases. It has endured for upward of three thousand years, no doubt undergoing very important changes, yet in many things retaining its original spirit. The progress of the system has ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... life. It has been reported to me that you admire the marble statue of a nymph which an Italian sculptor has lately wrought for me. I, on my part, have envied you the possession of a certain Arab slave, a living statue, a moving bronze, that you have amongst your retainers. Let us, like Homeric heroes, make an exchange. Give me your statue-man, your swart Apollo, and accept from me what many have been pleased ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... later mores. When, in the course of time, changes occur in the mores, the men of a later generation find themselves in antagonism to the mores of their ancestors. In the Homeric poems cases are to be found of disapproval by a later generation of the mores of a former one. The same is true of the tragedies of the fifth century in respect to the mythology and heroism in Homer. The punishment of Melantheus, the unfaithful goatherd, was ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... master, to-morrow you ought to fight like Hercules against Antaus—like Theseus against the Minotaur—like Bayard—like something Homeric, gigantic, impossible; I wish people to speak of it in future times as the combat, par excellence, and in which you had not even ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... and people believed in Liberalism. What is, or used to be, called the Broad Church, was the birth of some ten or fifteen years of Liberalism in religion at Oxford. The Essays and Reviews were what the Tracts had been; and Homeric battles were fought over the income of the Regius Professor of Greek. When that affair was settled Liberalism had had her innings, there was no longer a single dominant intellectual force; but the old storms, slowly subsiding, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... made either by Graville, or by any one else in the romance, to Homeric fables and personages, a critic who had gone through the ordinary education of an English gentleman would never thereby have assumed that the person so referring had read the poems of Homer themselves—he would have known that Homeric fables, or personages, though ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... spoke an Aryan language were a tribe of barbarous nomads, who wandered in the highlands of central Asia. Those who have studied the earliest products of Aryan genius in the Vedas, the Zend-Avesta, and the Homeric songs, will be willing to admit that these wandering barbarians may have had minds capable of the highest efforts to which the human intellect is known to have attained. Yet if an irruption of Semitic or Turanian ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... something like 'when Homer and Virgil are forgotten.' Speaking of Homer and Virgil, I have been writing a 'Romance of the Ganges,'[34] in order to illustrate an engraving in the new annual to be edited by Miss Mitford, Finden's tableaux for 1838. It does not sound a very Homeric undertaking—I confess I don't hold any kind of annual, gild it as you please, in too much honour and awe—but from my wish to please her, and from the necessity of its being done in a certain time, I was 'quite frightful,' as poor old Cooke used to say, in order to express ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Undying Voices," of Keats and Shelley, and of Swinburne's supernal rhythms, which he had brought with him. One visit to the Public Library had quite appalled him; the vast, chill orderliness of it. He had gone there, hungry to chat about books! To the Public Library! Surely a Homeric joke for grim, tomish officialdom. But tomish officialdom had not even laughed at him; it was too official to appreciate the quality of such side-splitting innocence.... Was he likely to meet a like irresponsiveness when he should seek clothing ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... entire "Hymn to the Earth," in hexameters, in the second of the volumes now before us, that the question of the total inadmissibility of that measure in English verse can be considered as finally settled; the true point not being whether such lines are as good as, or even like, the Homeric or Virgilian models, but whether they are not in themselves a pleasing variety, and on that account alone, if for nothing else, not to be rejected ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Quiche MS. as it now stands. Now and then, it is true, one imagines one sees certain periods and landmarks, but in the next page all is chaos again. It may be difficult to confess that with all the traditions of the early migrations of Cecrops and Danaus into Greece, with the Homeric poems of the Trojan war, and the genealogies of the ancient dynasties of Greece, we know nothing of Greek history before the Olympiads, and very little even then. Yet the true historian does not allow himself to indulge in any illusions on this subject, and he shuts his ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... pretext for a forced holiday from manual labour, the peasants thought of nothing, after church, but of amusing themselves; they drank, talked, sang, danced, and, above all, laughed, for the laugh of our forefathers quite rivalled the Homeric laugh, and burst forth with ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... I had never declared myself, they said. Was I for Home Rule? I said we must first review Mr. GLADSTONE's numerous writings about HOMER, and then come to Home Rule. "HOMER stops the way!" Were Mr. GLADSTONES Homeric theories compatible with a rational frame of mind? Here I felt very strong, and animated with a keen desire to impart information. The deputation said all this was ancient history. As to Home Rule itself, they said it really did not matter. What ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... true Christian faith in a Son of Man, who is at once utterly human and utterly divine. That man is made in the likeness of God—is the root idea, only half-conscious, only half-expressed, but instinctive, without which neither the Greek Tragedies nor the Homeric Poems, six hundred years before them, could have been composed. Doubtless the idea that man was like a god degenerated too often into the idea that the gods were like men, and as wicked. But that travestie of a great ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... are dealing with a very obvious confusion; for while man is in a low and undeveloped state, a good many acts which would be sins if committed by people on a higher level, have not that character at all. It is quite impossible, e.g., to read the Homeric poems and find in them any trace or indication that deceit, war and massacres are {163} regarded with so much as moral distaste; the men of the Homeric age had simply not risen to that moral height, and it would be futile to judge them by the standards of ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... sides of the head. This frontal eye is totally wanting in the other workers, and is not known in any other kind of ant. The apparition of these strange creatures from the cavernous depths of the mine reminded me, when I first observed them, of the Cyclopes of Homeric fable. They were not very pugnacious, as I feared they would be, and I had no difficulty in securing a few with my fingers. I never saw them under any other circumstances than those here related, and what their special functions may ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... with verse, whimsically but in all seriousness, in an article on "The Four Ages of Poetry," contributed in 1820 to a short-lived journal, "Ollier's Literary Miscellany." The four ages were, he said, the iron age, the Bardic; the golden, the Homeric; the silver, the Virgilian; and the brass, in which he himself lived. "A poet in our time," he said, "is a semi-barbarian in a civilised community . . . The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... the "authentic" epics of the other nations. And, by all ancient accounts, the other early Greek epics would not fare much better in the comparison. Homer's singularity in this respect is overwhelming; but it is frequently forgotten, and especially by those who think to help in the Homeric question by comparing him with other "authentic" epics. Supposing (we can only just suppose it) a case were made out for the growth rather than the individual authorship of some "authentic" epic other than Homer; it could never have any bearing on the question of Homeric authorship, ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... The Homeric poems show man in his first full awaking to beauty and to music. They show more. The fashioning of the supernal world in man's mind varies with people and with time. Here it is Zeus and Hades, again it will be Jehovah and Satan, and then Heaven and Hell. But in the Iliad and Odyssey ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... of beet leaves and cream, served with ice. Mickiewicz later repeats this passage in true Homeric fashion: ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... conscious analysis of feeling attempted:—the pathetic meaning is left to be suggested by the mere presentiment of the situation. Inexperienced critics have often named this, which may be called the Homeric manner, superficial, from its apparent simple facility: but first-rate excellence in it (as shown here, in 196, 156, and 129) is in truth one of the least common triumphs of Poetry.—This style should be compared ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... an "Isle of Apes" in the Sea of China and Al-Idrisi places it two days' sail from Sukutra (Dwipa Sukhatra, Socotra). It is a popular error to explain the Homeric and Herodotean legend of the Pygmies by anthropoid apes. The Pygmy fable (Pygmaei Spithamai1 cubit3 spans) was, as usual, based upon fact, as the explorations of late years have proved: the dwarfs are homunculi of various tribes, the Akka, Doko, Tiki- ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... own immense strength upon the pole. Great beads of sweat stood out on Bentley's bronzed forehead as he renewed his efforts; the stout hickory sapling bent and crackled beneath the pressure of the two men, but held on, and the boat slowly but steadily began to swing clear of the ice. These two Homeric men held it off by sheer strength, until the boat was in freewater, and the men, who had sat like statues in their places, could once more use their oars. The general stepped back into his place, cool and calm as usual, ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... one had to be carried away from the conventional dress of the Dublin streets, and had to be made to feel that the characters in "The Racing Lug" were primitive fishermen, and the people of "Connla" and "Deirdre" the people of Ireland's Homeric age. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... he attributes to each such inert material object a soul, whose relation to the object is analogous to that of the human soul to the body. But such an inference, we think, would not be justified. As with the Homeric Greeks, the principle of intelligence and life is not to be altogether identified with the ghost, or shade, or shadowy duplicate of the human form that is conceived to travel to the Kayan Hades. The soul seems to be rather an inextended invisible principle; for, as the procedure ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... compounded with another word, the part which is not a proper name begins with a capital if it precedes, but with a small letter if it follows, the hyphen; as "Post-homeric," "Sunday-school." ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... over the golden stage of Olympus, had made their exit, and were hurrying onward to oblivion. It was matter of notoriety, also, that all these gods were and had been liable to the taint of sorrow for the death of their earthly children, (as the Homeric Jupiter for Sarpedon, Thetis for Achilles, Calliope, in Euripides, for her blooming Rhesus;) all were liable to fear; all to physical pain; all to anxiety; all to the indefinite menaces of a danger not measurable.[Footnote: it must not be forgotten that all the superior gods passed ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... thus to give a history of the weapon calls to mind many similar passages in the Homeric poems. The particular story in mind here is the escape of Theodoric from the giants. He loses his way and falls into the hands of one of the twelve giants who guard Duke Nitger. He gains the favor of Nitger's sister, and through ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various |
