"Idyl" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an aggregate only, apart from its vital connection; it matters little whose the understanding is. The artist must be alive only to the totality of the impression, blind and deaf to all outside of that. He must believe that the idyl he sees in the landscape is there because he sees it, and will appear in the picture without the help of demonstration. The danger is, that from weakness of faith he will fancy or pretend that he sees something else, which may be there, but formed no part of the impression. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... bring a little light into the invalid's eye by a basket of grapes or a fragrant bunch of flowers, or to delight Tiny Tim with a trinket, or to let little Jacob "know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket, as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those of the trunk of travel; and yet out of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... the fault is to be charged against their rulers rather than themselves. The talent for sarcastic epigram is hereditary with the people. The pointed style of Martial was handed down through successive generations. The epigram in his hands was no longer a mere inscription, an idyl, or an elegy; it had lost its ancient grace, but it took on a new energy, and it set the model, which the later Romans knew well how to copy, of satire condensed into wit, in lines each of whose words ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of the evening bell was calling the simple cottagers to "Ave Maria." It was an enchanting picture of innocence and peace; in striking contrast to this courtly assemblage, glittering with gems and starry orders—a startling opposite to that sweet, pure idyl. And now this select circle seemed agitated as by an electric shock. There, upon the ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... admiration—"For heaven's sake, when you kill him, hurt him not"—should suffice to preserve and to embalm the name of the writer. I can scarcely think that a later scene, apparently imitated from the most impudent idyl of Theocritus, can have been likely to elevate the moral tone of the young gentleman who must have taken the part of Callisto; but the honest laureate of the city, stern and straightforward as he was in the enforcement of domestic duties and contemporary morals, could be now and then as ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... love were wrong there could not be within us such peace. That Aniela does not call it by its proper name means nothing; it is there all the same. The whole day passed for us like an idyl. Formerly I disliked Sundays; now I find that a Sunday, from morning until night, may be like a poem, especially in the country. Soon after breakfast, we went to church in time for the early mass. My aunt followed in our rear; even Pani Celina, profiting ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... "This idyl becomes true," Kautsky says, "only if we grant that but one side of the opposed forces [the proletariat] is growing and increasing in strength, while the other side [the capitalists] remains immovably fixed to the same spot." But he believes ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... painted, not from within, but from the outside or Russian point of view. But here is no refining, no affectation of pastoral simplicity. The Cossacks is 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, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... an edition of Not a Man and Yet a Man and The Rape of Florida, adding to these a collection of miscellaneous poems, Drifted Leaves, and in 1901 he published An Idyl of the South, an epic poem in two parts. It is to be regretted that he did not have the training that comes from the best university education. He had the taste and the talent to benefit from such culture ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... two wives," said he to himself, "and he treats us to an idyl of the genuine Gessner stamp! An imperial Damon who spends his time twining wreaths of roses with his Philis! Well—he had better be left to play the fool in peace; his pastoral will keep him from meddling in state affairs. Men call me the coachman of European politics; so be it, and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... himself be the author of the brochure. He thought John Scott a greater man than Maculloch; and Manton the gunmaker only second to Dr. Jenner as a benefactor of his race. He found the works of the late Mr. Apperly more entertaining than the last new Idyl from the pen of the Laureate; and was rather at a loss for small-talk when he found his feminine neighbour at a dinner-table was "deeply, darkly, beautifully blue." But the young baronet was by no means a fool, notwithstanding ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... here and there a musk-rose or a violet that retains its fragrance. He seems to have taken Shirley as his master; but desire in the pupil's case outran performance. It is, indeed, a pitiful fall from the Grateful Servant, a honey-sweet old play, fresh as an idyl of Theocritus, to the paltry faded graces of the ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... voice of the poet. He has the key to fairy-land, a feeling for nature which we thought romantic and modern, and in his lyrics the native wood-notes wild of his own 'Mousa lochmaia' (the muse of the coppice). The chorus of the Mystae in the 'Frogs,' the rustic idyl of the 'Peace,' the songs of the girls in the 'Lysistrata,' the call of the nightingale, the hymns of the 'Clouds,' the speech of the "Just Reason," and the grand chorus of birds, reveal Aristophanes as not only the first comic ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... remember the Spanish sailor, Eliza Jane—it was before your time. There was a little personal skirmishing here, which I feared, at first, might end in a suspension of maxillary functions, and the loss of the story; but here it is. Ah, me! it is a pure white winter idyl: how shall I sing it this bright, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... was born, the end which Fate forced upon him, to me, was inevitable. Each word and act of the three weeks of his parents' love-idyl must reflect in the character and life of the child. Little by little the baby King grew before my mental vision until I saw at last there was no escape from his importunity and I allowed the insistent Boy—masterful even from his ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... representing young love springing up fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter moments to fall flat from a lack of the true ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere." They are more mannerised, more in the spirit of Pre-Raphaelite art, than anything in Morris' later work. If the name-poem is put beside Tennyson's idyl "Guinevere"; or "Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery," beside Tennyson's "Sir Galahad," the difference is striking. In place of the refined ethics and sentiment, and purely modern spiritual ideals which find a somewhat rhetorical expression in Tennyson, Morris endeavours ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... help her friends with a sweet, unobtrusive kindness which won hearty response from both ladies, and caused them to view Berkeley's increasing attentions to the little maid with pleasure. They even aided the small idyl by every lawful means, having the girl with them as often as they could ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... Whittier, which are very interesting in this connection: "When I am in the mood for thinking deeply I read 'The Minister's Wooing.' But 'The Pearl of Orr's Island' is my favorite. It is the most charming New England idyl ever written." ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... fill the time. This tale of laborious days bounded by the fires of sunrise and sunset, this struggle with the primal forces of storm and flood, this passage across a panorama unrolling in ever wilder majesty, was the setting for her love idyl. The joy of her mounting spirit broke out in an answering cry that flew across the river to David like the call of ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... I have it in me, I believe I have sufficient devotion and ability, not only to keep alive the flame of his love in our solitary life, far from the world, but even to make it burn stronger and brighter. If I am mistaken, if this splendid idyl of love in hiding must come to an end—an end! what am I saying?—if I find Gaston's love less intense any day than it was the evening before, be sure of this, Renee, I should visit my failure only on myself; no blame should attach to him. I ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... mountain-fish. Cans of Hardanger ale were not wanting; and a young girl, with light plaited hair, light-yellow leather jacket, black thickly-plaited petticoat, and a red kerchief tied round her neck, with a face as pretty and innocent as ever an idyl bestowed upon its shepherdess, waited upon the guests, and entertained them with her simple, ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... her—of her beauty—of her kindness—of his own unworthiness—of what she had said and done—until, finding in this gracious stranger the vent his pent-up feelings so long had sought, he sang then and there the little idyl of his boyish life. He told of his decline in her affections after his unpardonable sin in keeping her waiting while he went for the trout, and added the miserable mistake of the rattlesnake episode. "For it was a mistake, Mr. Hamlin. I oughtn't to have ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... all began a season of deep and quiet contentment that was to remain in the memories of all of them as a kind of idyl. It was a life of elemental toil, hardship, and danger, and of strong, elemental pleasures—rest after labor, food after hunger, warmth and shelter after bitter cold. In that life there was no room for distinctions of social position or wealth. They respected one another and cared ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... occasionally wrote pieces with purely fictitious names, (this is worthy of notice, as forming a transition towards the new comedy,) one of which was called the Flower, and was probably therefore neither seriously affecting nor terrible, but in the style of the idyl, and pleasing. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... had prayed for one another, mingled one in the other with so ardent a desire for mutual happiness that, for a moment, they had attained to the very depths of the love which gives and immolates itself. And now their long, tear-drenched tenderness, their pure idyl of suffering, was ending in this brutal separation; she on her side saved, radiant amidst the hosannas of the triumphant Basilica; and he lost, sobbing with wretchedness, bowed down in the depths of the dark crypt in an icy, grave-like solitude. It was as though he had just lost her again, and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... which stirs his ingenuous spirit to prodigies of pursuit, his eyes were flame, his heart was apoplexy. The stick flew aloft and curved into the pond, and he rushed to the water's edge. But there, like the recreant knight in the Arthurian idyl, he paused and doubted. There was Excalibur, floating ten feet from shore. This was a new experience. Was it written that sticks should be pursued in this strange and alien element? He barked querulously, and returned, his intellect clouded ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... simple fashion the first pages of this little idyl were quietly turned. The book might have been closed or laid aside even then. But it so chanced that Cherry was an unconscious prophet; and presently it actually became a prudential necessity for her to have a masculine escort when she walked out. ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the monarchy; the Books of Samuel and of Kings, of the monarchy in its glory and its decline; the Books of Chronicles treat of parts of the same era, more from the point of view of the priesthood; Ruth is an idyl of the narrative type; Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther have to do with the return of the Jews from exile, and the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... now occurred in the continuation of "Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances." The first contributions that Julie sent from her new home were, "An Idyl of the Wood," and "The Three Christmas Trees."[11] In these tales the experiences of her voyage and fresh surroundings became apparent; but in June 1868, "Mrs. Overtheway" was continued by the story of ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... case made part of the first direct general cargo landed in Hong-kong harbor—an event that to the men who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily remote as the dark ages of history. But Captain Whalley could in a half hour of solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its sorrow. He had to close her eyes himself. She went away from under the ensign like a sailor's wife, a sailor herself at heart. He had read the service over her, out of her own prayer-book, without a break in his voice. When he raised ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... In 1817 the pathetic idyl, wrought out amidst harsh discord, had found its earthly close in the family vault at Windsor, amidst the lamentations of the whole nation. Princess Charlotte, the candid, fearless, affectionate girl, whose youth had been clouded by the sins and follies of others, but ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... and win them. "It seemed at that time," M. Beugnot goes on, "as if Heaven had given him every means of securing happiness. A son had just been born to him, whose future the poets were justified in foretelling in their own way. The child who inspired the Mantuan poet with the idyl, or rather with the magnificent prophecy, Sicelides Musae, etc., was but an humble creature by the side of this infant, who to the most impressive pride of race added enormous, newly acquired glory, such as the world had never seen." The happy Emperor fancied ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... Paradise they dwelt for another four weeks. The ancient garden had doubtless many a dream of love to keep, but none sweeter or truer than the idyl of Tyrrel and Ethel Rawdon. They were never weary of rehearsing it; every incident of its growth had been charming and romantic, and, as they believed, appointed from afar. As the sum-mer waxed hotter the beautiful place took on an appearance of royal color and splendor, and the air was ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... be called my husband, dwelling here, and that it might please him here to abide." [Footnote: Od. vi. 244.—Translated by Butcher and Lang.] About the whole scene there is a freshness and a fragrance as of early morning, and a tone so natural, free and frank, that in the face of this rustic idyl the later centuries sicken and faint, like candle-light in the splendour ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... It was perhaps this encomium upon the farmer at the expense of the banker which inspired Horace's friend Alfius to withdraw his capital from his banking business and dream a delicious idyl of a simple carefree country life: but, it will be recalled (Epode II, the famous "Beatus ille qui procul negotiis") that Alfius, like many a modern amateur farmer, recruited from town, soon repented that he had ever listened to the alluring call of "back to the land" ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... maidenhair fern drips lush and dank. Here Liszt drew inspiration from the harmonies of water notes blended with the chiming of distant bells, and Watteau showed in the many studies which he made in the garden how potent was its influence in investing his fetes champetres with the grace of the idyl. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... by BRAM STOKER, M.A. (SAMPSON LOW), is a simple love-story, a pure idyl of Ireland, which does not seem, after all, to be so distressful a country to live in. Whiskey punch flows like milk through the land; the loveliest girls abound, and seem instinctively to be drawn towards the right man. Also there are jooled crowns to be found by earnest seekers, with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... Revolutionary scenes. The story is a strong one, a thrilling one. It causes the true American to flush with excitement, to devour chapter after chapter, until the eyes smart, and it fairly smokes with patriotism. The love story is a singularly charming idyl. ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... or summon courage to describe the beauty of this picture—its atmosphere of holy peace, the dignity of its composition, the golden richness of its coloring. The most tragic situation has here again been alchemized by Luini's magic into a pure idyl, without the loss of power, without the sacrifice ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... abroad among the elect of the earth. But I loved you then, Hermia, I love you now, and I've told you so. I hadn't meant to, but I'm not sorry. I'm glad that you know it—even though your smiles deride me; even though I know I've spoiled your idyl here and made a mockery ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... is unusual for delicacy, subtlety, and the ... felicitous tenderness which brood over the book like a golden autumnal haze which dims the outlines of common things and beautifies them.... The story is indeed unique in this, that it is an idyl for the aged—a romance of ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... imitate this irregularity, as not inconsistent with the plain, ungrammatical speech of the characters introduced, and the homely air of even the most imaginative passages. The opening poem is a charmingly wayward idyl, called "The Meadow," (Die Wiese,) the name of a mountain-stream, which, rising in the Feldberg, the highest peak of the Black Forest, flows past Hausen, Hebel's early home, on its way to the Rhine. An extract from it will illustrate what Jean Paul ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... "my liver ;" which viscus, and not the heart, is held the seat of passion, a fancy dating from the oldest days. Theocritus says of Hercules, "In his liver Love had fixed a wound" (Idyl. xiii.). In the Anthologia "Cease, Love, to wound my liver and my heart" (lib. vii.). So Horace (Odes, i. 2); his Latin Jecur and the Persian "Jigar" being evident congeners. The idea was long prevalent and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... idyl for our sailor. He spent most of his days making a jacket with which to clothe the rat, and actually did catch one (I hoped he was not my friend of the staircase) and proceeded to put him into this sailor-made costume, ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... The simple idyl of their loves was unbroken by any stain or disappointment, and yet always shadowed with the deepest anxiety for the future. Though treated with the utmost indulgence, she was legally a slave, and so was the boy of whom she became the mother. Cojo, her uncle, was a captain among ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... think that there has ever been an idyl like that through which we lived during those fifteen months, first on the heights of the Atlas range and then in the infernal plains of the Sahara: an idyl of heroism, of privation, of superhuman torture and superhuman joy; an idyl of hunger and thirst, of total ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... evening George Sand, who sometimes thought aloud when with Chopin—this being her way of chatting—spoke of the peacefulness of the country and unfolded a picture of the rural harmonies that had all the charming and negligent grace of a village idyl, bringing, in fact, her beloved Berry to the fireside of the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... to the relatives to whose charge she fell—a veritable good brownie, who brought luck wherever she went. The story of her life forms a most readable and admirable rustic idyl. ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... dictionary poetry" to the poor fellow, who was at last prevailed on to read some of his dialect pieces in the presence of Katy. He read her one on "What the Sunflower said to the Hollyhock," and a love-poem, called "Polly in the Spring-house." The first strophe of this inartistic idyl will doubtless be all the reader will care ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... nor he owned the truth to themselves; they were ignorant as yet that they were commencing the first chapter of their life-idyl. Fern had a vague sense that the room was brighter when Erle was there looking at her with those kindly glances. She never owned to herself that he was her prince, and that she had found favor in his eyes. She was far too humble for that; but she knew the days ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Lamar" is a remarkable novel. It has originality in subject and treatment. The hero is drawn with a master hand. The picture of the heroine is a revelation of innocence and beauty of the most exquisite English type. The love story which runs through the book, like a golden thread, is an idyl. Few novels are so well calculated to appeal to a large class of readers, comprising, as it does, food ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... scraping rustle of the palms, a sound like the friction of thin metal plates. The balcony, if possible, was worse than their room. In his irritation Lee cursed the scruples of his brother; Savina, prostrate on the bed, said nothing. At intervals her hand moved, waving a paper fan with a printed idyl from Boucher, given her in a caf at Havana. She had none of the constrained modesty, the sense of discomfort at her own person, so dominating in Fanny. Lee finally lighted a lamp: the hours, until the precipitant onrush of night, seemed stationary; gigantic ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees—"flat-nosed bees," as he calls them in the Seventh Idyl—and comparisons in which comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this world's goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with honeycombs, or to be inclosed in ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... previous evening, and he had laughed at it, being absolutely heart-whole. There was something irresistibly comical then about the Earl's bland theory that Fairholme House needed a sprightly viscountess, yet now, twenty-four hours later, he could extract no shred of humor from the idyl of a draper's assistant. It seemed to be a perfectly natural thing that these lovers should talk of mating. Of what else should they whisper on this midsummer's night, when the gloaming already bore the promise of dawn, ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... chords of the soft music of the Gaelic English as it fell from the tongues of Irish lads and lasses, whether in note of sorrow or of sport, had already begun to touch with winsome tenderness the stolid Saxon hearts, when that idyl of their country's penal days, 'The Bit o' Writin',' was sent out from the O'Hara fireside. The almost instantaneous success and popularity of their first stories speedily broke down the anonymity of the Banims, and publishers ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... grew gradually under the author's hand. On December 8, 1832, he wrote to a friend: "I am now at work on a poem of life among the gentry, in the style of Hermann and Dorothea. I have already jotted down a thousand verses." He had evidently planned a village idyl of no great length, probably based on the love of Thaddeus and Zosia. In a draft of the first book that is still preserved, Thaddeus sees on the wall a picture of Joseph Poniatowski at the battle ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... old he began to study painting, but soon gave up the art and devoted himself to literature. He became a journalist of New York City, and his productions include almost every variety of writings found in the literary magazines. After his death, two volumes of his poems, "Drift: a Seashore Idyl," and "Poems, Grave and Gay," were edited ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Frothingham has done a good service, and done it well, in translating this famous idyl, which has been justly called 'one of the most faultless poems of modern times.' Nothing can surpass the simplicity, tenderness, and grace of the original, and these have been well preserved in Miss Frothingham's ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... the dying fire. Thinking over the evening, the idea came to me that perhaps, after all, he did admire my protegee, and, being a romantic old woman, I did not repel the fancy; it might go a certain distance without harm, and an idyl is always charming, doubly so to people cast away on a desert island. One falls into the habit of studying persons very closely in the limited circle of ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... an idyl of Theocritus, very well known by Agias, and without the least hesitation he took ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... me to my dreams. But visions did not return. My idyl was spoiled. Old-fashioned ideas emerged, and took form in the plain light of every-day common-sense. I knew the wonderfully gorgeous spectacle these two young people were going to see at the play that ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... you have to begin by saying something on the first, next, to allude to the second, and, after finishing with all three, to take the name of the whole set and match it with a line, no matter whether it be from some stanza or roundelay, song or idyl, set phrases or proverbs. But they must rhyme. And any one making a mistake will be mulcted in ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... her here weeping over me,—me, who had so often called up her tears by my ill conduct, filled me with confusion. At the remembrance of my injustice and of her love, even the tears came into my eyes; I hastened to implore pardon of her, doubly and trebly: and I turned this incident into an idyl, [Footnote: Die Laune des Verliebten, translated as The Lover's Caprice, see p. 241.] which I never could read to myself without affection, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... began "Wilhelm Meister," wrote the dramas, "Iphigenie," "Egmont," and "Torquato Tasso," and his "Reinecke Fuchs." To the period of his friendship with Schiller belong the continuation of "Wilhelm Meister," the beautiful idyl of "Hermann and Dorothea," and the "Roman Elegies." In the last period, between Schiller's death in 1805 and his own, appeared "Faust," "Elective Affinities," his autobiographical "Dichtung und Wahrheit" ("Poetry and Truth"), his "Italian Journey," ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... prose translation of the "Odyssey" the exquisite idyl of Nausicaa and her Maids, and the discovery of himself by Ulysses. Perhaps the picture came out more clearly than ever before; at any rate, it filled my whole day with delight, and to-day I seem to have heard some sweetest good tidings, as if word had come ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... far the most important work of Mrs. Browning is Aurora Leigh: a long poem in nine books, which appeared in 1856, in which the great questions of the age, social and moral, are handled with great boldness. It is neither an epic, nor an idyl, nor a tale in verse: it combines features of them all. It presents her clear convictions of life and art, and is full of philosophy, largely expressed in the language of irony and sarcasm. She is an inspired advocate of the intellectual claims of woman; and the poem is, in some degree, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... employment for his ability and energy. Edward can give him just the needed work, with great advantage to the property, and would like to do so. Charlotte fears that the presence of the Captain may disturb their pleasant idyl, but finally yields. She herself has a niece, Ottilie, a beautiful girl whom no one understands and who is not doing well at her boarding-school. Charlotte would like to have the girl under her own care. After much debate the pair take both the Captain and Ottilie into ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... tender skin she rather enjoyed the sensation. He, in his turn, was fully aware of the happiness she felt in being there, and he reserved the work which required skill for the time when she could look on in wonder and admiration. It was an idyl that they were unconsciously enacting all that spring, and when Gervaise returned to her home it was in ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... amusements the day passed, a day that remains forever an idyl of simple loveliness to me, such as any man is the richer for having known. When darkness overtook us, we made for ourselves the softest of ferny beds, and slept serenely, untroubled by anything, under the light ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... without intending it, and I have taken without your knowledge. Do not regret the accident which has enriched another. This concealed idyl of the hills was mine, as I supposed, but I acknowledge your equal right to it. Shall we share the possession, or will ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... through his delightful pages memories came back to me of three friends of my own childhood—'Robinson Crusoe,' 'The Swiss Family Robinson,' and 'Masterman Ready'—and I would be glad to know that all, old and young, who have enjoyed those immortal tales would take to their hearts this last idyl of an island."—Sara Andrew Shafer, in the ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... and has been nearly always splendidly successful. In analytic studies of high, middle, and low life he has not his superior. In the novel of intrigue and sensation he is easily a master, while he succeeds at least fairly in a form of fiction at just the opposite pole from this, to wit, the idyl ('Le Lys dans la vallee'). In character sketches of extreme types, like 'Gobseck,' his supremacy has long been recognized, and he is almost as powerful when he enters the world of mysticism, whither so few of us can follow him. As a writer of novelettes he is unrivaled and some of his short stories ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... heat,—let us seek cooler air beneath the shade of yonder cypresses, whose dark-green boughs shut out the glaring sky. We'll talk of love and poesy and tender things till sunset, . . I will recite to thee a ballad of mine that Niphrata loved,—'tis called 'An Idyl of Roses,'...and it will lighten this hot and heavy silence, when even birds sleep, and butterflies drowse in the hollowed shelter of the arum-leaves. Come, wilt thou? ... To- night perchance we shall have ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... [Footnote 1: This Lyric Idyl of 'Solomon's Song,' together with some narrated stories of the same idyllic spirit, are united in a single volume of this series under ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... that by the time spring had passed into summer, sumptuous wildflowers succeeding the first little scrubby daisy, a blessed idyl of quaint child life, dear to Simon's heart, had grown out of the chance meeting on the hillside. It was as if Simon's clearing were a charmed circle into which no evil could enter, to which no echo of the greed ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... monotony; in Versailles, in Trianon, lived the present Queen of France in the dazzling splendor of her glory, of her youth, and of her beauty. In Trianon—this first gift of love from the king to his wife—the Queen of France dreamed life away in a pleasant idyl, in a joyous pastoral amusement; there, she tried to forget that she was queen, that is to say, that she was the slave of etiquette; there she tried to indemnify herself for the tediousness, ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... first is from a poem in free-verse, Meditation, by | | Richard Aldington; the second is blank verse, from the Small | | Sweet Idyl in Tennyson's Princess; the third is from | | Henley's Margaritae Sorori (also in free-verse); the fourth | | is from DeQuincey's English Mail-Coach, Dream Fugue IV | | (prose); the fifth is from Milton's Samson Agonistes, ll. | | 1092 ff. (blank verse); the sixth is from Browning's The ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... presence of the lover," says Miss Alice Fletcher, who has written some entertaining and valuable treatises on Indian music and love-songs.[244] Mirrors, too, are used to attract the attention of girls, as appears from a charming idyl sketched by Miss Fletcher, which I ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... time you did," she broke in again. "It may be beautiful here—inside these walls—an unbroken idyl of peace and contentment, but it isn't life. It's just existence, that's all. If I were a man, I'd want to do a man's work in the world. I wouldn't want to miss an hour of it, childhood, boyhood or manhood. I'd want to meet my temptations and conquer ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... will be, my dear duke, a most charming idyl; in true Watteau style, I will be the sweet shepherdess, and lead your highness by a little ribbon. But where ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... Beneath an idyl of Moschus, of all places in the world, Macaulay notes the fact of Peel being First Lord of the Treasury; and he finds space, between two quotations in Athenaeus, to commemorate a Ministerial majority of 29 on the Second Reading ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... a little longer. To be sure I was my own mistress, but I was well aware, notwithstanding, that Aunt Helen was fully capable of coming on some fine day, with horse, foot, and dragoons, and putting a summary end to my financial idyl. ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... of painting is equally true with respect to poetry. It is only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... effective. "Zanetto" is nothing more than an operatic sketch in one act. In its original shape, as it came from the pen of Franois Coppe, under the title "Le Passant," the story is a gracious and graceful idyl. A woman of the world, sated and weary with a life of amours, meets a young singer, feels the sensations of a pure love pulsing in her veins and sends him out of her presence uncontaminated. Here are poetry and beauty; but not matter for three-quarters ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Herr Chas. Goffrie. Mrs. Taggart was also for five years a pupil of Senor Arevalo, the famous guitar soloist of Los Angeles.... Mrs. Taggart has in preparation (1902) Methought He Touched the Strings, an idyl for piano in memory of the ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... his mind to go to the Engadine and see for himself how matters looked. He could stay at Saint Moritz, or even Samaden, so as not to disturb Marcello's idyl, and Marcello could come down alone to see him. He should probably meet acquaintances, and would give them to understand that he had come in order to get rid of Regina and save his stepson from certain destruction. ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... The little idyl was the talk of the villagers before it came to the squire's ears. When he questioned Alfred the young man confessed it readily enough. He loved Miss Percival, and she didn't mind waiting. Mr. Thorne ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... dactylic hexameter and in a way partly epic and partly idyllic a story of love and domestic interests in a contrasting setting of war and exile, was modeled on Hermann and Dorothea, so the latter poem was suggested by J. H. Voss' idyl Luise, published first in parts in 1783 and 1784 and as a whole revised in 1795. Of his delight in Luise Goethe wrote to Schiller in February, 1798: "This proved to be much to my advantage, for this ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... us go back to an idyl little known of Marie's twelfth year. The fact itself is not very extraordinary. The little girl is training herself for motherhood by lavishing caresses on wretched papier-mache baby dolls. She is practising for ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... A prose idyl is the term which best describes the courtly and pastoral character of Lodge's "Rosalynde," the last work of fiction of any importance which distinctly bears the impress of euphuism. Published in 1590, the ten editions through which it passed during the next fifty ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... sixteenth century. Samuel Usque was a fugitive from the Inquisition, and his dialogues, "Consolations for the Tribulations of Israel" (written in Portuguese, in 1553), are a long drawn-out sigh of pain passing into a sigh of relief. Usque opens with a passionate idyl in which the history of Israel in the near past is told by the shepherd Icabo. To him Numeo and Zicareo offer consolation, and they pour balm into his wounded heart. The vividness of Usque's style, his historical insight, his sturdy optimism, his poetical force ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... garret she kept herself apart and precious. Always she seemed fluttering just ahead of him, like a will-of-the-wisp. If he touched her hand ever so gently she drew it away. The caresses most girls he had known would have understood and accepted as part of the summer idyl, he knew, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... stairs and entered the door. Here we were greeted by a homely idyl. Pierre Barthelemy and his third wife—an excellent woman, whom I later learned to esteem very highly—were just sitting at breakfast. Everything looked very cozy. On the table was a service of ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... was first written for the Friends in Council, a literary club of Kansas City, Mo. It has received the encomiums of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, John J. Ingalls and others for its beauty of expression and dramatic qualities. "Invocation," an April idyl; "The Sea-shell;" and "Mountain Born" sing of the love of nature. "In the Conservatory;" "My Summer Heart;" and "Tired of the Storm" hint of sorrow and unrest and longing. Then in 1886, "Compensation" was written. "Irma's Love For The King" is a favorite; also, "'Sold'—A Picture," written ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... of chiseling her thought on the surface of a "smooth-lipped shell," was obliged to go to Rome in order to get the necessary instruction in cameo-cutting. There her genius developed so much that she began to model in clay, and soon became a successful sculptor in marble. Lucy Larcom, in her "Idyl of Work," says of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... a living idyl in the white moon light; did I gaze long enough, strange fancies would come to me, the statuary would be living marbles, while the leaves of the palm-tree and olive would sing to me of their story as given by ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... have been to an Athenian quite inexplicable. They had, in short, an open and childlike conception of religion; and, as such, it was a sunny conception. Any one who will take the trouble to compare an idyl of Theokritos with a modern pastoral, or the poem of Kleanthes with a modern hymn, or the Aphrodite of Melos with a modern Madonna, will realize most effectually what ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... will be told in future years of these two great souls who were the first to recognize the dignity of human individuality. The domestic life of this couple who set up the standard of absolute equality of husband and wife was an exquisite idyl, fragrant with love and tenderness, a poem whose rhythm was not marred, a divine melody that rose above the discords and dissensions of domestic life upon the lowlands where man is the ruler and woman ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... in her dress, but it was a curiously well-preserved provincial fashion of some years back. In a wider sphere one might have called her a woman of the world, with her unexpected bits of modern knowledge, but Mrs. Todd's wisdom was an intimation of truth itself. She might belong to any age, like an idyl of Theocritus; but while she always understood Mrs. Fosdick, that entertaining pilgrim could not always understand ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... woman, whose gentle, unselfish character left on me an impression that can never fade... Her life, like her nature, was calm and uniform. Her character fascinated the Emperor and bound him down to her." This loving idyl, a sort of interlude in the tragedy of war, may have suited Constant's taste, but it was hardly of a nature to please Josephine, who, like most jealous people, knew almost always what she wanted to know, and from the Tuileries found means to watch ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... mental agony before we know its substantial cause; and we only see the cause as reflected in it "Ned Bratts," again, conveys in its first lines the sensation of a tremendously hot day in which Nature seems to reel in a kind of riotous stupefaction; and the grotesque tragedy on which the idyl turns, becomes a matter of course. It would be easy to ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Profundis, still sounding from very far away. At long intervals the great earth sighed dreamily in its sleep. All about, the feeling of absolute peace and quiet and security and untroubled happiness and content seemed descending from the stars like a benediction. The beauty of his poem, its idyl, came to him like a caress; that alone had been lacking. It was that, perhaps, which had left it hitherto incomplete. At last he was to grasp his song in all its entity. But suddenly there was an interruption. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... enlivened only by a gray mill and a dark brown mill-wheel, from which the spray rises like silver dust, and then floats away, and vanishes in the rays of the sun. Is what is not too common for the painter, too common for the poet? Is an idyl in the truest, warmest, softest colors of the soul, like the "Beautiful Miller's Daughter," less a work of art than a landscape by Ruysdael? And observe in these songs how the execution suits the subject; their tone is thoroughly popular, and reminds many of us, perhaps too much, of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... and placidity that go with such bodies of water, on the one hand, and all their bold and rugged scenery on the other. In summer, a passage up or down its course in one of the day steamers is as near an idyl of travel as can be had, perhaps, anywhere in the world. Then its permanent and uniform volume, its fullness and equipoise at all seasons, and its gently-flowing currents give it further the character of a lake, or of the sea itself. Of the Hudson it may be said that it is a very ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... the risk of life to bring to their homesick chief a drink from the well of Bethlehem; the story of Bathsheba and Uriah—lust, treachery, and murder; the prophet's rebuke; the years declining under heavy shadows. How full of lifeblood it all is! Every chapter is an idyl, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... conjectures have been advanced concerning the significance of this strange adventure and its mysterious name "La Joie de la cour". It is a quite extraneous episode, and Tennyson in his artistic use of our hero and heroine in the Idyl of "Geraint and Enid" did well to omit it. Chretien's explanation, a little farther on, of "La Joie de la cour" is lame and unsatisfactory, as if he himself did not understand the significance of the matter ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... dates, and quinces, and syrups, which may be thought easy to be brought in by a poet. In his idyl of "Audley Court" he gives a most appetizing description of a ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... which the shepherd idyl, begun at five o'clock in the morning, had reached at half-past four in the afternoon. The sun was setting; ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... dealing, generally in some concrete and dramatic way, sometimes in a purely lyrical manner, with the emotion of love. Love among the Ruins, a masterpiece of an absolutely original kind, is the idyl of a lover's meeting, in which the emotion is emphasised and developed by the contrast of its surroundings. The lovers meet in a turret among the ruins of an ancient city, and the moment chosen ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... indeed like a spot of blood-stained mud upon some perfect tissue of silver flowers on silver ground. It is a piece of cruellest realism, because quite quiet and unforced, in the midst of a kind of fairy-land idyl of almost childish love, the love of the beautiful son of the lord of Beaucaire for a beautiful Saracen slave girl. For, although Aucassin and Nicolette are often separated, and always disconsolate—she in her wonderfully frescoed vaulted room, he in his town prison—there ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... that proved on every hand a blessing. Her incomparably unselfish, self-sacrificing first husband himself declared afterwards that this was the only proper solution. Siegfried was the name given to the fruit of this union. The "Siegfried Idyl" of 1871 is dedicated to the boy's happy childhood in the beautiful surroundings ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... I thought of tragic idyl, and of flight and hot pursuit, And the jingle of the bridle, and cuirass, and spur on boot, As our horses's hooves struck showers from the flinty bowlders set In freshet ways with writhing reed ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... of a potentate not usually lavish of his favours, and a valetudinarian, he is allowed to flit to Algiers and Corsica, to enjoy his beloved Provence in company with Mistral, to write for the theatres, and to continue to play the Bohemian. Then the death of Morny seems to turn the idyl into a tragedy, but only for a moment. Daudet's delicate, nervous beauty made his friend Zola think of an Arabian horse, but the poet had also the spirit of such a high-bred steed. Years of conscientious literary labour followed, cheered by marriage with ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... are his, and hideth them under the Shadowe of his Wings—and since that, if the Fiat be indeed issued agaynst us, no Stronghold, though guarded with triple Walls of Circumvallation, like Ecbatana, nor pastoral Valley, that might inspire Theocritus with a new Idyl, can hide us, either by its Strength or its Obscurity, from the Arrow of the Destroying Angel; ye, therefore, seeing these Things cannot be spoken agaynst, ought to be quiet, and do Nothing rashly. Wherefore, I pray you, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... and literary excellence, both "The Market Place" and "Gloria Mundi" are vastly inferior to "The Damnation of Theron Ware," or that exquisite London idyl, "March Hares." The first 200 pages of "Theron Ware" are as good as anything in American fiction, much better than most of it. They are not so much the work of a literary artist as of a vigorous thinker, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... poems were written during the first ten years at Weimar. At the outbreak of the French Revolution he accompanied the Duke of Weimar in one of the campaigns against France. The thrilling atmosphere of the Revolution furnished him with a literary background for his epic idyl, "Hermann und Dorothea." Goethe's subsequent journey to Italy, which was a turning-point in the poet's career, was commemorated in his "Letters from Italy"—a classic among German books of travel. Another eminently successful creation was the epic of "Reynard, ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... replied the Prince; "it is a charming and poetic idyl which you present to me. We should flee far from the world, eh? We should go to an unknown spot and try to regain paradise lost. How long would that happiness last? A season during the springtime of our youth. Then autumn would come, sad and harsh. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of his own name, and, like young and uneducated people, wrote or carved it anywhere; later placed near it that of a new love, Annette, and afterward on finding the tree he shed tears, melted toward her, and made an idyl. He was also seized with a passion of teasing her and dominating over her devotedness with wanton and tyrannical caprice, venting upon her the ill humor of his disappointments, and grew absurdly jealous and lost her after she ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Theocritus's Lament for Daphnis (Idyl i) in which Thyrsis is the mourning shepherd. Hylas was taken away by nymphs who admired his beauty and Bion is the subject of Moschus's Epitaph ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... now occupying a prominent position in life, who said, as he bade her tenderly good-bye, that he would never forget her, no matter what woman reigned by his fireside, or what children played on his hearth. Perhaps, in his stately library, no book was so welcome on a winter's evening as an idyl of rural life, no picture so pleasing as that of some Maud Muller raking hay or receiving the dumb caresses of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... imaginative enthusiasm needed for a Faery Queen. What they possessed was delicacy, refinement, and wit; what they created, while perfecting the epigram and stereotyping the hymn, was a form intermediate between epic and lyric, namely the idyl as we find it in the works of Theocritus, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... extravaganza entitled, Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes, and then, having got his superabundant vitality reduced (it was likely to expend itself in these weird mental exploits), he settled down one day and wrote that really tender and beautiful idyl, Eve's Diary, which he had begun, or at least planned, the previous summer at Tyringham. In a letter to Mr. Frederick A. Duneka, general manager of Harper & Brothers, he tells something of the manner of the story; also his revised opinion of Adam's Diary, written in '93, and originally ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Lapham An Open-eyed Conspiracy—an Idyl of Saratoga The Landlord at Lions Head, v1 The Landlord at Lions Head, v2 Their Wedding Journey The Outset A Midsummer-day's Dream The Night Boat A Day's Railroading The Enchanted City, and Beyond Niagara ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells |
