"Laureate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... however, that he took any legal measures to obtain compensation for the wrong done him. Cibber is silent upon the subject; because, it has been suggested, the Chamberlain had been instrumental in obtaining him the appointment of poet laureate, which could hardly have devolved upon him in right of ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... "LAUREATE OF THE COMMON HUMAN HEART."—"God must love the common people," said President Lincoln, "because he has made so many of them." Longfellow wrote for "the common human heart." In him the common people found a poet who could gild the commonplace things of life and make them seem more attractive, ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... luxuriant curls; but one of those whom the proud and unfeeling style the dregs of the populace, a haggard, houseless, penniless man, in rags and tatters: I allude to Manuel, the—what shall I call him?—seller of lottery tickets, driver of death carts, or poet laureate in Gypsy songs? I wonder whether thou art still living, my friend Manuel; thou gentleman of Nature's forming- -honest, pure-minded, humble, yet dignified being! Art thou still wandering through the courts of beautiful Safacoro, or on the banks of the Len Baro, thine eyes fixed in ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... insignificant causes, for if Amyntas had been called Peter or John, as his mother wished, William II. might be eating sauerkraut as peacefully as his ancestors, the Lord Mayor of London might not drive about in a gilded carriage, and possibly even—Mr Alfred Austin might not be Poet Laureate.... ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... reason why Tate was preferred to Congreve. Dorset was too practised a courtier not to study the tastes of his master to good purpose. A liking for the stage, or a lively sense of poetic excellence, was not among the preferences of King William. The Laureate was sub-purveyor of amusement for the court; but there was no longer a court to amuse, and the King himself never once in his reign entered a theatre. The piety of Queen Mary rendered her a rare attendant at the play-house. Plays were therefore no longer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... to catch a last glimpse of the University dome, towering over the treetops; and we felt very tenderly toward everyone there. But there were "sweet girl graduates" on board; and, as you know well enough, it required no laureate to sing their praises, though he has done so with all the gush ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... to live on less than two hundred dollars a year, derived from the proceeds of poems, pamphlets and essays. At this time he was already an "Academy Laureate," having received honorable mention for a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... laureate, composed a serious and elaborate epithalamium of 340 lines; besides some gay Fescennines, which were sung, in a more licentious tone, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the "Tina" of Antonio Malatesti, a series of fifty sonnets on a mistress, sent to him in manuscript by the author, with a dedication to the illustrissimo signore et padrone osservatissimo. The pieces were not of a kind to be approved by the laureate of chastity, and annoyance at the implied slur upon his morals may account for his omission of Malatesti from the list of his Italian acquaintance. He carried the MS. home, nevertheless, and a copy of it, ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... Thomson would have been better in rhyme, although still inferior to his Castle of Indolence; and Mr. Southey's Joan of Arc no worse, although it might have taken up six months instead of weeks in the composition. I recommend also to the lovers of lyrics the perusal of the present laureate's odes by the side of Dryden's on Saint Cecilia, but let him be sure to read first those ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... Accepted him, of course. What else would a young fool like her do? He inthrojooced her to the Poet Laureate, thinking shed ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... greatest of English poets, born in Lincolnshire in 1809. He was made poet-laureate in 1850. Many of his poems are well known to young readers' and very popular. He died ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... in short, in which the nymphs may strew the laureate hearse, not only with all the flowers and fruits of earth, but with the Amaranth of paradise and the stars of heaven if the fancy takes them. Of a spirit compounded of these elements and of its quintessence are the 'Nymphals' ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the Iambic poet, gave himself wholly to write impure and lascivious things: so SKELTON (I know not for what great worthiness, surnamed the Poet Laureate) applied his wit to scurrilities and ridiculous matters; such [as] among the Greeks were called ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... "Apostrophe to the Rooster in the Waist of the Ship" in the next, the transition was considered to be rather abrupt; but when he sends an invoice of rhymes to the Governor of Fayal and another to the commander in chief and other dignitaries in Gibraltar with the compliments of the Laureate of the Ship, it is not popular with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the well-attired woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears: Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffodillies fill their cups with tears, To strow the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. For so to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurled, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where thou, perhaps, under ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... little tass of the golden vine for our Northern Star. I am sure no one will grudge the Princess these simple enjoyments, and of the produce of the last-named pleasing plant, I wonder how many bumpers were drunk to her health on the happy day of her bridal? As for the Laureate's verses, I would respectfully liken his Highness to a giant showing a beacon torch on "a windy headland." His flaring torch is a pine-tree, to be sure, which nobody can wield but himself. He waves it: and four times in the midnight ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the Government will not think just now about appointing a Poet Laureate. I hardly think they can be altogether in the right mood. The business just now before the country makes a very good detective story; but as a national epic it is a little depressing. Jingo literature always weakens a nation; ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... more children in gutters, but the son of the woman at the mill, and testing him and assigning his career, first by school examinations, and then by his official performances, we will make him in time Poet Laureate or President of the Board of Trade, according to the bent of his genius." The astonished workman turns round upon the exhibitors of this fairy vision: "And pray who are You?" "Oh, you, we, the people, all of us together. Come put your shoulder to the wheel, and up goes ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... charm for him; and he once declared that he would almost rather have been Ireland than Shakespeare; and then it was his delight to write Greek versions of a poem that might attach the mark of plagiarism to Tennyson, or show, by a Scandinavian lyric, how the laureate had been poaching from the Northmen. Now it was a mock pastoral in most ecclesiastical Latin that set the whole Church in arms; now a mock despatch of Baron Beust that actually deceived the Revue des Deux Mondes and caused quite a panic at the Tuileries. He had established ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Derzhavin is spoken of with reverence among his countrymen: he was the laureate of the epoch of Catherine, and had a fresh ode for every new military glory. There is much fire and vigour in his productions and he could develop the strength and flexibility of his native language which can be made as expressive and ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... coup! All the mischievous North Sea shall be jocund for this, before long. Surely they must name one vessel after you! You are a bloodless Judith, and you have enchanted a perfectly blameless Holofernes. I, your laureate, have no special song to give you just now, but I think much of you, for the sake of darkened fishers, if not for ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... from Italy, and accompanied by the poet Tasso, wearing a "gabardine and a hood of satin." Catherine showed the Italian great favor, as was due a countryman, but there was another poet among them as well, Ronsard, the poet laureate of the time. The Duc de Guise had followed in the wake of Marguerite, unbeknown to Catherine, who frowned down any possibility of an alliance between the houses ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... reputation, whom literati from all parts of the Union would agree in sustaining as specimens of distinguished American poets, though they would differ in assigning their relative position. Thus, if the Republic had to choose a laureate, Boston would probably deposit a nearly unanimous vote for Longfellow; the suffrages of New York might he divided between Bryant and Halleck; and the southern cities would doubtless give a large majority for Poe. But these gentlemen, and some three or four more, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... balance. Hence his work was not a balance of truths, like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the British Constitution. It is intensely typical of Tennyson's philosophical temper that he was almost the only Poet Laureate who was not ludicrous. It is not absurd to think of Tennyson as tuning his harp in praise of Queen Victoria: that is, it is not absurd in the same sense as Chaucer's harp hallowed by dedication to Richard II or Wordsworth's harp hallowed by dedication ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... munificence. Congreve, when he had scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for his first comedy with places which made him independent for life. Smith, though his Hippolytus and Phaedra failed, would have been consoled with three hundred a year but for his own folly. Rowe was not only Poet Laureate, but also land-surveyor of the customs in the port of London, clerk of the council to the Prince of Wales, and secretary of the Presentations to the Lord Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to the Commissions ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... biscuits of wheaten flour, plates of honey-comb, and cream in tall glass ewers. That was the regulation lunch at the Bee Festival. The Bee Festival was nearly as old as the kingdom, and there was an ancient legend about it, which the Poet Laureate had put into an epic poem. The King had it in his royal library, printed in golden letters and bound ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... to the antiquary, that these verses are intended to imitate the antique poetry of the Scalds—the minstrels of the old Scandinavians—the race, as the Laureate ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... King to accept Presbytery! The person sent, however, was the one next to Hobbes in literary repute among the Royalist exiles, the one most liked by Hobbes, and oftenest in his company. He was no other than the laureate and dramatist Will Davenant, known on the London boards by that name for a good many years before the war, but now Sir William Davenant, knighted by the King in Sept. 1643 for his Army-plotting and his gallant soldiering. He was over forty years of age, and had just ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... SWINE: I have heard your Laureate sing, That pity was a royal thing; Under your mighty ancestors, we Pigs Were bless'd as nightingales on myrtle sprigs, 40 Or grasshoppers that live on noonday dew, And sung, old annals tell, as sweetly too; But now our sties are fallen in, we catch ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... director of the race, chiefly because he was a famous traveler as well as a pedestrian himself, and so was a judge of such matters. He was the same of whom the Gander, the poet-laureate, had written ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... unhappy translation, leads the subject away from the mere love-carolers toward the authors of the metrical romances, the bards of Germany. It is at this point that he introduces some forcible criticisms on Tennyson's poetry of that character, and makes it evident that the Laureate might have improved his Idyls by extending his readings among the German chanters of Arthurian legend. The following seems practical and just: "If Tennyson was determined to make the love-passion the chief theme of his work, rather than the religious element of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... strong. He was pleasant, idle, rather vain, and a little inclined to be dissipated. Mrs. Octagon did not know that Basil was fond of dissipation. She thought him a model young Oxford man, and hoped he would one day be Laureate ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... part of the island witch-hanging or burning proceeded with only less vehemence than in Scotland. One of the most celebrated cases in the earlier half of the seventeenth century (upon which Thomas Shadwell the poet laureate, who, under the name of MacFlecknoe, is immortalised by the satire of Dryden, founded a play) is the story of the Lancashire Witches. This persecution raged at two separate periods; first in 1613, when nineteen prisoners were brought ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... ASHTON asks in The Evening News, "Why is the Poet Laureate so strangely silent?" Everyone else will remember Mr. BRIDGES' patriotic lines at the beginning of the War, and we begin to suspect that Mr. ASHTON'S well-known repugnance to writing for the papers has been extended ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... wide and bright, and at its side lies a pond through which the carthorses go plunging. But the town's most notable building stands in the narrower road from the main street to the south. This is the old Porch House, where Abraham Cowley, the poet laureate, spent the last two years of his life, seeking in the solitudes of his garden and the fields of his farm the rest and freedom which the ingratitude of Charles II had forgotten to find for a faithful servant. It was from Porch House that he wrote to John Evelyn, dedicating ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... Dublin, in 1652, and educated there at Trinity College. He was appointed poet-laureate by King William III. in 1690, and it was in conjunction with Dr. Nicholas Brady that he executed his "New" metrical version of the Psalms. The entire Psalter, with an appendix of Hymns, was licensed by William and Mary and published in 1703. The hymns in the volume are all by Tate. ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... saved an empire by his warlike genius, he ruled vast provinces with justice, wisdom, and power, and lastly, obedient to his Sovereign's command, he died in the heroic attempt to save men, women, and children, from imminent and deadly peril." The nation felt that their Poet Laureate, Lord Tennyson, did but speak the simple truth when ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... was introduced to Pope Leo X., as a buffoon, but was promoted to the laurel. This laureate was ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... poetry was attributed to "men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations." Byron's revenge was complete. In his "Vision of Judgment" (published in The Liberal, No. I., October 15, 1822) the tables are turned. The laureate is brought before the hosts of heaven and rejected by devils and angels alike. In October Byron wrote Heaven and Earth, a Mystery (The Liberal, No. II., January 1, 1823), a lyrical drama based on the legend of the "Watchers," or fallen angels of the Book of Enoch. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Thursday, and give alms to the poor in the name of God. He was a very learned and accomplished man; and his writings, both in prose and verse, were equal to those of Zahiri and Naziri. When he first came to India, he resided for some years at Delhi; but having had some dispute with the poet-laureate of the Emperor Mohammed Shah, he found himself under the necessity of retiring to Benares, where he lived in great privacy. As he was a stranger in the country, was engaged in no calling or profession, and received no allowance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... valley, and the river brimming out from the 'monarch of springs.' In these new lawns of Helicon he made a new home for his books, and tried to forget in their company the tumults that had driven him from Italy. In 1340 he received offers of a laureate's crown from Rome, the capital of the world, and from Paris, 'the birth-place of learning.' 'I start to-day,' he wrote to Colonna, 'to receive my reward over the graves of those who were the pride of ancient Rome, and in the very theatre of their ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... mostly Antislavery pieces. "The Yankee Girl" was one of them, fully to appreciate the spirit of which, it is necessary to have been a working-girl in slave-labor times. New England Womanhood crowned Whittier as her laureate from the day of his heroine's spirited ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... and man of fashion, Publius Ovidius Naso, who was the laureate of this gay society, was a few years younger than Propertius, with whom he was in close and friendly intimacy. The early death of both Propertius and Tibullus occurred before Ovid published his first volume; and Horace, ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the most interesting poem is The Thistle and the Rose. This was written when Margaret, the daughter of King Henry VII of England, came to be the wife of King James IV of Scotland. Dunbar was the "Rhymer of Scotland," that is the poet-laureate of his day, and so, as was natural, he made a poem upon this great event. For a poet-laureate is the King's poet, and it is his duty to make poems on all the great things that may happen to the King. For ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... perfection, as yet unrealized on earth, so dominates all his thinking, and has such peculiar features of its own, that even familiar quotations must be quoted here. You will find an exquisite translation of a typical passage in our Poet Laureate's Anthology, The Spirit of Man (No. 37). Specially to be noted here is the stress on the unchanging character of this eternal perfection and the suggestion that it cannot be fully realized in the world. At the same time, Plato is equally sure that it is only through the study of this world ...
— Progress and History • Various
... The Fauconbergs took revolutions calmly and, despite the disinterment of their great relative, accepted the Restoration gladly and lived to chuckle over the Revolution. The forgetfulness, no less than the vindictiveness, of men is often surprising. Marvell, who played the part of Laureate during the Protectorate, produced two songs for the conventionally joyful occasion. The second of the two is decidedly ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... pointed out by the passer-by as the minstrel of the Roman lyre, or, in other words, as the laureate, that his satire provokes sufficient criticism to draw from him a defense and a justification of himself against the charge of cynicism, and that he finally records a greater freedom from the tooth of envy, are all indications ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... Colley Cibber as poet-laureate, and dying in 1785 was followed by Thomas Warton. From Warton the line of succession is Pye, Southey, Wordsworth, Tennyson. See post, under June ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... not soar', are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins 'were as scarlet, they are now white as ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... doing some odd jobs for the man. The food he gave Billy was wrapped in an old copy of the Kansas City Star. When Billy reached camp he tossed the package to Bridge, who, in addition to his honorable post as poet laureate, was also cook. Then Billy walked down to the stream, near-by, that he might wash away the grime and sweat of honest toil from his ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... letter to the public to be set forth presently, he calls himself "poet of the Emperor Joseph II." He was in the habit of thus designating himself and it was small wonder that his biographers almost unanimously interpreted these words to mean that he was poet laureate, or Caesarian poet. After the mischief, small enough, except perhaps in an ethical sense, had been done, he tried to correct it in a foot note on one of the pages of his "Memorie," in which he says that he was not "Poeta Cesario," but "poet to the Imperial theaters." In his capacity ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... league of incest" at Geneva, in 1816-17, with "two girls," Mary Godwin (Mrs. Shelley) and Jane Clairmont. Byron not only denied the charge, but retorted upon him, in his "Observations upon an Article in 'Blackwood's Magazine'" (March 15, 1820), as the author of 'Wat Tyler' and poet laureate, the man who "wrote treason and serves the King," the ex-pantisocrat who advocated "all things, including women, in common." Southey's 'Vision of Judgment', an apotheosis of George III., published in 1821, gave Byron a second provocation and a second opportunity, by speaking in the preface of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... "The Shepherd's Calendar," and three stanzas of the form used in "The Faerie Queene." Thyrsis speaks in blank verse and is answered by the shade of Musaeus (Pope) in heroic couplets. Verbal travesties of "Lycidas" abound—"laureate hearse," "forego each vain excuse," "without the loan of some poetic woe," etc.; and the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... could help it, and that he should not give up to law what was meant for mankind. I fear, however, that successful Law has caught him in her intolerant clutches, and that Literature, who surely would be the nobler mistress, must wear the willow. Last and greatest is the poet-laureate of the West, for Mr. Longfellow also lives ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... selected by the twenty-four to be one of their four proctors, with a seat in the Lisbon Town Council. On February 4, 1513, he had become Master of the Lisbon Mint. For the departure of the fleet against Azamor he comes forward as the poet laureate of the nation and vehemently inveighs against sloth and luxury while he sings a hymn to the glories of Portugal. The play alludes to the gifts sent to the Pope in the following year and this probably led to the date of the ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... called the Greater Ruritania by the cultivated classes who regarded Kipling, Treitschke, and Maurice Barres as one hundred percent Ruritanian. But the grandiose idea aroused no enthusiasm abroad. So holding this finest flower of the Ruritanian genius, as their poet laureate said, to their hearts, Ruritania's statesmen went forth to divide and conquer. They divided the claim into sectors. For each piece they invoked that stereotype which some one or more of their allies found it difficult ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... oft to her parents complain'd, Of my favouring a bard who her empire disdain'd; That at my instigation, a poem you writ, Which to beauty and youth preferr'd judgment and wit; That, to make you a Laureate, I gave the first voice, Inspiring the Britons t'approve of my choice. Jove sent her to me, her power to try; The Goddess of Beauty what God can deny? She forbids your preferment; I grant her desire. Appease the fair Goddess: you then may rise higher." The next[2] that ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... dead, who made to live Past kingdoms, with his vivid brain! Who could such warmth to shadows give, By the mere magic of his pen, That Charles and England rose again! Well sleeps he 'mid the Abbey's dust: And, Laureate! thy funereal verse Shall have such echo as it must From hearts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... to the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. This very tender, beautiful, and pathetic Poem will be found on the other side of this Dedication. It must 'for all time' take its place beside the living Laureate's ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... white and laureate head! Lie calm, O Dead, that art not dead, Since from the voiceless grave, Thy voice shall speak to old and young While song yet speaks an English tongue By Charles' or ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... IX.) by reason of the dedication of "Zanoni" to Gibson the sculptor, in which it was said that the book was not for "the common herd." The story of Lytton's castigation by Tennyson is duly related where the Laureate's contributions to Punch are spoken of. In Lytton's case, at least, Punch forgot to apply Swift's aphorism that a man has just as much vanity ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Heywood, whom the Mermaid Inn Had dubbed our London laureate, hauled the cask Out of its ancient harbourage. "Ben," he cried, Bustling into the room with Dekker and Brome, "The prentices are up!" Ben raised his head Out of the chimney-corner where he drowsed, And listened, reaching slowly for ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Louis Frechette, Poet Laureate, has as a French-Canadian, kindly written an "Introductory" in his own graceful language, and I have to thank him above all for his recognition of the spirit which has actuated me in ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... cannot help thinking, with a little unmalicious amusement, what a cuckoo child the poet must have been to this pair. Here, too, lived a good old man and prolix poet, a friend of Tennyson. It is asserted, on authority, that the laureate, in his visits to the family, sometimes found himself so intolerably bored by his fellow-craftsman that he was fain to betake himself to a bathing-machine, dallying therein and over his bath for two or three hours ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... satire by Alexander Pope—written to revenge himself upon his literary enemies. The plot is this: Eusden the poet-laureate being dead, the goddess of Dulness elects Colley Cibber as his successor. The installation is celebrated by games, the most important being the "reading of two voluminous works, one in verse and the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... every-day, picturesque worthies of good, honest scoundrelism and disreputableness is Sir Robert Louis Stevenson. You can afford conscientiously to stuff ballot boxes in order that his election may be secured as Poet Laureate of Rascals. Leaving out John Silver and Billy Bones and Alan Breck, whom every privately shriven rascal of us simply must honor and revere as giants of courage, cunning and controlled, conscience, Stevenson turned from singles and pairs, and in "The Ebb Tide," drove, by turns, ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... of the threatened dissolution of every tie, legal, social, or political; an age of earthquake, war, and famine! Bacchus, who is known from Aristophanes not to have excelled in criticism, protested that his laureate was greater than Homer; and, though Homer could not go quite so far as this, he graciously conceded that if he had himself been an Egyptian of the fifth century, with a faint glimmering of the poetical art, and encumbered ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... seem a glorious beginning for our heroine, but think of the inestimable luxury of brushing up against Colley Cibber. This remarkable man, who would be in turn actor, manager, playwright, and a pretty bad Poet Laureate before death would put an extinguisher on his prolific muses, had at first no exalted ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... well. It is, in fact, a love-match. The fact that the royal lovers have never seen each other only emphasizes its romantic quality. Their joy in beholding in actuality what they have for three long months cherished so dearly in imagination, is a theme for the poet laureate—who will, however, we fear, judging from his past performances, hardly do it justice. It is, as we have said, a love- match. The royal pair fell in love with what they had heard of each other—the Princess of Basque with the image she had formed in her mind from glowing ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... the idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureate. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... not re-elected in 1626, when the next parliament was summoned, but secured his return for Agmondesham in March 1627. He appears to have been in these years a silent senator, taking little interest or share in the debates, but retiring from them to offer the quit-rent of his versicles—a laureate without salary, and yet not probably much more sincere than laureates generally are; for although his loyalty was undoubted, his expressions of it in rhyme are often hyperbolical ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... generations of phoneticians I know little. Among them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe his Miltonic sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all portraiture. But if the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... of opinion and violent effervescence of sentiment in the first period of the French Revolution. Extremes meet: and the most furious anarchists have since become the most barefaced apostates. Among the foremost of these I might mention the present poet-laureate and some of his friends. The prose-writers on that side of the question—Mr. Godwin, Mr. Bentham, etc.—have not turned round in this extraordinary manner: they seem to have felt their ground (however ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... follies. See what we have done instead! When our growing sense of priggish decorum and our dishonest ceremoniousness of speech made the jester a figure no longer possible, we substituted for him the poet-laureate!—not to persuade us of our follies, but to chant our undeserved praises. And alas, how much more ridiculous, at certain times, he has made us appear—nay, be! With what lecherous sweetness or ponderous ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... had attended on the prince during his last illness. I was supping with Veraci, the poet-laureate, on the eve of the prince's death, and in the course ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... we place small premium in either honor or money on the business of teaching. As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions ranked with musicians, and the Master of the Hounds wore a bigger medal than the Poet Laureate, so do we pay our teachers the same as coachmen and coal-heavers, giving them a plentiful lack of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... among the Elizabethans. For twenty-five years he was the literary dictator of London, the chief of all the wits that gathered nightly at the old Devil Tavern. With his great learning, his ability, and his commanding position as poet laureate, he set himself squarely against his contemporaries and the romantic tendency of the age. For two things he fought bravely,—to restore the classic form of the drama, and to keep the stage from its downward course. Apparently he failed; the romantic school ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... sovereign, but even expressed its opinion that 'there is no living poet of either sex who can prefer a higher claim than Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.' No doubt there would have been a certain appropriateness in the post of Laureate to a Queen being held by a poetess, but the claims of Tennyson to the primacy of English poetry were rightly regarded as paramount. The fact that in Robert Browning there was a poet of equal calibre with Tennyson, though ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Milton a secretary, Bobby Burns a farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth a government employee, Emerson a lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house inspector, and Whitman a clerk. William Morris was a workingman and a manufacturer, and would have been Poet Laureate of England had he been willing to call himself a student of sociology instead of a socialist. Socialism itself (whatever it may be) is not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... walk among the open fields that then lay so close at hand for the Londoner. And perhaps, as the inhabitants of towns often do, he took a pleasure in the very hedgerows unknown to those who saw them every day. The present Poet Laureate, who has spent most of his life in the country, has asked a question to which it is not easy for the countryman to give the ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... poet laureate, and conservative Churchman, wrote the life of Nelson, wrote it on stolen time—sandwiched in between essays and epics. And now behold it is the one effort of Robert Southey that perennially survives, and is religiously read—his one great ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... look about you, you will note that Natural Beauty is having an increasing effect upon the movements of men. There is a very definite relationship between the Beauty of the Earth and her human inhabitants. The Poet Laureate builds his house on the top of Boar's Hill not because the soil is specially productive up there so that he may be able to grow food, for the soil is rather poor; not because water is easily available, for it is very difficult to get, as he found when his ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... week you opened your hoard Of truthful and tasteful tales— How you sat on the knees of the Laureate Lord, How you danced with the Prince of Wales— And we knew that the Sunday Times had scored In ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... worked, indeed, is so good that there would be a difficulty in spoiling it completely; but the prose of the translation in the English Bible, faultless as it is, loses nothing in Bunyan's hands, and if we found these poems in the collected works of a poet laureate, we should consider that a difficult task had been accomplished successfully. Bunyan felt, like the translators of the preceding century, that the text was sacred, that his duty was to give the exact meaning of it, without epithets or ornaments, and ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... hymn, my lord of Surrey?" he cried with a laugh, as the other hastily thrust the tablets, which he had hitherto held in his hand, into his bosom. "You will rival Master Skelton, the poet laureate, and your friend Sir Thomas Wyat, too, ere long. But will it please your lord-ship to quit for a moment the society of the celestial Nine, and descend to earth, while I inform you that, acting as your representative, I have given all needful directions ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... trembled and half wished he could retire. They entered; his apprehension gave way to disappointment, she was not there. Collecting himself, he was presently introduced to a smart, jaunty, and, to do him justice, distingue old beau. This was Colley Cibber, Esq., poet laureate, and retired actor and dramatist, a gentleman who is entitled to a word ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... classes who also respect this ideal, are further protected by sound moral traditions; and the lower classes have a cheery sense of humour which is a great antiseptic against vulgarity. But though the Poet Laureate has not, in my opinion, hit the mark in calling vulgarity our national sin, he has done well in calling attention to the danger which may beset educational reform from what we may call democratism, the tendency to level down all superiorities ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... peculiar intensity—on the two former, because they were patriots; and on the latter, because she was a beautiful woman; and his allusions to them rank with the finest parts in his or any poetry. He seemed especially adapted to be the poet-laureate of Wallace—a modern edition, somewhat improved, of the broad, brawny, ragged bard who actually, it is probable, attended in the train of Scotland's patriot hero, and whose constant occupation it was to change the gold of his achievements into the silver of song. Scottish manners, too, as ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... might afford a gainful and reputable employment to a great number of the friends of the government; and, I should think, instead of having immediate recourse to the deputy-licenser himself, it might be sufficient honour for any poet, except the laureate, to stand bareheaded in the presence of the deputy of the deputy's ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... and short syllables—as far as "long" and "short" can be definitely distinguished in English—correspond precisely to the rules of Roman prosody. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whose investigations in English and Roman prosody have been incessant, has recently published a book of experiments in writing English quantitative hexameters. [Footnote: Ibant Obscuri. ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... al-Walid (died 828). But it is rather the Persian spirit which rules,—the spirit of the Shahnameh and Firdausi,—"charming elegance, servile court flattery, and graceful wit." In none are the characteristics so manifest as in Abu Nuwas (762-819), the Poet Laureate of Harun, the Imr-al-Kais of his time. His themes are wine and love. Everything else he casts to the wind; and like his modern counterpart, Heine, he drives the wit of his satire deep into the holiest feelings of his people. "I would ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... vision tarried; but somewhere we knew The beautiful gates must open to our quest, Somewhere that marvellous City of the West Would lift its towers and palace domes in view, And, to! at last its mystery is made known— Its only dwellers maidens fair and young, Its Princess such as England's Laureate sung; And safe from capture, save by love alone, It lends its beauty to the lake's green shore, And Norumbega ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... The Laureate had read this, and yet considers it the language of a heart that 'never was hardened.' He says that 'the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly overcharged, and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to pronounce ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... virile song have taken the English reading world.... When we turn to the larger portion of 'The Seven Seas,' how imaginative it is, how impassioned, how superbly rhythmic and sonorous!... The ring and diction of this verse add new elements to our song.... The true laureate of Greater Britain."—E. C. Stedman, in ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... itself, in language that pleased Dickens for the special reason that at the time this part of the book had seemed to many to have fallen greatly short of the splendour of its opening. Jeffrey said however quite truly, claiming to be heard with authority as his "Critic-laureate," that of all his writings it was perhaps the most finished in diction, and that it equalled the best in the delicacy and fineness of its touches, "while it rises to higher and deeper passions, not resting, like most of the former, in sweet thoughtfulness, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... cried Hixley. "If I ever get my deserts in this world, I'll make you Laureate to the Forces, with a hogshead of your own native whiskey for every victory of ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... author of a poem entitled 'The Chronicle of England unto the Reign of King Edward the Fourth, in Verse.' It has no poetic merit, and little interest, except to the antiquary. In the reign of the above king we find the first mention of a Poet Laureate. John Kay was appointed by Edward, when he returned from Italy, Poet Laureate to the king, but has, perhaps fortunately for the world, left behind him no poems. Would that the same had been the case with some of his successors in the office! ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... "Swamp-Angels" and thousand-pounders in place of the armaments that gained the Battle of the Nile and toppled over the chimneys of Copenhagen. New modes of warfare thundered their demand for a new poet to describe them; and Nature has answered in the voice of our Battle-Laureate, Henry ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... being an art of lies, but of true doctrine; not of effeminateness, but of notable stirring of courage; not of abusing man's wit, but of strengthening man's wit; not banished, but honoured by Plato; let us rather plant more laurels for to ingarland the poets' heads (which honour of being laureate, as besides them only triumphant captains were, is a sufficient authority to show the price they ought to be held in) than suffer the ill-favoured breath of such wrong speakers once to blow upon ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... day, the Installation Ode was performed in the presence of the new chancellor. Her majesty was present as a visitor. The ode was composed by Wordsworth, the poet-laureate, and set to music by Professor Walmisley. Flower-shows, public breakfasts, concerts, levees, grand university dinners, entertained the numerous visitors of rank during the stay of the royal party. Her majesty had seldom before been attended by so august and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and make them less of wild beasts. Some have thought it omnipotent for this; others have given it as a sign of the decline and fall of the nobler part of us. Neither is, and both are true. Art does, as our Laureate says, make nobler in us what is higher than the senses through which it passes; but it can only make nobler what is already noble; it cannot regenerate, neither can it of itself debase and emasculate and bedevil mankind; but it is a symptom, and a ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... man who had sung, and wandered, and loved; who had been slighted, and imprisoned for a madman; who had escaped and hidden himself, and had yet been glorious; who had come to Rome at last to receive the laureate's crown in the Capitol, as Petrarch had been crowned before him. His life is a strange history, full of discordant passages that left little or no mark in his works, so that it is a wonder how a man so torn and harassed could labour unceasingly for many years ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... to be known, as he played the violin in one church, the organ in another, and got some pupils. His first rise was his acquaintance with Metastasio, the poet laureate of the court. Through him, Haydn got introduced to the mistress of the Venetian embassador, a great musical enthusiast, and in her circle he met Porpora, the best music-master in the world, but a crusty, snarling old man. Porpora held ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... Christmas hymn, "While shepherds watched their flocks by night," is precisely of this order; and, indeed, is of the very period when flourished the greatest of the Provencal noel writers: for the Poet Laureate Nahum Tate, whose laurel this hymn keeps green, was born in the year 1652 and had begun his mildly poetic career while Saboly still ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... His house was ornamented with minarets, adorned with golden balls, and surmounted by a large gilt eagle. He equipped it with costly furniture, with paintings, and a library. He went so far as to procure the services of a poet laureate, whose business it seems to have been to sing his praises. Surrounded with splendors like these, the plain title of "Mr." Dexter would have been infinitely too mean and common. He therefore boldly took the step of self-ennobling, and gave himself forth—as he said, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... pastoralism, its mock chivalry, its display of fine feelings, to set off rather than to mitigate these horrors. The society was founded in the fourteenth century, and it has held annual meetings ever since, - meetings at which poems in the fine old langue d'oc are declaimed and a blushing laureate is chosen. This business takes place in the Capitol, before the chief magistrate of the town, who is known as the capitoul, and of all the pretty women as well, - a class very numerous at Toulouse. It was impossible to have a finer person than that ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... of coloured evening editions arranged in a stiff skirt, like that of a saltatrice, round the waist of the wearer) has many mysterious points. The attire of a person prepared to criticise the Poet Laureate is something so awful and striking that I dare not even begin to describe it; the one fact which I am willing to reveal, and to state seriously and responsibly, is that it ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... and the Anglicized "renegade" were favourite terms of reprobation with politicians and others at the beginning of the century. When Southey's Wat Tyler was reprinted in 1817, William Smith, the Member for Norwich, denounced the Laureate as a "renegado," an attack which Coleridge did his best to parry by contributing articles to the Courier on "Apostasy and Renegadoism" (Letter to Murray, March 26, 1817, Memoir of John Murray, 1891, i. 306). Byron ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... was unusual for them, they spoke of the future, the dim, vague, but so happy future, when Albert was to be the nation's poet laureate and Madeline, as Mrs. Laureate, would share his glory and wear, so to speak, his second-best laurels. The disagreeable problems connected with the future they ignored, or casually dismissed with, "Never mind, dear, it will ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... to the ancient race, even until long after the times of which we now speak—their unconquerable prejudice against defensive armour. Gilbride McNamee, the laureate to King Brian O'Neil, gives due prominence to this fact in his poem on the death of his patron in the battle of Down (A.D. 1260). Thus sings the ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... publication of the first parts of The Faery Queen (1590) raised Spenser to the foremost place in English letters. He was made poet-laureate, and used every influence of patrons and of literary success to the end that he be allowed to remain in London, but the queen was flint-hearted, insisting that he must give up his estate or occupy it. So he returned sorrowfully ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... could confide his patriotic sorrows. Paul Sillery was serving in the army of the Loire. Arthur Papillon, who had shown such boisterous enthusiasm on the fourth of September, had been nominated prefet in a Pyrenean department, and having looked over his previous studies, the former laureate of the university examinations spent much of his time therein, far from the firing, in making great speeches and haranguing from the top of the balconies, in which speeches the three hundred heroes of antiquity in a certain mountain-pass ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... subjective emotional unity. This is the basis of harmony in lyrical poetry, where the succession of images turns mainly on their emotional colouring. Thus, the images that float before the mind of the Poet Laureate, in his In Memoriam, clearly have their link of connection in their common emotional tone, rather than in any logical continuity. Dreaming has been likened to poetic composition, and certainly many of our dreams are built ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... of Great Britain and Ireland." It is ingeniously recommended in a certificate by Sir Richard Steele, or the Tattler, under the fictitious name of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., and in a poem of forty-three lines, by Nahum Tate, poet laureate to her Majesty. It is a duodecimo volume of three hundred pages; a work of no inconsiderable merit and originality; and written in a style which, though not faultless, has scarcely been surpassed by any English grammarian since. I quote it as Brightland's:[78] who were the real authors, does not ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... this voyage around England the Premier visited the Orkneys on a similar trip, in the "Pembroke Castle," the poet laureate being of the party on this occasion. From the Orkneys he sailed across to Denmark and suddenly appeared at Copenhagen, where Mr. Gladstone entertained the Czar and Czarina, the King of Greece, and the King and Queen of Denmark, and many others of their relatives ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... English civilization would be similarly incomplete without the semi-historic figure of King Arthur, glorified through the accumulated legends of the Middle Ages and made to live again in the melodic idylls of the great Victorian laureate. And so one might go on. In many ways the mythology and folklore of a country are a truer index to the life of its people than any of the pages of actual history; for through these channels the imagination and the heart speak. All the chronicles of rulers and governing ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... poets were pleased with each other, and the closest intimacy ensued. It was on his way to visit Wilson, at Elleray, his seat in Cumberland, during the autumn of 1814, that the Shepherd formed the acquaintance of the Poet-laureate. He had notified to Southey his arrival at one of the hotels in Keswick, and begged the privilege of a visit. Southey promptly acknowledged his summons, and insisted on his remaining a couple of days at Greta Hall to share his hospitality. Two years could not have more firmly ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... have been," said Betty Jardine. "But Mrs. Forrester thinks of me as frivolity personified, I know, and doesn't care to admit anything lower than a cabinet minister or a poet laureate when she has her lion domiciled. She is an old darling; but, between ourselves, she does take her lions a little too seriously, doesn't she. Well, prepare for a coup de foudre, Gregory. You'll be sure to fall in ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... general taste when he places his garden "near some fair town." Our present laureate, though a truly inspired poet, and a genuine lover of Nature even in her remotest retreats, has the garden of his preference, "not ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... acquittal, with interest, of the original debt. The fortunes of the Wordsworth family were, therefore, at a low ebb in 1787, and much credit is due to the uncles who discerned the talents of William and Christopher, and bestowed a Cambridge education on the future Poet Laureate, and the ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... wisdom of drawing the attention of Parliament to the silence of the POET LAUREATE. If he is goaded into breaking it we shall know whom ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... The Laureate is among the English poets evidently the great favorite of our guide: the choice does honor to his head and heart. A man must have a very strong bent for poetry, indeed, who carries Southey's works in his portmanteau, and quotes them in proper time and occasion. Of course at Waterloo a spirit ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... given the privilege of selecting his poet-laureate we may be sure he would have named Whittier. For they were both lovers of nature and of man. Both earnest abolitionists, intensely patriotic, loving liberty and the rights of the humblest of God's creatures, they were kindred spirits. So Whittier wrote not alone for New England, ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... also against their Thomas Moores, Samuel Rogerses, and Walter Scotts, who went about the country harping and singing against English oppression. No such turbulent guests were to be received. The plan of making them poets-laureate, or converting them to loyalty by pensions of 100 pounds per annum, had not then been thought of. They debarred the Irish even from the pleasure of running away, and fixed them to the soil ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... him"—one of his fellow journalists has written that he was a jester, but not of the kind that Shakespeare drew in Yorick. He was not only,—so the writer implied,—the maker of jibes and fantastic devices, but the bard of friendship and affection, of melodious lyrical conceits; he was the laureate of children—dear for his "Wynken, Blynken and Nod" and "Little Boy Blue"; the scholarly book-lover, withal, who relished and paraphrased his Horace, who wrote with delight a quaint archaic English of his special devising; who collected rare books, and brought out ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... suffered from all these troubles to an extent which the average Bailee can only fancy by looking with his mind's eye through "patent double million magnifiers." A man so eminent as the Laureate is the butt of all the miserable minor poets, all the enthusiastic school- girls, all the autograph-hunters, all the begging-letter writers, all the ambitious young tragedians, and all the utterly unheard-of and imaginary relations in Kamschatka or Vancouver's Island with ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... honour in these latter days quite as much as it did in the classic times of Augustus with Virgil and Horace for his intimates, and of Petrarch crowned at the Capitol laureate of all Italy during the vacancy of a popedom in the Vatican. Not but that, with or without any titular distinction, authorship is practically the most noticeable rank amongst us. Many will pass by a duke who would have stopped ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... said I, "Tennyson's Brook. Our laureate's description of a moving river is not so sombre as that of the American poet; and, besides, has more life and ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... a writer in "The Argus" referred to him as "the prose laureate of pessimism." His philosophy may be summed up in a few phrases: Nothing matters, Whatever will be is, Everything is possible, and Since we live today let us make the best of it and live in Paris. And through all the opera of ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... They will not let me tell you, I knew they would try to prevent me, those long gray fingers stealing in, stealing in! But I will tell you. Listen, Hortense, please. I saw the hawthorne, pink and white, the laburnum— yellow—not fire-color, I shall correct the Laureate there, Hortense, when I am better, when I—publish!—It is dreadful to be alone in London. Don't come, Hortense. Stay where you are, even if it is cold and gray and there is no color. Keep your amulet round your neck, dear!—I count my ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... Journal, provoking endless parliamentary wrangles, and perhaps helping to develop later on an editor. Memorable were the Young People's Conventions of 1886 and 1887, and Lylians will never forget the patriot Kromm, Spoopendyke Shreve, the poet laureate and a dozen others. The Fourth of July picnics at Pamrapo and Nyack ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... heard of Byron's 'Sardanapalus'?" exclaimed the actor, throwing up his hands. "Why, it's one of the finest things ever put upon the boards. Full of telling effects, and not too many bothering lengths, you know. The Poet Laureate, dear good man, worried my life out a year ago to let him write a play upon the subject especially for me. The part of Sardanapalus was to be devised so as to bring out all my particular—er—capabilities, and any little hints that might occur to me were to be ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... Wilson, declared he was Burns's rival as a song-writer, and his superior in anything relating to external nature! indeed they wrote of him as unsurpassed by poet or painter in his fairy tales of ancient time, dubbing him Poet Laureate to the Queen of Elfland; and yet his unrefined manner tempted these friends to speak of him familiarly as the greatest hog in all Apollo's herd, or the Boar ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... probable that the Poet Laureate,—Homer, will be invited to compose an epic poem commemorating the events of the raid. An edition of 20,000 copies will be issued, including 50 on India paper, with corruptions ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... of the Highland roads was in progress, the late Robert Southey, poet laureate, visited the Highlands in company with his friend the engineer, and left on record an interesting account of his visit, in a, manuscript now in the possession of Robert Rawlinson, C.E., to whom we ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... actor, and musician, during which time he revised plays and composed songs, and grew closely in touch with the life of the Indiana farmer. About 1873 he first contributed verses, especially in the Hoosier dialect, to the papers, and before long had attained a recognized position as poet-laureate of the Western country folk. His materials are the incidents and aspects of village life, especially of the Indiana villages. These he interprets in a manner as acceptable to the na[:i]ve as to the sophisticated, which is saying a good deal for this type of verse. ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... esteem But Virtue's patriot theme, You lov'd her hills, and led her laureate band; But staid to sing alone To one distinguish'd throne, And turn'd thy face, ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... poet was invited to read from his new work. Tennyson, with one leg curled under him on the sofa, chanted Maud, the tears running down his cheeks; and then Browning read in a conversational manner his characteristic poem, Fra Lippo Lippi. Rossetti made a pen-and-ink sketch of the Laureate while he was intoning. On one of the journeys made by the Brownings from London to Paris they were accompanied by Thomas Carlyle, who wrote a vivid and charming account of the transit. The poet was the practical member of ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... of Dryden and his contemporaries are bombast in the ideas and bad taste in the expressions. In Crowne's heroical novel of "Pandion and Amphigenia"[346] both defects are pushed to an extreme which, incredible as it may seem to the readers of Dryden, was never at any time reached by the laureate. ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... in the east: it has again risen in the west. Two suns in one day, two triumphs of liberty in one age, is a miracle which I hope the laureate will hail in appropriate verse. Or may not Mr. Wordsworth give a different turn to the fine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... has been justly called the "Laureate of the South." He was born at Charleston, and being left an orphan by the death of his father, Lieutenant Hayne of the Navy, he was reared and educated by his uncle, Robert Young Hayne. His fortune was ample, but he studied law although he never practised. He ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... has obtained permission from the Laureate's publishers to reprint the following stanzas ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... New Orleans will plume itself upon this dish which drew from Thackeray a world-famous tribute. "In New Orleans you can eat a Bouillabaisse, the like of which was never eaten in Marseilles or Paris." Which is much, very much, from the laureate of Bouillabaisse, as native to Marseilles. The reason of superiority is not far to seek—it lies in the excellence and flavor of the fish native to the Gulf of Mexico. Lacking Pompano, Red Snapper, and Redfish, even Milly could not quite do her knowledge justice. But she made shift ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... speculations of kings. Masters of the destinies of others, mankind flatter them into a belief that their power can almost control fate itself. Accordingly, the visit of the butterfly did not produce much permanent inquietude. The poets-laureate and literati of the court turned it into numerous sentimental conceits; amongst others, that the insect had fastened on the princess's cheek mistaking it for a rose. This idea branched out into a hundred elegies, a thousand madrigals, and fifteen hundred songs, which were sung in all ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... people remember a Nottinghamshire poet of an earlier day who fulfilled with much conscientiousness the duties of local laureate. It was the age of Notts's pre-eminence in cricket, and that, with other reasons, inspired the bard to write some verses which opened with the line, "Is there a county to compare with Notts?" The county of Derby was jealous of its neighbour in other things besides sport, and considered ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... thynketh my wrytynge dull and blont And wolde conceyve the colours purperate Of Rethoryke, go he to tria sunt And to Galfryde the poete laureate To Janneus a clerke of grete estate Within the fyrst parte of his gramer boke Of this mater there ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... yearly letter wrote that she had heard from Mrs. A. T. that the Laureate was still suffering. I judge from your Letter that he is better. . . . I never heard any of his coadjutor Sullivan's Music. Is there a Tune, or originally melodious phrase, in any of it? That is what I always missed in Mendelssohn, except in two or three of his youthful Pieces; Fingal and Midsummer ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald |
