"Lyric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of poetry in general are the epic, the lyric, and the dramatic. All the other subordinate species are either derived from these, or formed by combination from them. If we would consider these three leading kinds in their purity, we must go back to the forms in which ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... his friend, and by the aid of virtue in the person of Director Holtei, thanks to a magnanimous oversight on the part of Franz Listz. The preference of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. for church scenes contributed to secure him eventually his important position at the greatest lyric theatre in Germany, the Royal Opera of Berlin. For he was prompted far less by his devotion to the dramatic muse than by his desire to secure a good position in some important German city, when, as already hinted, through Liszt's ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... taught the arts of song and penmanship in the four districts from Jericho to Cedar Hill. He sang a roaring bass and beat the time with dignity and precision. For weeks he drilled the class on a bit of lyric melody, of which ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... Elizabeth's reign,—it has no direct reference to Jesus. Compilers of hymn-books have sought to rectify what they deem a lapse in Christian spirit by the substitution of a verse begining "Christ alone beareth me." But the quality of the interpolated verse is so inferior to the lyric itself that it has not found general acceptance. Others, again, with an excess of zeal, have endeavored to substitute "the Cross" for "a cross" in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... notes, I slipped once more From lyric dawn through dreamland's open door, And there was God, Eternal Life that sings, Eternal joy, brooding all mortal things, A nest of stars, beneath ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... spire of the pinnacle of Fame, and whose fine frenzy has as yet given him but a scurvy mundane support, when Scripsit brings home his modest rasher, and finds, on unfolding it, that it is wrapped in the unsold sheets of his last lyric,—doesn't he think that the tallow which helped him to pen the thoughts in the midnight watches was the costliest of feu sacre? When Senator Patriota sits brooding over the speech which has carried the opposition against ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... fond of Corot, and at moments I have thought of him as the heir and successor to some of Corot's haunting graces; but there was all the difference between them that there is between lyric pure and tragic pure. Ryder has for once transcribed all outer semblances by means of a personality unrelated to anything other than itself, an imagination belonging strictly to our soil and specifically to ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... other. Number one pushes number two over. Number two screams: that frightens the baby and he joins in. I call number one a naughty girl, take the persecuted one in my arms, and endeavor to comfort her by trotting to the old lyric:— ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... In poetry, least of all arts, does the Negro conceal his individuality. This is his great gift, but also in another way the spur to further achievement. The race should in course of time produce many brilliant lyric poets. Dunbar was a lyric poet; so was Pushkin. The drama and the epic obviously call for more extended information, a more objective point of view, and a broader basis in general culture than many members of the race have so far had the time or the talent or the inclination to ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... anything else, perhaps, Phoebe Cary will be remembered for her lyric, One Sweetly Solemn Thought. Not long before she died she heard a story of something which this little poem had accomplished, which made her very happy. A gentleman going to China was entrusted ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... the soldier should care so little for martial songs, or the songs that are ostensibly written for him; but that is not the fault of Tommy Atkins. Lyric poets don't give him what he calls "the stuff." He doesn't get it even from Kipling; Thomas Hardy's "Song of the Soldiers" leaves him cold. He wants no epic stanzas, no heroic periods. What he asks for is something simple and romantic, something about a girl, and home, and the lights ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... and Menelaus, and conduct their own horses in the rapid career. [41] Ten, twenty, forty chariots were allowed to start at the same instant; a crown of leaves was the reward of the victor; and his fame, with that of his family and country, was chanted in lyric strains more durable than monuments of brass and marble. But a senator, or even a citizen, conscious of his dignity, would have blushed to expose his person, or his horses, in the circus of Rome. The games were exhibited at the expense ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Man of Ross I 'll daily sing, With vocal note and lyric string, And duly, when I 've drank the king, He 'll be my second toss. May Heaven its choicest blessings send On such a man, and such a friend; And still may all that 's good attend The worthy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... let us have a lyric recitation; let us be brief and clear. What do you want? Explain yourself. I don't suppose that you have addressed this rebuke to me solely for the purpose of telling me that you are in love ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... ancient Horace sweetly chants Such maids with lyric fire; Albion's old Horace sings nor paints, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... effects, which were well known to the Greeks, they associated Music with Medicine as an attribute of Apollo.[178:1] Chiron the centaur, by the aid of melody, healed the sick, and appeased the anger of Achilles. By the same means the lyric poet Thales, who flourished in the seventh century B. C., acting by advice of an oracle, was able to ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Barber in 1723. in two splendid 4to volumes. The first volume containing pieces in most species of poetry, the epic excepted, and also imitations from other authors. His Grace wrote some Epigrams, a great number of lyric pieces, some in the elegiac strain, and others in the dramatic. Amongst his poems, an Essay on Poetry, which contains excellent instructions to form the poet, is by far the most distinguished. He wrote a play called Julius Caesar ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... there was a waiter in this very hotel, but, alas! he is now gone, who sang (from morning to night, as my informant said with a shrug at the recollection) what but 's ist lange her, the German version of Auld Lang Syne; so you see, madame, the finest lyric ever written will make its way out of whatsoever corner of patois ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Master [Dr. Barnard] that he was an admirable scholar, and possessed of genius, was at once placed at the head of a form. He acquired the rules of Latin verse; tried his powers; and perceiving that he could not rise above his rivals in Virgil, Ovid, or the lyric of Horace, he took up the sermoni propiora, and there overshadowed all competitors. In the following lines he describes the hammer of the auctioneer with a mock sublimity which turns ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... more expansive, wholly given up to rapture, an impassioned painter of crude and dazzling pictures, a lyric prose-writer, omnipotent in laughter and tears, plunged into fantastic invention, painful sensibility, vehement buffoonery; and by the boldness of his style, the excess of his emotions, the grotesque familiarity of his caricatures, he has displayed ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... poetry contains in all only about thirty thousand lines; but it includes epic, lyric, didactic, elegiac, and allegorical poems, together with war-ballads, paraphrases, riddles, and charms. Of the five elegiac poems (Wanderer, Seafarer, Ruin, Wife's Complaint, and Husband's Message), the Wanderer is the most artistic, and best portrays ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... magic grace Trailed rosy clouds across each early sin. And, leaning lawnward, is the room where Keats Wrote the last one of those immortal songs (Called by the critics of his day 'mere rhymes'). A lark, high in the boxwood bough repeats Those lyric strains, to idle passing throngs, ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... vas a Polish Jesuit whose neo-Latin Horatian odes and Biblical paraphrases gained immediate European acclaim upon their first publication in 1625 and 1628.[1] The fine lyric quality of Sarbiewski's poetry, and the fact that he often fused classical and Christian motifs, made a critic like Hugo Grotius actually prefer the "divine Casimire" to Horace himself, and his popularity ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... altogether perfect, and dependent for its charm frequently on strange complexities and unexpected rising and falling of weight and accent in its marble syllables; bearing the same relation to a rigidly chiselled and proportioned architecture that the wild lyric rhythm of Aeschylus or Pindar bears to the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the physical charms of the lovers, thorough unreserve of imagery, are conspicuous enough. Just these features, as Wetzstein showed, are reproduced, in a debased, yet recognizable, likeness, by the modern Syrian wasf—a lyric description of the bodily perfections and adornments of a newly-wed pair. The Song of Songs, or Canticles, it is true, is hardly a marriage ode or drama; its theme is betrothed faith rather than marital affection. Still, if we choose to regard ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... was inconceivable by him that New York could reject it. He spoke about the music, but he meant his "production." The man was a marvel in his own line, and such a worker as can rarely be found anywhere. He believed the opera was going to mark an epoch in the history of the lyric stage. And he said so, almost wildly, in late hours of the night ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... roysterer on the ground proposed the King's health, and supported the toast by a ballad in which "Great Charles, like Jehovah," was described as merciful and generous to the foes that would unking him and the vipers that would sting him. The chorus to this loyal lyric was sung by the ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... labored mosaic. Into it all he has breathed a spirit of freshness and vividness: whether it be the romance of Alexander the Great and the exploits of Rustem, or the love scenes of Zal and Rodhale, of Bezhan and Manezhe, of Gushtasp and Kitayim. That he was also an excellent lyric poet, Firdusi shows in the beautiful elegy upon the death of his only son; a curious intermingling of his personal woes with the history of his heroes. A cheerful vigor runs through it all. He praises the delights of wine-drinking, ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... they suffer, and you fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark, standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its innumerable pillars, is not in the least gray with time—no grayer than a Greek lyric. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... dream-world and the real, We heard the waxing passion of the song Soar as to scale the heavens on pinions strong. Amidst the long-reverberant thunder-peal, Against the rain-blurred square of light, the head Of the pale poet at the lyric keys Stood boldly cut, absorbed in reveries, While over it keen-bladed lightnings played. "Rage on, wild storm!" the music seemed to sing: "Not all the thunders of thy wrath can move The soul that's dedicate to worshipping Eternal Beauty, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... composition and his style illuminate the characters, order the circumstances, and render clear, as, for example, in the Sonnets, the subtleties of his thought. A great artist, by his comprehensive grasp of the main issue of his work, even in a short lyric or a small picture, and by his luminous representation of it, suggests, without direct expression of them, all the strange psychology, and the play of character in the situations. And such an artist does this excellent ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Moscow opera a Belgian singer, Desiree Artot, who was then thirty-three years old, a woman whose pictures make her nearly beautiful, and who is recorded as a queen of grace and a queen of dramatic and lyric song. She was witty and magnetic, and Peter Iljitsch, five years her junior, like another Chopin and another Mary's lamb, followed ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... akin to Spry. Bragg was once used for bold or brave, without any uncomplimentary suggestion. The New English Dictionary quotes (c. 1310) from a lyric poem— ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... real admirer of London. We have no space to speak of all his perfect applications of the idea; of the poem in which, for instance, a lady's eyes are compared, not to stars, but to two perfect street-lamps guiding the wanderer. We have no space to speak of the fine lyric, recalling the Elizabethan spirit, in which the poet, instead of saying that the rose and the lily contend in her complexion, says, with a purer modernism, that the red omnibus of Hammersmith and the white omnibus of Fulham fight there for the mastery. How perfect ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... fall, its literary fortunes express themselves, when we try to generalise, in a series of curves, alternate rises and declines, which may be repeated again and again. In English literature out of the unknown past rose the Anglo-Saxon lyric and epic, Deor's Complaint, Beowulf, and the poems of Caedmon and Cynewulf. From the death-like sleep of our language which followed the Norman Conquest rose the heights of thirteenth-century romance. From the dull poetic pedantries of the age which succeeded Chaucer rose the glittering ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... poems that were publisht in three volumes. During his Sea and Land ministry he was brought in contact with seamen and this finds expression in his later works taking character from life on the sea. Many of his verses have found place in Christian hymnology, notably such a lyric as "Jesus, Savior, pilot me over life's tempestuous sea," with that sweet verse "as a mother stills her child Thou canst hush the ocean wild." Another hymn was "Wrecked and struggling in mid ocean, clinging to a ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... not but have hit on before among the rudiments of grammar; but that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe. This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play-writers be; and show them what religious, what glorious and ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... intentional moral"[175] is also full of sense and vigor, but these qualities are so thoroughly diffused through the work that there is no need of particularizing. His praise of Alexander's Feast may be referred to, however, as showing his characteristic delight in objective poetry.[176] As a lyric poet, he says, Dryden "must be ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... wrecks of his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius imparts.[6] But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek its peace where he himself had found it, in Art. So the labour of the scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of man's spirit beyond science, brings also a reward of its own to the devotee. The sun of Art falls in a kind of twilight upon his soul, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... was speaking to himself. "It might work—it might add interest—" Mr. Heatherbloom waited patiently. "Would you have any objections," earnestly, "to my making a little addenda to the sign on the chariot of cadence? What's the Matter with Mother? 'The touching lyric, as interpreted by Horatio ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... friends? Of course we are. Old rivals too, In commerce and adventure the world over. From JOHN THE GREAT'S time to the present, you In Africa have been a daring rover; "The Rover's free"! Ah! that's good lyric brag— He is not free ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... reached the house itself she found an evening reception going forward—the Hardwicks were entertaining the Lyric Club. She halted outside, debating what to do. Could she call Miss Lydia from her company to listen to such a story as this? Was it not in itself almost an offence to bring these things before people who could live as Miss Lydia lived? Somebody ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... Geek has broken his long silence to some purpose. Those who remember his pre-war achievements in the field of polychromatic romanticism will hardly be prepared for his present development, which lifts him at a bound from the overcrowded ranks of lyric-writers to the uncongested heights whereon recline the great masters of epic poetry. And yet it was perhaps inevitable. The thunder and the reek of war (the last two years of which, we believe, were spent by Mr. Geek in the Egg Control ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... pleased were we with this little lyric that we read it aloud two or three times over to each other: for it was a hot summer's day when the early, freshness and bloom is over and the foliage takes on a deeper, almost sombre green; and it brought back ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... a song-bird! The interpreter of the lieder of Franz or Schubert or Grieg who will sacrifice vocal display to the composer's meaning, and who has the fineness of soul to grasp and make manifest the mood of the lyric, how welcome a guest! And yet those who could write undying comic music if only they were composers, who could lift the hearts of their hearers into the skies with "Hark, hark, the lark," if only they could sing, are legion in number. ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... recollect a dozen instances when architecture, music, painting, or some sudden sight of sea or mountain, have thus affected us; and all poetry, particularly all great lyric poetry, Goethe's, Shelley's, Wordsworth's, and, above all, Browning's, is full of the ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... lyric repertoire you have, ARTHUR! Old English glee, Puritan psalmody. Music-hall song, all come equally well to you, it seems. But those roughs mean ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... never allows himself to be caught in undress. Thoreau spurns this punctiliousness, and thus impairs his average execution; while for the same reason he attains, in favored moments, a diction more flowing and a more lyric strain than his teacher ever allows himself, at least in prose. He also secures, through this daring, the occasional expression of more delicate as well as more fantastic thoughts. And there is an interesting passage in these letters ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... future belonged to the latter of the two forms of speech,—the one spoken in the northern part of the country. This, the langue d'oil, became at length the French language. But the langue d'oc, a soft and musical tongue, survived long enough to become the vehicle of lyric strains, mostly on subjects of love and gallantry, still familiar in mention, and famous as the songs of the troubadours. The flourishing time of the troubadours was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Provencal is an alternative name ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the early inscriptions are rude and unskilfully executed; nor can we even assure ourselves whether Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, Kallinus, Tyrtaeus, Xanthus, and the other early elegiac and lyric poets, committed their compositions to writing, or at what time the practice of doing so became familiar. The first positive ground which authorizes us to presume the existence of a manuscript of Homer, is ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... people is defaced by the inconsiderate levity of a few, who never recollect where they have been born, but who fall away into error and licentiousness, as if a perfect impunity were granted to vice. For as the lyric poet Simonides teaches us, the man who would live happily in accordance with perfect reason, ought above all things ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... reality, the pessimistic poetry that suffuses his pages after reading Huysmans's immitigable exposition of the ugly and his unflinching attitude before the unpleasant. And Huysmans's point of departure is seldom from an idea; facts furnish him with an adequate spring-board. Maupassant is more lyric in tone and texture. Edmond de Goncourt, jealous of the success of the newcomer, wrote in his diary that Maupassant was an admirable conteur, but a great writer, never. Zola admitted to a few intimates ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... For the lyric poets the cuckoo is "companion of the spring," "darling of the spring;" coming with the daisy, and the primrose, and the blossoming sweet-pea. Where the sound came from I could not tell; it puzzled Wordsworth, with younger eyes than mine, to find ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... wealth and in power to their AEolian and Dorian neighbours. Among the Ionic cities themselves Miletus and Ephesus were the most flourishing, Grecian literature took its rise in the AEolic and Ionic cities of Asia Minor. Homer was probably a native of Smyrna. Lyric poetry flourished in the island of Lesbos, where Sappho and Alcaeus were born. The Ionic cities were also the seats of the earliest schools of Grecian philosophy. Thales, who founded the Ionic school ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... you can haf all your wishes," asserted the Professor, still in the German lyric strain over his triumph. "It iss the box of enchantments. You haf but to will the change you would haf taig place—it iss done. The substance of the rocks, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was all over Poe seemed very little disturbed. The truth is, he was a wreck, and feeling utterly dependent, clutched frantically at every hope of sympathy and consolation. His only real love was for his dead wife, which he recorded shortly before his death in the exquisite lyric, "Annabel Lee." ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... but the Camoens of the lyrics and the sonnets, where the passion of tenderness finds its supreme utterance. Braga has noted five stages of development in Joao de Deus's artistic life—the imitative, the idyllic, the lyric, the pessimistic and the devout phases. Under each of these divisions is included much that is of extreme interest, especially to contemporaries who have passed through the same succession of emotional experience, and it is highly probable ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... pigeon-wings, the concertina played "Matamoras," Jones continued his lyric, when two Mexicans leaped at each other, and the ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... lightsome mood, Worn as occasion might necessitate, Replaced to-night by sober-sided Sense, That made her beauty like an eve in June, Just as the moon is risen. I, to mark My approbation of her present mood, Rehearsed a rambling lyric of my own, That seemed prophetic of ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... soul and lie Blind to the beauty of the earth, Deaf tho' a lyric wind goes by, Dumb in a ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... is himself a creature, made by something he calls "Quiet;" and what is this but the Gnostic notion of aeons and their subordination to the great, hid God? No, this brief dramatic lyric is far from being an imagination. Rather say it is a chapter taken from the history of man's traffic in gods. Setebos is creative; lacks moral qualities in that he may be evil or good; acts from spleen, and by ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... full choir upon the wind, and fancied that, if moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that. Finally, he took a draught at the Shaker spring, and, as if it were the true Castalia, was forthwith moved to compose a lyric, a Farewell to his Harp, which he swore should be its closing strain, the last verse that an ungrateful world should have from him. This effusion, with two or three other little pieces, subsequently written, he took ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... skilful repetitions and exquisite versification in his "Ancient Mariner," "Genevieve," "Alice du Clos," but nowhere a systematic burden. Campbell has no burdens in his finest lyric ballads, though the subjects were fitted for them. The burden of the "Exile of Erin" ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the self-reliant force By which his way he told, Nor of the Midas-touch that turn'd All enterprise to gold, And made the indignant River yield Unto the ozier'd plain,— For these would ask a wider range Than waits the lyric strain: ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... gathering their utmost force from the sense of communion in a form which has expressed them both, for long generations of struggling fellow-men. The Hebrew liturgy, like others, has its transitions of litany, lyric, proclamation, dry statement and blessing; but this evening, all were one for Deronda: the chant of the Chazaris or Reader's grand wide-ranging voice with its passage from monotony to sudden cries, the outburst of sweet ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... of love has been written by the poets. Every phase through which this ever-deepening emotion has passed, every form which this primary power has taken in its growth, has received from them its own proper expression. They have made even the grosser instincts lyric with beauty; and, ascending with their theme, they have sung the pure passion of soul for soul, its charm and its strength, its idealism and heroism, up to the point at which, in Browning, it transcends ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... sometimes fell upon the earth And those who saw it wept with joy and fright. "Thou art Apollo, than the sun more bright!" They cried. "Our music is of little worth, But thrill our blood with thy creative mirth Thou god of song, thou lord of lyric might!" ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... in silence through the green and gold lyric of the spring day, an elderly company sadly out of key with the triumphant note of eternal youth which rang through all the visible world. Mrs. Purdon looked at nothing, said nothing, seemed to be aware of nothing but the ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the Crescent City not long ago befell The tear-compelling incident I now propose to tell; So come, my sweet collector friends, and listen while I sing Unto your delectation this brief, pathetic thing— No lyric pitched in vaunting key, but just a requiem Of blowing twenty dollars in by ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... pains to lighten them. With Charles X. grief at the loss of his brother was quickly followed by the enjoyment of reigning. Chateaubriand, who, when he wished to, had the art of carrying flattery to lyric height, published his pamphlet: Le roi est mart! Vive le roi! In it he said: "Frenchmen, he who announced to you Louis le Desire, who made his voice heard by you in the days of storm, and makes to you to-day of Charles X. in circumstances very different. He is no longer obliged to tell ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... singers had appeared in public before reaching her age, yet she was only two and twenty, and a year or two could make no great difference. Nevertheless, she was more anxious than she would have admitted, and she had persuaded her teacher to let her sing to Madame Bonanni, the celebrated lyric soprano, whose opinion would be worth having, and perhaps final. The great singer had the reputation of being very good-natured in such cases and was on friendly terms with Margaret's teacher, the latter being a retired prima donna. Margaret felt sure of a fair hearing, therefore, ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... Scandinavian poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in professional and literary hands. The mediaeval minstrels and jongleurs (who may best be studied in Leon Gautier's Introduction to his ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... than in some other way. For example, he had great natural facility in the use of the pencil and the brush, and was strongly advised to take up painting as a career. The volume of his poetical writings, issued several years ago, is proof of his power of expression in verse and lyric forms. Above these and animating them were what Mr. Lawrence Gilman terms "his uncommon faculties of vision and imagination." What he thought, what he said, what he wrote, was determined by the poet's ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... Dibdin ever arise to sing a Devastation or a Glatton? Can a Devastation or a Glatton ever inspire poetic thoughts and images? One would say that the singer must be endowed in no ordinary degree with the sacred fire whom such a theme as a modern ironclad turret-ship should move to lyric utterance. It has been said that all the romance of the road died out with the old coaching days; and certainly a locomotive engine, with its long black train of practical-looking cars, makes hardly so picturesque a feature in the landscape as one of the old stage-coaches with its red-coated ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... pass. You will admit, though, that Peter has his lure. I read about him in the Tavistock Gazette, one of the few papers, I fancy, which does not belong to Lord NORTHCLIFFE; and this is how the lyric (it is really a lyric, although it masquerades as an advertisement) runs, not only in the paper but in my head: "To be let, by Tender" (this is not an oath but some odd legal or commercial term) "as and from Lady Day all that nice little PASTURE FARM known as HIGHER CHURCH ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... of the Incarnation was, as it were, worked for her in her own soul; when she heard in her own heart the beating of the heart of God; when his hand touched her with a tenderness that warmed her place of peace. She had hardly known this flamed and lyric creature for herself. It was as if her soul, resting after long flight, had contemplated for the first time the silver and ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... were swift hills mottled with green and gold, ahead a curdle of snow-capped mountains, above a sky of robin's-egg blue. The morning was lyric and set our hearts piping as we climbed the canyon. We breathed deeply of the heady air, exclaimed at sight of a big bee ranch, shouted as a mule team with jingling bells came swinging down the trail. With ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... O, metre as below, 6: A fine lilting lyric of the Captain's love for his lass; his farewell; and his ...
— A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Songs • Hubert G. Shearin
... phenomenal velocity On vertiginous pinnacle of poetic pomposity! Yet deign to cock thy indulgent eye at the petition Of one consumed by corresponding ambition, And lend the helping hand to lift, pulley-hauley, To Parnassian Peak this poor perspiring Bengali! Whose ars poetica (as per sample lyric) Is fully competent to turn out panegyric. What if some time to come, perhaps not distant, You were in urgent need of Deputy-Assistant! For two Princesses might be confined simultaneously— Then, how to homage the pair extemporaneously? Or with ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... to 1190. The lyric poets of this period were for the most part Austrian and Bavarian knights who lived remote from the French border and were little influenced by the now well-developed art of the troubadours and trouvres. They got their impulse rather from the simple love-messages ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... Arma virumque of the Aeneid. C. 1 (to Cornelius Nepos) is the first of another series of short pieces (cf. the epithet nugae in l. 4). Catullus doubtless published his larger pieces together. The traditional arrangement, due to a later hand, is as follows: (1) The lyric poems in various metres; (2) the larger poems and the elegies; (3) the shorter poems written in elegiacs. Catullus began to be popular as soon as his works were published; cf. Nep. Att. 12, 4 (quoted p. 124). He is imitated in the Priapea, in Ovid, in ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... as a mountain spring; But—when it's bitter with base treachery— It dams itself against all utterance, And either mines the soul, or, breaking forth, Sweeps downward to destruction. Oh! 'tis true, Love is the lyric happiness of youth; And they, who sing its perfect melody, Do from the honest parish register Still take their tune. And so must you. For you Are now in the very period of youth When myriads of unborn beings knock loud and long Upon the willing portals of the heart For entrance into life. Deny ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... of inspiring the lyric writer and composer, the costume designer and the scenic artist. He must possess imagination, suggest the locale, color and architecture—the atmosphere—of all scenes, select the color schemes for all costumes and scenery. He makes up all orders ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you think he puts such a ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... of sawdust at either end a pyramid of powdered gold upon an emerald ground. And in the expectant hush before the appearance of the fielding side, I still recall the Yorkshire accent of the Surrey Poet, hawking his latest lyric on some "Great Stand by Mr. Webbe and Mr. Stoddart," and incidentally assuring the crowd that Cambridge was going to win ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... half lines of lyric—especially when it came to the last verse—here, there, and everywhere he scored them through with a ruthless hand; and with a renewed sense of usefulness, and a conscience well at ease, he returned the much deleted ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... people!—but I cannot convey the pleasure I had in the very elusiveness and mystery of the sign, nor how I wished I might at the next turn come upon the poet himself. I decided that no one but a poet could have contented himself with a lyric in one word, unless it might have been a humourist, to whom sometimes a single small word is more blessed than all the verbal riches of Webster himself. For it is nothing short of genius that uses one word when twenty will ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... faithful reproduction of the intention of both poet and composer. This reproduction includes the revelation of the characteristics of the poem itself, whether lyric, dramatic, or in other ways distinctive. It also reveals the musical significance of the composition to which the words are set. The melodic, rhythmic, and even harmonic values must be made clear to the hearer. But interpretation ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... sat there with the bunches of the camel-dates above him, golden as the sunlight. Then, as the scent of the lyric-flowers, released by evening, warned him of the night dropping like a flight of dark birds on the plain, he rose stiffly, and made his way as usual toward ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... youth imagines that spring-tide and love are wonders which he is the first of human beings to appreciate, and he burns to alleviate his emotion in rhyme. Historians exaggerate, perhaps, the function of music in awakening and guiding the exercise of lyrical poetry. The lyric exists, they tell us, as an accompaniment to the lyre; and without the mechanical harmony the spoken song is an artifice. Quite as plausibly might it be avowed that music was but added to verse to concentrate and emphasize its rapture, to add poignancy and volume to its ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... passion; and Mrs. Pritchard displayed all the dignity of distress. That Great Britain was not barren of poets at this period, appears from the detached performances of Johnson, Mason, Gray, the two Whiteheads, and the two Whartons; besides a great number of other bards, who have sported in lyric poetry, and acquired the applause of their fellow-citizens. Candidates for literary fame appeared even in the higher sphere of life, embellished by the nervous style, superior sense, and extensive erudition of a Corke; by the delicate taste, the polished muse, and tender feelings of a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... full literary production, boasting authors who rank with the greatest of other countries, there is hardly one poet or prose-writer to-day, of recognized ability, who works for the stage, nor can we count more than one or two high-class comedies or lyric dramas of American origin. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... peculiar protection of prince Eugene, by whose liberality he subsists. He passes here for a free-thinker, and, what is still worse in my esteem, for a man whose heart does not feel the encomiums he gives to virtue and honour in his poems. I like his odes mightily; they are much superior to the lyric productions of our English poets, few of whom have made any figure in that kind of poetry. I don't find that learned men abound here; there is, indeed, a prodigious number of alchymists (sic) at Vienna; the philosopher's ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... poet Gascoigne, and the elder of our fascinating trio, is conspicuous for an unswerving, whole-hearted attachment to nature and rural scenes. It is in the pastoral lyric where, with tenderest devotion, he pursues, untrammelled, a light and free-born fancy. His fertile, varied muse, laden with the passionate exaggerations of love-lorn swain, is yet charged with richest imagery and thought, full to overflowing with joyous abandonment, and sweet with the perfume ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... effect of this amazing lyric grows upon me every time that I hear it. Some Psalms, like the delicate and tender cxix., steal into the heart after long and quiet use. How dull I used to find it as a child; how I love it now! But this is not the case with the Venite; its noble simplicity and directness has no touch of intentional ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... day of my sojourn over the tinsmith's shop, Sunday, I drew down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness, such ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Margaret's words poured from her lips. Ordinary as they were, they were a love-lyric ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... every note Of every lung and tongue and throat, Ay, every rhythm and rhyme Of everything that lives and loves And upward, ever upward moves From lowly to sublime! Earth's multitudinous Sons of Light, I heard them lift their lyric might With each and every chanting sprite That lit the sky that wondrous night As far as eye ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... did the two situations affect Una? 10. Note the teachings in xxiii (prayer), xxiv (absolution), and xxv (mortification of the flesh). 11. Observe that Faith teaches the Knight his relations to God; Charity, those to his fellow-men. 12. Explain the lyric note in l. 378. 13. Give an account of the knight's visit to the Hill of Contemplation. Explain the allegory. 14. Find a stanza complimentary to Queen Elizabeth. 16. What prophecy ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... Cercolas and saw thine eyes; But never wholly, soul and body mine, Didst thou bid any love me as I loved. Now I have found the peace that fled from me; Close, close, against my heart I hold my world. Ah, Love that made my life a lyric cry, Ah, Love that tuned my lips to lyres of thine, I taught the world thy music, now alone I sing for one who falls asleep ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... that I would lose, if necessary, all of Milton, all of Shakespeare but a song or two, much of Dante and some of Homer, to be secured in them for ever. My friend (of the Ramillies) and I were disputing about a phrase I had applied to lyric poetry as the infallible test of its merit. I asked for "the lyric cry," and he scorned me. I could find a better phrase with time; but the quatrain just quoted makes it unmistakable, as I think. Anyhow, it will be conceded that there ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... any such false lights as these. By the man in the moon we mean none other than that illustrious personage, whose shining countenance may be beheld many a night, clouds and fogs permitting, beaming good-naturedly on the dark earth, and singing, in the language of a lyric bard, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... was accepted and the convention took place Feb. 7-13, 1906. Half of the $1,200 raised for it was given to the National Association. Most of the delegates were entertained in homes. The meetings were held in the Lyric Theater and the audiences at the evening sessions numbered from 1,500 to 3,000. The State association sent out 20,000 invitations. Music was provided for every session by the Charles M. Stieff Piano Company and clergymen came from various churches for the opening ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... "Bartholomew Fair," and "The Devil is an Ass," which was written too late. It included likewise a book of some hundred and thirty odd "Epigrams," in which form of brief and pungent writing Jonson was an acknowledged master; "The Forest," a smaller collection of lyric and occasional verse and some ten "Masques" and "Entertainments." In this same year Jonson was made poet laureate with a pension of one hundred marks a year. This, with his fees and returns from several ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... Softly sings of mental pain, And mournful diapasons sail On the faintly dying gale. But, ah! the soothing scene is o'er, On middle flight we cease to soar, For now the muse assumes a bolder sweep, Strikes on the lyric string her sorrows deep, In strains unheard before. Now, now the rising fire thrills high, Now, now to heaven's high realms we fly, And every throne explore: The soul entranced, on mighty wings, With all the ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... mankind which is a transmuted disappointment of preposterous claims; to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper. The standing-ground worth striving after seemed to be some Delectable Mountain, whence I could see things in proportions as little as possible determined by that self-partiality which certainly plays ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... lyric stuff; Her bows, I grant, are merely bluff, Her sternmost pile of windy fluff Would leave one cool; Yet never since the world was planned Was aught more lofty and more grand Regarded as a mother—and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... self again, Thou art secure from panegyric, Thou who gav'st politics an epic strain, And actedst Freedom's noblest lyric; This side the Blessed Isles, no tree Grows green enough to make a wreath ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... lawful and good. The poets are again expelled or rather ironically invited to depart; and those who remain are required to submit their poems to the censorship of the magistrates. Youth are no longer compelled to commit to memory many thousand lyric and tragic Greek verses; yet, perhaps, a worse fate is in store for them. Plato has no belief in 'liberty of prophesying'; and having guarded against the dangers of lyric poetry, he remembers that there is an equal danger in other writings. ...
— Laws • Plato |
