"Sonnet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his friend's obtuseness, and eager to turn even the reluctance of nature into insult. He took his refusal for a sign that he, too, deserted him; and must be called back, after bidding Pennellini adieu, to hear the only condition on which the accursed sonnet would be furnished, namely, that it should not be signed Pennellini, but An Affectionate Friend. Never was sonnet cost poet so great anguish as this: Pennellini went at it conscientiously as if it were a problem in mathematics; he refreshed his prosody, he turned over Carrer, he toiled a whole night, ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... is a sentiment universally established, that it is in the power of the Devil, when God permits, to communicate to man forces above those of Nature. Nor must it be said that God never permits this; the case of the girl Sonnet is unanswerable proof to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... rhymed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland; yet thus much curse I must send you in the behalf of all poets; that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... The Mystic viii. The Grasshopper ix. Love, Pride and Forgetfulness x. Chorus 'The varied earth, the moving heaven' xi. Lost Hope xii. The Tears of Heaven xiii. Love and Sorrow xiv. To a Lady sleeping xv. Sonnet 'Could I outwear my present state of woe' xvi. Sonnet 'Though night hath climbed' xvii. Sonnet 'Shall the hag Evil die' xviii. Sonnet 'The pallid thunder stricken sigh for gain' xix. Love xx. English War Song xxi. National Song xxii. Dualisms xxiii. [Greek: ohi rheontes] xxiv. ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... surviving fame, and for the progress of English poetry, the circumstance was eminently propitious; since it is from the return of this noble traveller that we are to date not only the introduction into our language of the Petrarchan sonnet, and with it of a tenderness and refinement of sentiment unknown to the barbarism of our preceding versifiers; but what is much more, that of heroic blank verse; a noble measure, of which the earliest example exists ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... by Thomas D'Arcy McGee; The Maple; A Tale of the Bay of Quinte; Longfellow and his Poetry; The Cited Curate; The Labradorians; Margaret; The Settler's Daughter; Song; Historical Notes on the Extinct Tribes of North America—The Mascoutens—The Neuters—The Eastern Range of the Buffalo; Sonnet to the Humming Bird; Reviews; The British Quarterlies; The British Monthlies; American ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and twists of intrigue attract us; we love to ruffle it in silk as well as in mail or in homespun. The voices and faces of fair women make music and beauty for our ears and our eyes; we love the harp and the lute as well as the mavis and throstle in the hedgerow, and we pore as diligently over a sonnet as thou dost ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... the highest peak of Furness fells, Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells: In truth the prison unto which we doom Ourselves no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground; Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... breakfasts at Daylesford may have been,—and we are assured that the tea was of the most aromatic flavour, and that neither tongue nor venison-pasty was wanting,—we should have thought the reckoning high if we had been forced to earn our repast by listening every day to a new madrigal or sonnet composed by our host. We are glad, however, that Mr. Gleig has preserved this little feature of character, though we think it by no means a beauty. It is good to be often reminded of the inconsistency of human nature, and to learn to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... first of all these sonnets was that which is now as familiar as honey on the lips of every lover of suave songs—I mean that sonnet which ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... planted on either side with mulberries and poplars, from which vines hung dangling in careless festoons, I found many a bowering shade, where I sat, at intervals, to indulge my pensive humour over some ejaculatory sonnet; as the pilgrim, on his journey to Loretto, reposes here and there, to offer his prayers and meditations to the Virgin. In little more than an hour and half, I found myself in the midst of the Euganean hills, and, after winding almost another ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... A sonnet entitled To a Caged Canary in a Negro Restaurant will present the poet's people and his own manner of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... my numbers, or list to my strains. Thy manual sign he refuses to put To the airs I produce from the pen, or the gut: Be thou then propitious, great Phoebus, and grant Belief, or reward to my merit, or want, Tho' the Dean and Delany [3] transcendently shine, O! brighten one solo, or sonnet of mine, Make one work immortal, 'tis all I request; Apollo look'd pleas'd, and resolving to jest, Replied—Honest friend, I've consider'd your case. Nor dislike your unmeaning and innocent face. Your petition I grant, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... lawyer, but he did not like the profession. He feared "the bar would be his bier;" it absorbed time which he thought should be dedicated to better ends. We think we find the expression of his heart in the lines of the so-called Shakespeare Sonnet: ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... he replied, serenely. "You are a flower-face; I never saw any one who so well merited the term. I must write a sonnet to Flower Face." ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... book is to provide an anthology of English lyrical poetry earlier than the advent of the Sonnet with Wyatt and Surrey during the sixteenth century. It includes 152 poems, ranging between 1225 and 1550 A.D., an essay on Some Aspects of Mediaeval Lyric by E. K. ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Dyce showed, Davies is glancing at a sonnet of Drayton's "To the Celestiall Numbers" in Idea. Jonson told Drummond that "S. J. Davies played in ane Epigrame on Draton's, who in a sonnet concluded his mistress might been the Ninth [sic] Worthy; ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... Brzezina, the musicseller, asked him for his portrait, but, frightened at the prospect of seeing his counterfeit used as a wrapper for butter and cheese, Chopin declined to give it to him; the editor of the "Courier" inserted in his paper a sonnet addressed to Chopin. Pecuniarily the concerts were likewise a success, although the concert-giver was of a different opinion. But then he seems to have had quite prima donna notions about receipts, for he writes very coolly: "From the two concerts I had, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... fable of AEsop, in Robinson Crusoe, in a children's story, in Mark Twain's boyish experiences on the Mississippi, in a Barrack-room Ballad of Rudyard Kipling, in Thackeray's Esmond, in Shelley's Ode to a Skylark, in either a comedy of Shakespeare or his Hamlet, in a sonnet of Dante's Vita Nuova or in his Inferno. AEsop's communication of his point of view is final. So is Defoe's communication of mental pictures. So is Mark Twain's of that Mississippi pilotage. So is Kipling's in his Drums of the Fore and Aft, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... seem When they least know me: therefore I decree That they shall suffer.' Swift doth young Love flee, And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream. Then if we study Nature we are wise. Thus do the few who live but with the day: The scientific animals are they. - Lady, this is my sonnet to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Wild Huntsman), all belong, like 'Lenore,' to the literary inheritance of the German people. Buerger attempted a translation of the Iliad in iambic blank verse, and a prose translation of 'Macbeth.' To him belongs also the credit of having restored to German literature the long-disused sonnet. His sonnets are among the best in the language, and elicited warm praise from Schiller as "models of their kind." Schiller had written a severe criticism of Buerger's poems, which had inflamed party strife and embittered the last years of Buerger himself; but ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... works to have been published last week, and enthusiastic Dullborough to have got half through them. (I doubt, by the way, whether it had ever done half that, but that is a private opinion.) A young gentleman with a sonnet, the retention of which for two years had enfeebled his mind and undermined his knees, got the sonnet into the Dullborough Warden, and gained flesh. Portraits of Shakespeare broke out in the bookshop windows, and our principal artist painted a large original portrait in oils for the decoration ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... descendant of Sir Coplestone's, was a poet, and among his verses occurs this charming sonnet, on that not unknown event in Devon—a ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... The following sonnet was inspired by the democratic revolution of 1848, which shook modern society to its very foundations, and in which the Jews were ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... are made after a good model, because they are like this good model, though each after its kind; even so there is a perfect relation between things made after a bad model. Not that the bad model is unique, for there are many; but each bad sonnet, for example, on whatever false model it is formed, is just like a woman dressed ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... this Sonnet compare Hamlet's "Give me that man That is not passion's slave," etc. Shakespeare's writings show the deepest sensitiveness to passion:—hence the attraction he felt in the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... gained southern Oregon before he was caught and returned. Always, as soon as he received his liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He was possessed of an obsession that drove him north. The homing instinct, Irvine called it, after he had expended the selling price of a sonnet in getting the animal back ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... and over again. What is he doing? He is copying a beauty which he has seen in the invisible world, and which he is attempting to bring out from its hiding so that the men who have no eyes except for the sensuous may also see it. In my library is an original sonnet by John G. Whittier. In almost every line are erasures and interlineations. In some cases the careful poet has written a new line and pasted it over the rejected one. What does this mean? It means that he has discovered a truth ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... of the Italian, while Mr. Norton instinctively chooses for the rendering of Dante's tenderness and simplicity a diction almost as purely Saxon as that of the Bible. This gives the prose of "The New Life" with all its proper archaic quality; and those who read the following sonnet can well believe that it is not unjust to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... poems I have myself a kindness for Noll and Nell, although I don't think you have made it as good as you ought: verse five is surely not quite melodious. I confess I like the Sonnet in the last number of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was none of his choosing, nor of Mr. Cary's neither." And so the dor being given, the belligerents parted laughing, but the war remained in statu quo; and not a week passed but, by mysterious hands, some nosegay, or languishing sonnet, was conveyed into The Rose's chamber, all which she stowed away, with the simplicity of a country girl, finding it mighty pleasant; and took all compliments quietly enough, probably because, on the authority of her mirror, she considered them ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... much to the spoiling the Tongue: And who would he have to restore it? Himself, and his Brethren. Himself a Poet of Renown, and who, if he would once speak his Mind, I make no question is Prouder of his Elegy upon Patridge, and his Sonnet on Miss Biddy Floyd, than of all His Prose Compositions together, or even that elegant Poem, call'd The Humble Petition of Frances Harris, which is ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... the Hotel Grande Bretagne, Bellagio. CULCHARD is sitting by one of the pillars, engaged in constructing a sonnet. On a neighbouring seat a group of smart people are talking over their acquaintances, and near them is another visitor, a Mr. CRAWLEY STRUTT, who is watching his opportunity ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... easily, a skeleton verse, in which two or three words of each line are omitted, is given the child to fill up. By and by the more difficult forms of metre are outlined, until at length a feebleminded child can make out a sonnet, completely equipped with its four pairs of rhymes in the first section and its three pairs in the ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... contrast between sentiments and conduct, which this transfer of the seat of sensibility from the heart to the fancy produces, the annals of literary men afford unluckily too many examples. Alfieri, though he could write a sonnet full of tenderness to his mother, never saw her (says Mr. W. Rose) but once after their early separation, though he frequently passed within a few miles of her residence. The poet Young, with all his parade of domestic sorrows, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... on his grey mare, Meg, A better never lifted leg, Tam skelpit on thro' dub and mire, Despising wind, and rain, and fire; Whiles holding fast his gude blue bonnet; Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet; Whiles glow'ring round wi' prudent cares, Lest bogles catch him unawares: Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh, Whare ghaists and houlets ...
— Tam O'Shanter • Robert Burns
... Wordsworth's case the reader is not conscious of a magnetic personality drawing his judgment away from purely aesthetic standards? Again, consider the case of Keats. For us the facts of his life must color almost every line he wrote. How are we to determine whether his sonnet, When I Have Fears, is great poetry or not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love for Fanny Brawne, and his ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... evolved a whole kitchen philosophy of my own. I find the kitchen the shrine of our civilization, the focus of all that is comely in life. The ruddy shine of the stove is as beautiful as any sunset. A well-polished jug or spoon is as fair, as complete and beautiful, as any sonnet. The dish mop, properly rinsed and wrung and hung outside the back door to dry, is a whole sermon in itself. The stars never look so bright as they do from the kitchen door after the ice-box pan is emptied and the whole place is 'redd ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... ladies wear a hat Fit to write a sonnet on: Kitty has—the naughty cat— Neither hat nor bonnet on! Fifty silks has Madame Tate— She who loves to spank it on: All her clothes are worn by Kate When she ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... the hope of her marvelous salutation there no longer remained to me an enemy, nay, a flame of charity possessed me which made me pardon everyone who had done me wrong." Under the influence of her salutation, Dante tells us that he devised this sonnet: ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there"... So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... exemplified in Etrenes de poezie Franzoeze an vers mezures (1514). His works were published in 4 volumes, entitled Oeuvres en rime (1573), consisting of Amours, Jeux, Passetemps, et Poemes, containing, among much that is now hardly readable, some pieces of infinite grace and delicacy. His sonnet on the Roman de la Rose was said to contain the whole argument of that celebrated work, and Colletet says it was on everybody's lips. He also wrote a celebrated sonnet in praise of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew. Baif was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... fame rests on his being the father of his son. Of the boy's mother we have only obstructed glances and glimpses through half-flung lattices in the gloaming. Raphael was her only child. She was scarce twenty when she bore him. In a sonnet written to her, on the back of a painting, Raphael's father speaks of her wondrous eyes, slender neck, and the form too frail for earth's rough buffets. Mention is also made of "this child born in purest love, and sent by God to comfort ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... was from Wordsworth's Sonnet on London Bridge, of course," she smiled up at him. "You ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... over Fidele, supposed to be dead 87 Verses written on a Paper which contained a Piece of Bride-cake, given to the Author by a Lady 89 To Miss Aurelia C——R, on her Weeping at her Sister's Wedding 91 Sonnet 91 Song. The Sentiments borrowed from Shakespeare 92 On our late Taste in ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... offer some peculiarities. He has one composed of lines of six syllables, others of eight, besides those considered regular in French, consisting, namely, of twelve syllables. The following sonnet addressed to Roumania appears to be unique ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... other Camoens sonnets to look over. Writing on 29th October 1882, he says, "Many thanks for the sonnet. Your version is right good, but it is yourself, not me. In such a matter each man expresses his own individuality. I shall follow your advice about the quatrains and tercets. No. 19 is one of the darkest on account of its extreme simplicity. I ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... The first night I felt much disappointed in Miss K. In the gay parts a coquettish, courtly manner marred the wild mirth and wanton wit of Beatrice. Yet, in everything else, I liked her conception of the part; and where she urges Benedict to fight with Claudio, and where she reads Benedict's sonnet, she was admirable. But I received no more pleasure from Miss K.'s acting out the part than I have done in reading it, and this disappointed me. Neither did I laugh, but thought all the while of Miss K.,—how very graceful she was, and whether this and that way of rendering the part ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... now Panormitano," she said. "Here is something else upon which you shall give me your judgment." And she set before me a sheet upon which there was a sonnet writ in her own hand, which was as beautiful as any copyist's that I have ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... of his own proud success in love, and seized Petrarch's sonnets, which lay near him on the table, to compare his own new sonnet with ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... of Reading Gaol' And here's a sonnet, 'It was not like your great and gracious ways'—? Coventry Patmore. Well, young man, ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... least the Oriel common room) and he were becoming more estranged daily. How keenly he felt the estrangement, not from Oxford, but from old friends, about this time, can be read only in his own words." It is in such poems as the "Qua Cursum Ventus," or the sonnet beginning, "Well, well,—Heaven bless you all from day to day!" that it is to be read. These, with a few other fugitive pieces, were printed, in company with verses by a friend, as one part of a small volume entitled, "Ambarvalia," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... grain of common-sense entered the brain of the flower of chivalry; you might call it the dawn of reason. We had spent part of the morning in High Street, 'the noblest old street in England,' as our dear Hawthorne calls it. As Wordsworth had written a sonnet about it, Aunt Celia was armed for the fray—a volume of Wordsworth in one hand, and one of Hawthorne in the other. (I wish Baedeker and Murray didn't give such full information about what one ought to read before one can approach ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... perfidy"; and in the relations between men and women unfaithfulness is held to cancel all bonds, however indissoluble they may seem. Now and again, it is true, some strange voice reaches us, keyed to a different music. Shakespeare, for example, in his famous one hundred and sixteenth sonnet, boldly ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... The following sonnet, addressed to the new Magistrate, by the elegant and learned Abbe Bettolini, will entertain such of ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... "But it was a good battle-cry, Allen. I remember your reciting verses at Cambridge in your college-days, but it was generally 'A sonnet to your mistress' eyebrows,'—some fair one who had conquered your heart for a ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... a life—that was enough for them! They asked no such inconvenient reward as marriage: indeed, one or two of them had already obtained that boon from others. To serve their purpose, and then, if it must be, to be forgotten, or—wild hope—to be embalmed in a sonnet sequence: that was ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... wanted to linger near them, and their glances caused him strange emotions. He resented this, as an invasion of his privacy; it was inconsistent with his hermit-instinct. Thyrsis wished no women in his life save the muses with their star-sewn garments. He had been fond of a line from a sonnet ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... hero of the day," he said, "to the young poet who combines the gift of the prosateur with the charm and poetic faculty of Petrarch in that sonnet-form which Boileau declares to be ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch[708] or Ariosto,[709] filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that Cowper's poetry lacked the true note of passion, that there was an absence of the "lyric cry." I protest that I find the note of passion in the "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture," in his two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce not less marked than I find it in other great poets. I find in The Task and elsewhere in Cowper's works a note of enthusiasm for human brotherhood, for man's responsibility for man, for universal kinship, that had scarcely any place in literature before he wrote quietly ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... future good depends: Serve him. And so my sonnet ends, With, thank ye, thank ye, honest friends, For all your ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... continued his work of self-education. Some of his Cambridge friends appear to have grown a little anxious, on seeing one who had distinction stamped upon his brow, doing what the world calls nothing; and Milton himself was watchful, and even suspicious. His second sonnet records ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... leader, the Advocate Armellini, who pronounced the downfall of the Pope from his temporal sovereignty. This consistorial advocate had, six times over, solemnly sworn fidelity to the Pontiff. He had even composed in honor of the Papacy a sonnet, in which are read these remarkable words: "I spoke with Time, and asked it what had become of so many empires, of those kingdoms of Argos and Thebes and Sidon, and so many others which had preceded ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... memory comes—of a friend who,—volunteering such a service to a sonnet-writing somebody, gave him a taste of his quality in a side-column of short criticisms on sonnet the First, and starting off the beginning three lines with, of course, 'bad, worse, worst'—made by a generous mintage of words to meet the sudden run of his epithets, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... bring out the character of Francis. It has rather the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing, but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman, because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline, because the artist cannot bear to put in a black ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... mere tale of a tub: my words are idle. But to express the sonnet by natural reason, [Enter Giovanni. When stags grow melancholic you 'll ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... weeks. Two of the Sonnets in the book were addressed to Ellen Terry, one as "Portia," the other as "Henrietta Maria"; and these partly account for the book's popularity, for Miss Terry was delighted with them and praised the book and its author to the skies.[6] I reproduce the "Henrietta Maria" sonnet here as a fair ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... falls naturally in two parts; the first is a sonnet sequence describing the author's capture with his battalion in the great March Offensive, his weary tramp as a prisoner, and internment in a German camp; the second consists of a series of meditative sonnets on these inevitably suggested by close confinement. ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... School-master. "And only shows how in weak hands so beautiful a thing as the sonnet can ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... half its population exasperated enemies of England, and the rest but doubtful friends, and with the legitimate sovereign of that country, "the daughter of debate, who discord still did sow,"—[Sonnet by Queen Elizabeth.]—a prisoner in Elizabeth's hands, the central point around which treason was constantly crystallizing itself, it was not strange that with the known views of the Queen on the subject of the reformed Dutch religion, England ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of the bitterness of this reconstruction period that I penned the following sonnet to the memory of JOHN M. DANIEL, editor of the Richmond Examiner, to which paper I contributed more than threescore editorial articles ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... dear, what of it? Poor old Adrian is capable of anything. Nothing he did would ever surprise me. He might write a sonnet to a Royal Princess's first set of false teeth or steal the tin cup from a blind beggar's dog, and he would be still the same beautiful, charming, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... month. She is very accomplished, thoroughly understands commercial writings, and has at her finger ends more than two thousand characters of learned writing. In a poetical competition she gained the first prize with a sonnet composed in praise of 'the blossoms of the black-thorn hedges seen in the dew of early morning.' Only, she is not very pretty: one of her eyes is smaller than the other, and she has a hole in her cheek, resulting from an ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... imaginative and intellectual power, leveling him down to the amoral instinct of the brute. "How much more," said Jesus, "is a man better than a sheep!" One of the greatest of English humanists was Matthew Arnold. You remember his sonnet, entitled, alas! "To a Preacher," ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... small sweet meadow-flowers and the mossy marbles. He was pleased with everything; he had never before been pleased with so many things at once. Old impressions, old enjoyments, renewed themselves; one evening, going home to his room at the inn, he wrote down a little sonnet to which he prefixed the title of "Rome Revisited." A day or two later he showed this piece of correct and ingenious verse to Isabel, explaining to her that it was an Italian fashion to commemorate the occasions of life by a ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... Council relating to the Piedmontese Massacre, May 1655: Sudden Demand on Milton's Pen in that Business: His Letter of Remonstrance from the Protector to the Duke of Savoy, with Ten other Letters to Foreign States and Princes on the same Subject (Nos. LIV.-LXIV.): His Sonnet on the Subject.—Publication of the Supplementum to More's Fides Publica: Account of the Supplementum, with Extracts: Milton's Answer to the Fides Publica and the Supplementum together in his Pro Se Defensio, Aug. 1655: Account of that ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... classic scenes amid For rest and peace he hankers, Amari aliquid His joys aesthetic cankers: Whate'er he sees, he knows He has to write upon it A paragraph of prose Or possibly a sonnet: ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... the Essex Head, in Essex street, where an old servant of Mr. Thrale's was the landlord. "Its principles (he said) were to be laid in frequency and frugality; and he drew up a set of rules, which he prefaced with two lines from a Sonnet ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... hash," said Mrs. Dawe. "It may not be art, but I do wish you would do a five-course Marion Crawford serial with an Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for dessert. I'm hungry." ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... external events and circumstances. Epic poetry is written in a grand style, generally in pentameter, or hexameter; while the lyric adopts any verse that suits the emotion. The principal classes of lyric poetry are the song, the ode, the elegy, and the sonnet. ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She already beholds the face of the Ever-blessed. And the envoye of the Vita Nuova is the promise of the Commedia. "After this sonnet" (in which he describes how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady receiving honor and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed spirit)—"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this blessed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... drama are equally one-sided. The exquisite literary faculty of Charles Lamb revelled in detecting beauties which had been covered with the dust of oblivion during the reign of Pope. His appreciation was intensified by that charm of discovery which finds its typical utterance in Keats's famous sonnet. He was scarcely a more impartial judge of Fletcher or Ford than 'Stout Cortes' of the new world revealed by his enterprise. We may willingly defer to his judgment of the relative value of the writers whom he discusses, but we must qualify his judgment of their intrinsic excellence ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Charles's life. The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in the play of Henry V.; and it is at least odd that we can trace a resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, "I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle; and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene would be quite in character for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... blushed, and giggled convulsively. "No offence. Quite natural, I'm sure. You have much better things to do than to read my articles, Miss Virginia. I only thought you might have happened to read Mr. Spence's 'Sonnet to Alpha' in our ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... conversation, raging and sobbing and howling like a demoniac, but never asking to be untied; until, at the end of a fortnight or three weeks, he was rewarded, most characteristically, by being at once delivered of all love for his lady, and inspired with the idea for a sonnet. ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a milliner's whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such a nice lady;—and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and what I was then, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... against the vow foreswearing it is made clear. Notice, too, that the symptom, so to speak, of the labour of Love or Cupid as opposed to the Herculean labor of "warre against your owne affections" is at once made evident in Armando. This symptom is the desire to write a Sonnet. In what way, then, does it appear from the Story of Act I, that witness will be borne to the success of love's labor over the ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... is well known to be the commonest thing in the world. Or one might make the words the Backbone of a triolet, only one would have to split them up to fit it into the metre; or one might make it the decisive line in a sonnet; or one might make a pretty little lyric of it, to the tune of 'Madame ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... imitated from the "Teseide" of Boccaccio; "Anelida and Arcite" contains several stanzas taken from the same original; "Troilus and Criseyde" is an adaptation of Boccaccio's "Filostrato"; Chaucer introduces into it a sonnet of Petrarch[496]; the idea of the "Legend of Good Women" is borrowed from the "De claris Mulieribus" of Boccaccio. Dante's journeys to the spirit-world served as models for the "Hous of Fame," where the English poet is borne off by an eagle of golden hue. In it Dante is mentioned ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... "That sonnet, Abate, Beautiful, I am quite exhausted by it. Your phrases turn about my heart And stifle me to swooning. Open the window, I beg. Lord! What a strumming of fiddles and mandolins! 'Tis really a shame to stop indoors. Call my maid, ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... Preaching in Sing Sing Chapel. Anecdotes of Dr. William Rogers. Interesting Cases of Reformed Convicts. Letter from Dr. Walter Channing. Anecdotes of William Savery and James Lindley at the South. Sonnet by William L. Garrison. His sympathy with Colored People turned out of the Cars. A Methodist Preacher from the South. His Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Law. His Domestic Character. He attracts Children. His Garden described in a Letter to L.M. Child. Likenesses of him. Letter concerning ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... commendatory sonnet in the Second Folio (1632), Milton took the Jonsonian view of Shakespeare, whose "easy numbers" he contrasted with "slow-endeavouring Art," and readers of the poems of 1645 found in L'Allegro an early formulation of what was to become the stock comparison of the two great ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... no doubt, an exaggerated impression of Cowper's indifference to literature. His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters. But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature as Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer. Though Cowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer into English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical reservations. "I should not have chosen to have been the original author ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... and his friends are brought vividly before us from the time when, a sensitive child, his eyes first beheld Beatrice and his new life began, to the painful hours of bereavement and exile. The poet, it is known, made a curious sonnet out of a dream he had after his first meeting with Beatrice, and, in accordance with the fashion of the day, sent it to various well-known poets, asking them to interpret his vision. The answers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... things conduced to bring the baronet to a point. He had observed that Miss Keeldar looked pensive and delicate. This new phase in her demeanour smote him on his weak or poetic side. A spontaneous sonnet brewed in his brain; and while it was still working there, one of his sisters persuaded his lady-love to sit down to the piano and sing a ballad—one of Sir Philip's own ballads. It was the least ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Sterling exhorted, "in religion and radicalism." He saw life differently; more practically, if more selfishly; to one rhapsodizing about the "plain living and high thinking" of Wordsworth's sonnet, he answered: "You know that you prefer dining with people who have good glass and china and plenty of servants." For Tennyson's poetry he even then felt admiration; quotes, nay, misquotes, in "Eothen," from the little known "Timbuctoo"; {3} and from "Locksley Hall"; and supplied ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... handling complex problems, and a fine sense of the picturesque is no more a qualification for dealing effectively with the difficulties of an old society, than the composition of Wordsworth's famous sonnet on Westminster Bridge was any reason for supposing that the author would have made a ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... Eureka]'; and, throwing down a scroll, rushed as precipitately out of the room. The scroll was of vellum; the title to the contents of it was penned in golden letters, and softly-painted bunches of roses graced each corner. It contained a sonnet to love, and another to friendship; but a principal mistake which struck us, on the very threshold of our critical examination, was that he had incorrectly entitled these sonnets. Friendship should have been ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... said Roland. "I have always wanted to see that famous fountain of Vaucluse, the Hippocrene of Petrarch. You know his sonnet? ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... if for tea and toast you yearned, What joy to find upon it The chambermaid had coyly laid A palpitating sonnet. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... on the sidewalk, their hats on the back of their heads, arguing fiercely. One had slightly long hair. The other looked the more truculent, and was saying to him, intensely, "See here! We contracted with you to supply us with sonnets at five dollars per sonnet—" I passed up a side-street, one of those deserted ways that abound just off the big streets, resorts, apparently, for such people and things as are not quite strident or not quite energetic enough for the ordinary glare of life; ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... with the organ into whose depths the lost chord sank, never to return. I dashed off the jests well enough, but somewhere between the keys and the types they were lost, and the results, when I came to scan the paper, were depressing. And once I tried a sonnet on the keys. Exactly how to classify the jumble that came out of it I do not know, but it was curious enough to have appealed strongly to D'Israeli or any other collector of the literary oddity. More singular than the sonnet, though, was the fact that when I tried to write my name ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... in his recitation): Every poet that ever lived has put that thought into a sonnet. He must: he can't help it. (He looks to her for assent, and notices her absorption in the poker.) Haven't you been listening? (No ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... of the lovers, who are about to separate. A modification of it is familiar to us all in Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers debate whether the song they hear is of the nightingale or the lark; the aubade, with the two other great forms of love-poetry then floating in the world, the sonnet and the [220] epithalamium, being here refined, heightened, and inwoven into the structure of the play. Those, in whom what Rousseau calls les frayeurs nocturnes are constitutional, know what splendour they give to ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... publishing. This haste to rush into print is one of the bad signs of the times—a symptom of the unhealthy activity which was first called out by the French revolution. In the Elizabethan age, every decently-educated gentleman was able, as a matter of course, to indite a sonnet to his mistress's eye-brow, or an epigram on his enemy; and yet he never dreamt of printing them. One of the few rational things I have met with, Eleanor, in the works of your very objectionable pet Mr. Carlyle—though indeed his style is too intolerable to have allowed ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... patriotic admirer who had written that the Poles would some day be as proud of Chopin as the Germans were of Mozart. And when in addition to this the editor of a local paper told him he had in type a sonnet on him, Chopin was greatly alarmed, and begged him not to print it; for he knew that such homage would create envy and enemies, and he declared that after that sonnet was published he would not dare to read any longer what ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... worlds I steer, And seas are calm and skies are clear, And faith in lively exercise, And distant hills of Canaan rise, My soul for joy then claps her wings, And loud her lovely sonnet ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... prose to Charizi, but again he shows his devotion to two masters by writing Hebrew sonnets. The sonnet was new then to Italian verse, and Immanuel's Hebrew specimens thus belong to the earliest sonnets written in any literature. It is, indeed, impossible to convey a just sense of the variety of subject and form in ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... was sure that Peter's love for his wife, though perhaps that of a primitive man, was of the true Portuguese stamp, and with this view composed the following pleasing Sonnet: ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... this night, ile put in practise: Therefore, sweet Protheus, my direction-giuer, Let vs into the City presently To sort some Gentlemen, well skil'd in Musicke. I haue a Sonnet, that will serue the turne To giue the on-set to thy ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... London, he, then a married man, had an intrigue with a married woman, of which there are indications that he was afterwards deeply ashamed. One little incident seems curiously traceable: that he had given her a set of tablets which his friend had given him; and the sonnet in which he excuses himself to his friend for having done so, seems to us the only piece of special pleading, and therefore ungenuine expression, in the whole. This friend, to whom the rest of the sonnets are addressed, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... or Galasp." In this line of Sonnet XI, Milton seems to speak of three different persons, but in reality they are one and the same; i.e., Macdonnel, son of Colkittoch, son of Gillespie (Galasp). Colkittoch ...
— 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.
... Moliere's passionate fondness for his profession, I imagine he must now and then have felt some slight, or suffered from some want of consideration. Hence perhaps the above sentence. Compare with this Shakespeare's hundred and eleventh sonnet: ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... Clovis, "I only guessed. When you wanted to turn the prosaic lorry of commerce into a feathered poem flitting through the verdure of a tropical forest, I knew you must be working up a sonnet, and Florrie was the only female name that suggested itself ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... blubbering for? Afraid of these crocodiles, eh?' The little sentimentality which exceeded was forced to take its course down the inside of the nose. We have other work in this world than indulging in sentimentality of the 'Sonnet to ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... nutmeg song, but beauteous still is the sonnet! Near the T'u Mei to sleep, makes e'en a dream ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... birds, or falling rains, or other "meteors outside," if the preacher proved dull or the hymns undevout. But I found my attention was well held within. Not that the preaching was anything to be repeated. The sermon was short, unpretending, but alive and devout. It was a sonnet, all on one theme; that theme pressed, and pressed, and pressed again, and, of a sudden, the preacher was done. "You say you know God loves you," he said. "I hope you do, but I am going to tell you once more that he loves you, and once more and once more." What pleased ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... restlessly pacing to and fro in the confined space of the chamber allotted to him at Whitehall, and this sonnet, one of the most beautiful which he ever wrote, will express better than any other words what effect his ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... Georg Friedrich, Margrave of Baden, was a partisan of the Calvinistic Friedrich V, Elector Palatine, who was chosen King of Bohemia in 1619, and is known as the "Winter King." As the sonnet shows, the defeated Protestants set high hopes on the Margrave of Baden, who commanded an army of 20,000 men; but he was soon defeated by the imperial forces and died ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... poets together. Shelley, "responding like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment," had his chance here. It took only four days for Cornelia's attractions to begin to dim Harriet's. Shelley arrived on the 27th of July; on the 31st he wrote a sonnet to Harriet in which "one detects already the little rift in the lover's lute which had seemed to be healed or never to have gaped at all when the later and happier sonnet to Ianthe was written"—in September, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the earthquake of Lisbon or the eruption of Mont Pelee, treating human communities just as an elephant might treat an ant-hill. It is this sense of the immeasurable disproportion in things that a pessimist poet has expressed in the well-known sonnet:— ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... Butler's "Seven Sonnets" (except Nos. I. and V.), by Ingroja. In manuscript. His translation of Sonnet I. is printed with the "Seven Sonnets." He could not manage Sonnet V. I think the repetitions ...
— The Samuel Butler Collection - at Saint John's College Cambridge • Henry Festing Jones
... no use; he must get up. So, striking a light, he was presently deep in the composition of a fiery sonnet. It was evidently that which had caused all the phosphorescence. But a sonnet is a mere pill-box; it holds nothing. A mere cockle-shell,—and, oh, the raging sea it could not hold! Besides being confessedly an art-form, duly licenced to lie, it was apt ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... stubbed his brain against the hardest of these Indian words at first, but now he has developed an almost inconvenient passion for them. When he looks at me steadily, and I think he is about to exclaim a sonnet to my eyebrow, he bursts out: "Tomahawk comes from 'tumetah-who-uf,' he who cuts off with a blow"; or, "Syosset sounds Indian, but is Dutch in origin. It came from 'Schouts'—'sheriff'"; and so on. I never know ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... doubt the upholders of 'Art for art's sake' will generally be in favour of the courageous course, of refusing to sacrifice the better or stronger part of the public to the weaker or worse; but their maxim in no way binds them to this view. Dante Rossetti suppressed one of the best of his sonnets, a sonnet chosen for admiration by Tennyson, himself extremely sensitive about the moral effect of poetry; suppressed it, I believe, because it was called fleshly. One may regret Rossetti's judgement and at the same time admire his scrupulousness; but in any case he judged in his capacity of ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... Antonius ever went away from a table at all—on his feet; anyhow, while you were doing him so well in Egypt. He had to be carried. I call Sir Marcus (and I stole the Sirdar's epithet for the other Anthony) a Romantic Figure! His adoration for you is a—a sonnet. There's no 'h' in his name to bother you. And he fell in love at first sight, like a real sport—I mean, like the hero of a book. If he has ways you don't approve, you can cure them; redecorate and remodel him with the latest American improvements. Why, I believe he'd go so far ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Twickenham Park, either in this [1592] or the following year, through the immediate interest of his steady patron, the Earl of Essex, Mr. Francis Bacon had the honour of entertaining Queen Elizabeth, where he presented her with the sonnet in honour of that generous nobleman."—Nichols's Progresses of Queen Eliz., 2d ed. iii. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various |
