"Threnody" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... monodies: either the virtues of the loyal slave are extolled[140], or the knavery of the cunning slave[141]. The parasite is "featured" too, when Ergasilus bewails the decline of his profession[142], or Peniculus and Gelasimus indulge in haunting threnody on their perpetual lack of food[143]. Bankers, lawyers and panders come in for their share of satire[144]. Our favorite topic today, the frills and furbelows of woman's dress and its reform, held the boards of ancient Athens and Rome[145]. In Mil. 637 ff, Periplecomenus ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... a mournful melody of despairing love, full of that wild, mad, hopeless longing of a bereaved soul which the mid-night raven mocked at with that bitterest of all words—"Nevermore!" It was the weird threnody of the brilliant, but ill-starred Poe, who, like a meteor, blazed but for a moment, dazzling a hemisphere, and then went out forever in the ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... recognised as kindred souls. He awards unmeasured praise to Matthew Arnold, while of his defects and shortcomings he speaks plainly. He does loyal homage to Browning in a sequence of sonnets, and his tribute to Tennyson was paid in a lofty 'Threnody,' when that noble spirit passed away. For Victor Hugo he proclaimed, as all know, nothing short of unbounded adoration—he is 'the greatest writer whom the world has seen since Shakespeare'; though ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... scene that the shepherds of Bethlehem are seen watching their flocks. One air, "He was despised," suggests that its birth was amid tears. It was; for Handel sobbed aloud while composing it. It is the threnody of the oratorio. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... in slavery time in "signs" and in "sayings"—that the itching foot meant the journey to new lands—that the hound's midnight threnody meant murder? ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... grew lean and sun-browned, and thrived on it. Every afternoon with unfailing regularity a light shower fell, but in twenty minutes it was over and the sun shone again, greedily lapping up the moisture that glittered on the leaves. And forever the sea sang a low muttering bass to the faint threnody of the wind in ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... swaying in time to their music as I have seen a rapt singer do. Strangely enough, in their tones up here I could hear no cry of the sea. They sang instead the tumult of the sky, the vast loneliness of distant spaces, something of the deep-toned threnody of the ancient universe, mourning ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... main feature of the lyrics in Aminta and of Erminia's episode in the Gerusalemme.[71] This steeps the whole story of Clizia in a delicious melancholy, foreshadowing the death-scene of Clorinda.[72] This rises in the father's lamentation over his slain Ugone, into the music of a threnody that now recalls Euripides and now reminds us of mediaeval litanies.[73] Censure might be passed upon rhetorical conceits and frigid affectations in these characteristic outpourings of pathetic feeling. Yet no one can ignore their liquid ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... printings of his book. Then he went to the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled down in a Washington garret to spend his strength as an army hospital nurse. He wrote "Drum Taps" and other magnificent poems about the War, culminating in his threnody on Lincoln's death, "When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed." Swinburne called this "the most sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world." After the war had ended, Whitman stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John Burroughs and W. D. O'Connor. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry |
