"Elegiac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is dead Hyacinth lifted and extended to view, in all his beautiful, dead youth. The young, male body droops forward on the cross, like a dead flower. It looks as if its only true nature were to be dead. How lovely is death, how poignant, real, satisfying! It is the true elegiac spirit. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... the prince of Greek elegiac poets. Of his elegies we have a few fragments, and also the Latin translation by Catullus of the 'Lock of Berenice.' Berenice, the sister and wife of Ptolemy Euergetes, who succeeded his father Philadelphus in B.C. 245, had sacrificed some ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... had bestowed more leisure, he might have rendered the whole of Goethe's masterpiece in its original measure, at least as agreeably as the Faust has been presented to us hitherto. Mr Coleridge's felicity, both in the Elegiac metre and a slight variation of the Hendecasyllabic, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... grandeur to humiliation and penalty. Nor is it only in the higher walks of tragedy, with its pomp and circumstances of action, that the poet here serves us. His humbler minstrelsy has soothed many an English heart from the tale of "Lycidas" to the elegiac verse of Tennyson. George Herbert still speaks to this generation as two centuries ago he spoke to his own. His quaint verses gather new beauties from time as they come to us redolent with the prayers and aspirations of many successions of the wives, mothers and daughters of England and ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... least, others had made her a figure at it. She began to be seen here and there in the company of the widower, and it was reported privately to me that she had been perceived standing side by side with him in decorous contemplation, as it were in a sort of transient, elegiac revery a deux, before the monument. It was no surprise, therefore, when we heard, two months later, ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... come down to us is of later date than the commencement of the Second Punic War, and consists almost exclusively of works fashioned on Greek models. The Latin metres, heroic, elegiac, lyric, and dramatic, are of Greek origin. The best Latin epic poetry is the feeble echo of the Iliad and Odyssey. The best Latin eclogues are imitations of Theocritus. The plan of the most finished didactic poem in the Latin tongue was taken from Hesiod. ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Corners. Shakespeare's Town. Up and Down the Avon. Rambles in Arden. The Stratford Fountain. Bosworth Field. The Home of Dr. Johnson. From London to Edinburgh. Into the Highlands. Highland Beauties. The Heart of Scotland. Sir Walter Scott. Elegiac Memorials. Scottish Pictures. Imperial Ruins. The Land of ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... woods of Roscarna, the river, and the lake took on a melancholy tinge. Though this aspect of them was new to her, it is hardly strange that she should have seen them thus, for the beauty of Roscarna is really of an elegiac kind, an autumnal beauty of desertion and of decay. As for Slieveannilaun, she ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... Or the elegiac strain 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... brule, tout presse.' The National Assembly, on spur of the instant, renders such Decret, and 'order to submit and repent,' as he requires; if it will avail any thing. On the other hand, Journalism, through all its throats, gives hoarse outcry, condemnatory, elegiac-applausive. The Forty-eight Sections, lift up voices; sonorous Brewer, or call him now Colonel Santerre, is not silent, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. For, meanwhile, the Nanci Soldiers have sent a Deputation of Ten, furnished with documents and proofs; who will tell another ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... heroism of Beethoven, or Haendel, or Gluck, or even Schubert. He has all the charm of an Umbrian painter, as is shown in L'Enfance du Christ, as well as sweetness and inward sadness, the gift of tears, and an elegiac passion. ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... have described Interchange of Labour as the fundamental condition which enables us to travel it. It is now clear that the conception of popular culture is not, after all, represented by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catchwords with which we are wont to console ourselves in our elegiac orations, but that by it is meant ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... Conversion of St. Paul which, a hundred years later, was described as being "still regarded as one of the subsidiary bulwarks of Christianity." As poet he won the praise of Gray for his tender and elegiac verse. Thomson sang of his ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only reality then is the ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... correspondent E.R.C.B. has cited (Vol. ii., p. 71.) are from an elegiac poem by MALHERBE (who died in 1628, at the good old age of seventy-three), which is entitled Consolation a Monsieur Du Perrier sur la Mort de sa Fille. It has always been a great favorite of mine; for, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 37. Saturday, July 13, 1850 • Various
... for the page grew a little dim as he finished this elegiac sentence, and sighed to think how much more keenly he felt its truth than when it was written,—than on that memorable morning when he saw the advertisement in all the papers, "This day published, 'Thoughts on the Universe.' ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of the pudic goddess. There ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... rare adventure," commented the other. "Wandering in the country; the beautiful country, where I was reared; away from the madness of courts. Already I hear the wanton breezes sighing in Sapphic softness and the forests' elegiac murmur. Tell me, how ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... his elegiac strains upon the fate of the widowed bridegroom, on which subject, after a long and querulous effusion, the poet arrives at the sound conclusion, that if Baldoon had walked on foot, which it seems was his general custom, he would have escaped perishing by a fall from horseback. ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... 1357, Petrarch received a letter from Benintendi, the Chancellor of Venice, requesting him to send a dozen elegiac verses to be engraved on the tomb of Andrea Dandolo. The children of the Doge had an ardent wish that our poet should grant them this testimony of his friendship for their father. Petrarch could not refuse the request, and composed fourteen verses, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... martyred poet, which forms the principal portion of Pushkin's elegiac ode, is little else than an amplification, or pathetic and dignified paraphrase, of the exquisite composition actually written by Chenier on the eve of his execution; a composition become classical in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... France, an office which he held throughout the Napoleonic era. In 1813, he became a member of the Jolly Topers of the Caveau, then the resort of the most distinguished literary men of Paris. On the fall of Napoleon, Beranger took it upon himself to sing the glory of the fallen empire in elegiac strains. A severe reprimand was administered to him by the government. His second series of Napoleonic songs, published in 1821, cost him his place and three months' confinement in the prison of St. Pelagie, while his third (1828) ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... John Drinkwater, born in 1882, is best known as the author of Abraham Lincoln—A Play (1919) founded on Lord Charnwood's masterly and analytical biography. He has published several volumes of poems, most of them meditative and elegiac in mood. ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... his collection of English Odes, defines the ode as "any strain of enthusiastic and exalted lyrical verse directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with one dignified theme." Spenser's "Epithalamium" or marriage ode, Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," Tennyson's elegiac and encomiastic "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," Lowell's "Harvard Commemoration Ode," are among the most familiar ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... to Spello to inspect either Roman antiquities or frescoes, but to see an inscription on the city walls about Orlando. It is a rude Latin elegiac couplet, saying that, 'from the sign below, men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland, nephew of Charles; his deeds are written in history.' Three agreeable old gentlemen of Spello, who attended us with much politeness, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... cheerful, and on the other a melancholy feeling. To our thought, the associations connected with the return of the herds from the fields at sunset are best fitted to awaken that quiet, reflective state of mind which is most congenial to the mood of the elegiac poet. To another, these associations may be of such a character as to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... less known poet, John Keats, which kindly Mrs. Browning had been persuaded to include in her purchase on Mr. Ollier's assurance that they were the poetic kindred of Shelley's writings, and that Mr. Keats was the subject of the elegiac poem in the purple paper cover, with the foreign-looking type and the imprint "Pisa" at the foot of the title-page, entitled "Adonais." What an evening for the young poet that must have been. He ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... arpeggios, contrasted rhythms, progressions in thirds and octaves, etc., but still they breathe poetry and sometimes passion. Nocturne is an arbitrary, but expressive, title for a short composition of a dreamy, contemplative, or even elegiac, character. In many of his nocturnes Chopin is the adored sentimentalist of boarding-school misses. There is poppy in them and seductive poison for which Niecks sensibly prescribes Bach and Beethoven as antidotes. The term ballad has been greatly abused in literature, and in music is intrinsically ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... are not free from certain hardnesses, have a pathos and greatness in their simplicity, sufficient to endear the legitimate Sonnet to every Reader of just taste. They possess a characteristic grace, which can never belong to three elegiac stanzas, closing ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... to the unequal numbers [of the elegiac]: afterward [love and] successful desires were included. Yet what author first published humble elegies, the critics dispute, and the controversy still waits the ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... of Gower and Chaucer' by Mr Todd, there will be found ample and curious details about MS. poems by Gower, such as fifty sonnets in French; a 'Panegyrick on Henry IV.,' half in Latin and half in English, a short elegiac poem on the same subject, &c.; besides a large work, entitled 'Speculum Meditantis,' a poem in French of a moral cast; and 'Vox Clamantis,' consisting of seven books of Latin elegiacs, and chiefly filled ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan |
