"Elegy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tercentenary of Cervantes's death, an exceptionally fine collection of editions of his works and of rare plates illustrating episodes from them. Notable among the books was a first edition of his earliest published poems, four redondillas, a copla and an elegy, on the death, October 3, 1568, of Elizabeth de Valois, third wife of Philip II, and sister of Charles IX of France.[13] Dark rumors were afloat for some time that she had been poisoned by order of her husband. Among the other treasures in the Hispanic Museum exhibition was the ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... elegy on the death of two pigs, I am just now returned from eating a most excellent one with the most magnificent Donaldson. I wish you would explain to me the reason of my being so very hard-hearted as to discover no manner of reluctance at that innocent ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... merits our attention in the early Virginian colony was found soon after the Revolutionary War in a collection of manuscripts, known as the Burwell Papers. This poem is an elegy on the death of Nathaniel Bacon (1676), a young Virginian patriot and military hero, who resisted the despotic governor, Sir William Berkeley. It was popularly believed that Bacon's mysterious death was due to poison. An unknown friend wrote the elegy in defense ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... naval engineer. Then came Robert, the most attractive of the boys. A splendid athlete, compared by Anthony with a Greek statue, he had sweetness as well as depth of nature. His drawings of horses were the delight of his family; and when his favourite hunter died he wrote a graceful elegy on the afflicting event. The influence of his genial kindness was never forgotten by his youngest brother; but there was a stronger and more dominating personality of which the effect was less beneficial to a sensitive and ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... shrinking from the great crisis which the dawn would bring, he repeated to the officers and midshipmen within hearing a number of the verses from the most finished poem in the English language, Grey's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and which had appeared a short time before. Probably the lines on which ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... perplexing search his mother found the desired poems, most of them in first editions, at the Olliers, Vere Street, London. She took home also three volumes by another poet, John Keats, who, she was told, was the subject of an elegy by Shelley. Browning never forgot the May evening when he first read these new books, to the accompaniment, he said, of two nightingales, one in a copper-beech, one in a laburnum, each striving to outdo the other in melody. ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... that it took, Gray, author of 'An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,' seven years to ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... in his account. Boswell does not state of his own knowledge that Johnson was not acquainted with Savage when he wrote London. The death of Queen Caroline in Nov. 1737 deprived Savage of her yearly bounty, and 'abandoned him again to fortune' (Johnson's Works, viii. 166). The elegy on her that he composed on her birth-day (March 1) brought him no reward. He was 'for some time in suspense,' but nothing was done. 'He was in a short time reduced to the lowest degree of distress, and often wanted both lodging and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... political changes of Europe. One morning when the sun was flooding the building and casting the colours of the windows in rich patterns on the floor, I sat under the gallery at the west end and read Shelley's great elegy. I remember those wonderful last lines and I thought how, like an unshattered temple, the great works of literature survive the tempests of national strife. My mind was carried far away, beyond the anxieties ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... are an imperishable shrine of his affection for his sister, "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia." Spenser refers to her as "most resembling in shape and spirit her brother dear." She wrote a beautiful elegy on his death at Zutphen: Great loss to all that ever did him see; Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me. The renowned experimental philosopher, Robert Boyle, and his sister, Catherine, the very accomplished and famous countess of Ranelagh, were a noted pair of friends. Bishop ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... glory. In like manner it is unjust to hold him responsible for the deaths of Abner and Amasa, or to attribute to him any conspiracy with the hierocracy for the destruction of Saul, and thus to deprive him of the authorship of the elegy in 2Samuel i, which certainly was not the work of ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751). (Facsimile of first edition and of portions of ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... Kasidah, Ode or Elegy rhymed couplets numbering more than thirteen: If shorter it is called a "Ghazal." I have not thought it necessary ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... to this conclusion without much thought. She composed an Ode to Despair, an Elegy to an Unhappy Woman, and a Triolet to Interfering Dukes, before her mind was made up. She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a melancholy grey and holding communion only ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... not dawned. Goldsmith and Gray, both recently dead, serve to illustrate the condition in which the most exquisite polish and refinement of language has been developed until there is a danger of sterility. The 'Elegy' and the 'Deserted Village' are in their way inimitable poems: but we feel that the intellectual fibre of the poets has become dangerously delicate. The critical faculty could not be stimulated further without destroying all spontaneous impulse. The reaction to a more masculine and passionate ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the Upright is included that touching elegy which David sang after the death of Saul and Jonathan, and which stands next to the Song of Deborah as one of the earliest surviving examples of Old Testament literature. [Footnote: "Student's Old ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... deeply-drawn sigh. "You cannot, at least, prevent her image from being enshrined in my heart. No, Julia! even when thou descendest to the grave, thy remembrance will cause thee to live in my imagination, and I shall thus write thine elegy: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... representing the abandon of the dance, it seems rather to depict a melancholy lover allowing his eyes to travel slowly around the ballroom in a futile search of his heart's desire. The prevailing tone of the composition rather is that of an elegy—the burial of fond hopes. Stephen Heller, pianist and composer, tells of meeting Chopin in the store of a Paris music publisher. Heller had come in to order all the valses. Thereupon Chopin asked him which he liked best, and when Heller mentioned this sad one ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... VIII., shirts, handkerchiefs, sheets, and pillow-cases were embroidered in silks of different colors, until the fashion gave way to cut-work and lace. Italy produced lace fabrics early in the fifteenth century; and the Florentine poet, Firenzuola, who flourished about 1520, composed an elegy upon a collar of raised point lace made by the hand of his mistress. Portraits of Venetian ladies dated as early as 1500 reveal white lace trimmings; but at that period lace was, professedly, only made by nuns for the service ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... still later composition of the book is that found in the reference to the book of Jasher, chap. 10:13. From 2 Sam. 1:18, we learn (according to the most approved interpretation of the passage) that David's elegy on the death of Saul and Jonathan was written in the book of Jasher. But we are not warranted in affirming that this title was applied to a book of definitely determined contents. It may have been a collection of national songs, enlarged from ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... MURILLO'S influence over the human heart, that his genius enabled him to embellish truth, and to present it with all its graces and attractions to the understandings of all those who are endowed with an innate love of the beautiful. His pictures, like Gray's Elegy in a Country Church-yard, may with equal truth be said 'to abound in images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... Ibn Abi Hafsa, of this family, who made such a mistake (in a poet depending on the beneficence of the exalted) as to commit himself to the sweeping statement, in his elegy on the death of Maan, the Emir, that patronage had died with him. "It is said," Ibn Khallikan relates, "that Marwan, after composing this elegy, could never gain anything by his verses, for, as often as he celebrated ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... him. How he must have listened to the musical and melancholy counsellor who told his pain to the leaves of the book! What stimulant and what food for his boyish longings and dreams! And what a divine chorus of beauties the great love-heroines of ancient epic and elegy, Helen, Medea, Ariadne, Phaedra, formed and re-formed continually in his dazzled memory! When we of to-day read such verses at Augustin's age, some bitterness is mixed with our delight. These heroes and heroines are too far ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... strange that the books generally give space to a mention of Urian Oakes, President of Harvard College, and to quotations from the crude and lengthy elegy which he published in 1667; and print examples from the execrable versified version of the Psalms made by the New England divines, and yet deny a ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... Horace Walpole on trip to Continent 1739-41; became professor of modern history at Cambridge 1768, but did not teach. A man singularly retiring and shy throughout his life. Among his well-known poems are "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," "The Progress of Poetry," "The Bard," "The Fatal Sisters," and "The Descent of ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... never wrote anything of the kind more lovely. Herrick, of course, lives simply by virtue of his songs; his more ambitious or pretentious lyrics are merely magnified and prolonged and elaborated songs. Elegy or litany, epicede or epithalamium, his work is always a song-writer's; nothing more, but nothing less, than the work of the greatest song-writer—as surely as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist—ever born of English race. The apparent or external variety of his versification is, I should ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... be begun three days before the advent of the Messiah. Then he will appear in Palestine, and will utter a lament over the devastation of the Holy Land, and his wail will be heard throughout the world. The last words of his elegy will be: "Now peace will come upon earth!" When the evil-doers hear this message, they will rejoice. On the second day, he will appear again and proclaim: "Good will come upon earth!" And on the third his promise will be heard: ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... obsequies, exequies^; funeral, wake, pyre, funeral pile; cremation. funeral, funeral rite, funeral solemnity; kneel, passing bell, tolling; dirge &c (lamentation) 839; cypress; orbit, dead march, muffled drum; mortuary, undertaker, mute; elegy; funeral, funeral oration, funeral sermon; epitaph. graveclothes^, shroud, winding sheet, cerecloth; cerement. coffin, shell, sarcophagus, urn, pall, bier, hearse, catafalque, cinerary urn^. grave, pit, sepulcher, tomb, vault, crypt, catacomb, mausoleum, Golgotha, house of death, narrow house; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... born in 1535-6, he must have died in 1564. The tablet referred to also contains Buchanan's lines. Omnia quae longa, &c., celebrating his learning, and lamenting his premature fate. Dempster likewise quotes these lines and another elegy on his death, by Buchanan. (Opera, vol. ii. pp. 106, 120,) and says, that Alexander Cockburn, who had spent several years abroad, published various works, of which he had only seen three, the titles of which he specifies; but he mistakes the date of his death, ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... found Naples and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in 1864, and Mr. Gray (as he of the "Elegy" used to be called on his title-pages) found them in 1740. "The streets," he wrote home to his mother, "are one continued market, and thronged with populace so much that a coach can hardly pass. The common sort are a jolly, lively kind of animals, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... excuse for refusing wine that he could get drunk on anything else as well. In these days he got dead drunk on oatmeal porridge, while he produced a perishing ecstasy on bread and milk. But of genuine intoxication the pennyworth of gin and water that sustained the immortal Elegy was his last excess. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... There is said to be an English translation of "The Student of Salamanca," London, 1847. An excellent French version is that of R. Foulch-Delbosc, "L'tudiant de Salamanque," Paris, 1893. Mary J. Serrano has made splendid translations of "The Pirate" and "To Spain: An Elegy," Warner's Library of the World's Best ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... Francis Beaumont Of Life and Death Inviting a Friend to Supper Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy Epitaph on Elizabeth L. H. Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke To the Memory of my Beloved Master William Shakespeare To Celia The Triumph of Charis In the Person of Womankind Ode Praeludium Epode An Elegy ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... of "The Fleece" we could cull a hundred passages relating to sheep; but we have already exceeded our space. We cannot, however, close this brief notice of the allusions that have been made to sheep by our poets, without quoting a couple of verses from Robert Burns's "Elegy on Poor Mailie," ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... a true innovator, in the broadest and most meritorious sense of the word: he was the creator of philosophic poetry in France. Until Jocelyn appeared, in 1836, the form of poetic expression was confined chiefly to the ode, the ballad, and the elegy; and no poet, with the exception of the author of 'Moise' and 'Eloa', ever dreamed that abstract ideas and themes dealing with the moralities could be expressed in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... speech, the wail of tree, The words the winds and waters say, Make up that general elegy, Whose ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... stone solitary in a grey waste of shale. There he pondered the science of which, while she was so strangely ignorant, he had now become an adept; there, or thereabouts, he composed the most beautiful of all his rhymes, the canzone which may stand for an elegy of ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... gentle and amiable nature, and pure Christian sentiments, Grant afforded eminent promise, with a prolonged career, of becoming an ornament to literature. Cut down in the bloom of youth, his elegy has been recorded by ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... sonnets called Astrophel and Stella, of which his latest critic says: "As a series of sonnets, the Astrophel and Stella poems are second only to Shakespeare's; as a series of love-poems, they are perhaps unsurpassed." Spenser wrote an elegy upon Sidney himself, under the title of Astrophel. Sidney's prose is among the best of the sixteenth century. "He reads more modern than any other author of that century." He does not use "ink-horn terms," or cram his sentences ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... blank verse, when we come upon a rhymeless couplet we know that it is an extract from a longer composition in monorhyme. The Kit'ah is a fragment, either an occasional piece or more frequently a portion of a Ghazal (ode) or Kasidah (elegy), other than the Matla, the initial Bayt with rhyming distichs. The Ghazal and Kasidah differ mainly in length: the former is popularly limited to eighteen couplets: the latter begins at fifteen and is of indefinite ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... chaplain. In addition to his chaplaincy, he held the office of preceptor to one of the native princes of Hindostan. He died at Bhoog, in the kingdom of Cutch, on the 25th of September 1830; and if we add that he was a man of remarkable learning, his elegy may be transcribed from the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... she comes she brings a book with her, gilt-edged and bound in green morocco like the Byron we read when we were children, or in red morocco like the Elegant Extracts out of which we used to translate Gray's "Elegy," and the "Battle of Hohenlinden," ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Before that elevation he had lived on in his own county, uniting the character of the English squire, in that fox-hunting county, with that of a perfect gentleman, a scholar, and a most admirable member of society. He was a poet, also, affecting the style of Cowley, who wrote an elegy upon his uncle, William Hervey, an elegy compared to Milton's 'Lycidas' in imagery, music, and tenderness of thought. The shade of Cowley, whom Charles II. pronounced, at his death, to be 'the best man in England,' haunted this peer, the first Earl of Bristol. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... such as his famous elegy, he caught the classic tone to perfection, feeling himself in vital union with the great of bygone centuries; but in thought and feeling he was really modern and under the influence of the Christian Germanic spirit with all ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... if that rule had been attended to, neither would Lord Byron have deemed it worth notice that "the knell of parting day," in Gray's Elegy, "was adopted from Dante;" nor would Mr. Cary have remarked upon "this plagiarism," if indeed he used the term. (I refer to "NOTES AND QUERIES," Vol. iii., p. 35.) The truth is, that in every good edition of Gray's Works, there is a note to the line in question, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various
... quick conclusions from small signs. But in this instance, the light in your eye, the curl of your expanded nostril, the half frown on your brow, and the flush on your cheek, told me beyond a doubt that you are a poet. And you are so, young man. I care not whether you have penned as yet an elegy, or no—nevertheless, you are in soul, in temperament, in fantasy, a poet. Do ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... the andante, not very new, with commonplace variations, and the feeble finale. Then they played more, at the request of the guests,—first an elegy by Ernst, and then various other pieces. They were all very well, but did not produce upon me a tenth part of the impression that the opening piece did. I felt light and gay throughout the evening. As for my wife, never had I seen her as she was that night. Those brilliant eyes, ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... personal nobility which distinguished him as a thinker and a man, was not of the heroic type. He had nothing Homeric in his inspiration, nothing of the warrior or the patriot in his nature. His genius, when it pursued its bias, found instinctive utterance in elegy and idyl, in meditative rhetoric and pastoral melody. In order to assume the heroic strain, Tasso had recourse to scholarship, and gave himself up blindly to the guidance of Latin poets. This was consistent with the tendency of the Classical Revival; but since the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... like Fitzjames, he cursed the hunt, And sorely cursed the day, And mus'd a new Gray's elegy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... race reached a high degree of civilization at a very early period. They have always been distinguished by a love of poetry, especially for the elegy, and they abound in tales, legends and proverbs. Until the middle of the twelfth century they had their own independent kings, since then they have been alternately conquered by the Russians and Swedes; but like the Poles, they have preserved a strong national feeling, ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... stand the jars of life—souls created to register thoughts and sentiments too fine for those of coarser construction. Such was the soul of the storekeeper of Coniston. Whether or not he was one of those immortalized in the famous Elegy, it is not for us to say. A celebrated poet who read the letters to the Guardian—at Miss Lucretia Penniman's request—has declared Mr. Wetherell to have been a genius. He wrote those letters, as we know, after he had piled his boxes and rolled ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... ago as 1862 Swinburne introduced Baudelaire to English readers: in the columns of the Spectator, it is amusing to remember. In 1868 he added a few more words of just and subtle praise in his book on Blake, and in the same year wrote the magnificent elegy on his death, Ave atque Vale. There have been occasional outbreaks of irrelevant abuse or contempt, and the name of Baudelaire (generally mis-spelled) is the journalist's handiest brickbat for hurling ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Trinity College Library, and some fifty churches, inevitably fall into the background. So when the world has admitted that a poet has disputed the supreme palm of epic with Homer and Virgil, it hardly cares to remember that he has also challenged all rivals in such forms as the Pastoral Elegy, the Mask, and the Sonnet. De minimis non curat might be applied to such cases without any very violent extravagance. The first thought that must always rise to the mind at the mention of Milton's name must be the stupendous ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... new ideas of duty and destiny, to wondrous thoughts and aspirations; and they would not down at my bidding. Over and over again I tried to banish them, but the inward and spiritual ear was open, and the sad strains of Schubert's "Elegy of Tears," and "The Wanderer," and the "Ave Maria," seemed my sorrow, my wanderings and my prayers. Sadness was not my nature; I was as cheerful as the bird that sings, save a mighty something which clung to me and overshadowed me like the enormous ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... for the service of the great, 370 So WHACHUM beats his dirty brains, T' advance his master's fame and gains And, like the Devil's oracles, Put into doggrel rhimes his spells, Which, over ev'ry month's blank page 375 I' th' almanack, strange bilks presage. He would an elegy compose On maggots squeez'd out of his nose; In lyrick numbers write an ode on His mistress, eating a black-pudden: 380 And when imprison'd air escap'd her, It puft him with poetic rapture. His sonnets charm'd th' attentive crowd, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... gone; and Harry Esmond blushed that he had not a single tear for her, and fell to composing an elegy in Latin verses over the rustic little beauty. He bade the dryads mourn and the river-nymphs deplore her. As her father followed the calling of Vulcan, he said that surely she was like a daughter of Venus, though Sievewright's wife was an ugly ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sprinkled Giton with the last drops in her cup, when Eumolpus, who was himself almost drunk, was seized with the notion of satirizing bald pates and branded rascals, but when he had exhausted his chilly wit, he returned at last to his poetry and recited this little elegy upon hair: ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... in His inimitable elegy, which every reader will immediately recollect. Can it be imagined, that nature, which does nothing in vain, nor indeed without a reference to the being who is eminently signalized as lord of the lower creation, has been at pains to decorate these spots, but in anticipation, if one may use the expression, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... learning epitaphs and monumental inscriptions. A story of melancholy import never failed to excite my attention; and before I was seven years old I could correctly repeat Pope's "Lines to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady;" Mason's "Elegy on the Death of the Beautiful Countess of Coventry," and many smaller poems on similar subjects. I had then been attended two years by various masters. Mr. Edmund Broadrip taught me music, my father having presented me with one of Kirkman's finest harpsichords, as an incitement to emulation. ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... 68: Sepulchral altars.—Ver. 480. The 'sepulchralis ara' is the funeral pile, which was built in the form of an altar, with four equal sides. Ovid also calls it 'funeris ara,' in the Tristia, book iii. Elegy ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... voice changed with the character of its affairs. Still vibrating with the delivery of his sermon, it was now charged with the official business of the interment. In its inflections it expressed both elegy and eulogy; and in the brief pause before and after "invited" and the fall of "attend" there was the last word of comment upon the mortal term. A crispation of interest passed over the congregation; ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... chief visitations of the Black Death (1361 and 1369), and a few years earlier the poet of the "Vision" had given voice to the sufferings of the poor. It was not, however, the mothers of the people crying for their children whom the courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the year 1369; the woe to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a princely widower temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first wife. In 1367 the Black Prince was conquering Castile (to be lost again before the year was out) for that interesting protege of the ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the country that does that for me," she replied. "I am not the same, I feel queer; besides I am never two days alike. To-day I have the air of a mad woman, and to-morrow shall be as grave as an elegy. I change with the weather, I don't know why. You see, I am capable of anything, according to the moment. There are days when I would like to kill people,—not animals, I would never kill animals,—but people, yes, and other days when I weep at a mere thing. A lot of different ideas pass ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... through the folds of muslin and broadcloth! But it takes very little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover. There are a great many cruel things besides poverty that freeze the genial current of the soul, as the poet of the Elegy calls it. Fire can stand any wind, but is easily blown out, and then come smouldering and smoke, and profitless, slow combustion without the cheerful blaze which sheds light all round it. The one Reader's hand may ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... on a tombstone in the picturesque churchyard of Harrow-on-the-Hill. It was, I observe, written as long ago as 1838, so that it can be reproduced without much danger of hurting the feelings of those who may have known and loved the subject of this touching elegy. The name of the victim was Port, and the circumstances of his death are thus ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... me last term that her favorite poem in English literature, is 'Gray's Elegy' on account of it's being so full of calm. Sometimes I think that Sylvia Courtney is rather ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... school, but now he had it in his power to study a great author entire, and as a whole. Never before did he fully appreciate the "thunderous lilt" of Greek epic, the touching and voluptuous tenderness of Latin elegy, the regal pomp of history, the gorgeous and philosophic mystery of the old dramatic fables. Never before had he learnt to gaze on "the bright countenance of truth, in the mild and dewy air of delightful ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... into an elegy, plaintive and full of pain. In the Circus there was silence. After a while Caesar, himself affected, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... element. This is true only in a limited sense. It is true that the Puritan element in the Horton series of poems becomes more patent as we pass from the two lyrics to the mask of Comus, and from Comus to the elegy of Lycidas, just as, in the corresponding periods of time, the evils connected with the reign of Charles I. and with Laud's crusade against Puritanism were becoming more pronounced. But we can hardly regard ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... divers efforts made to conceal their rent breeches and dirty linen; nay, he could distinguish by their countenances the different kinds of poetry in which they exercised the muse. He saw Tragedy conspicuous in a grave solemnity of regard; Satire louring in a frown of envy and discontent; Elegy whining in a funeral aspect; Pastoral dozing in a most insipid languor of face; Ode-writing delineated in a distracted stare; and Epigram squinting with a pert sneer. Perhaps our hero refined too much in his penetration, when he affirmed, that, over and above these ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... deserted, and his look met those four fond eyes, fixed with that strange wistfulness which in our hours of trouble the eyes of a dog sympathizingly assume, an odd thought for a sensible man passed into him, showing, more than pages of sombre elegy, how deep was the sudden misanthropy that blackened the world around. "When I am dead," ran that thought, "is there one human being whom I can trust to take charge of the ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Austin Dobson The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn Andrew Marvell On the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes Thomas Gray Verses on a Cat Charles Daubeny Epitaph on a Hare William Cowper On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bullfinch William Cowper An Elegy on a Lap-Dog John Gay My Last Terrier John Halsham Geist's Grave Matthew ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... memory is perhaps over-praised by Macaulay when he says that it would do honour to the greatest name in our literature, but it proved incontestibly that Tickell, as a poet, was superior to the master whom he so loved and honoured. His reputation hangs upon this elegy, which Fox pronounced perfect.[34] The Prospect of Peace, which passed through several editions, had at one time a considerable reputation, not assuredly for its poetry, but because it appealed to the spirit of the time The style of the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Memon bridegroom unto the house of the bride. Thus is it ever in this city of strange contrasts. Life and Death in closest juxtaposition, the hymn in honour of the Prophet's birth blending with the elegy to the dead. Bag-pipes are not unknown in the Musalman quarters of Bombay; and not infrequently you may watch a crescent of ten or twelve wild Arab sailors in flowing brown gowns and parti-coloured head-scarves treading ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... Dryden died, and with him a dramatic age passed away. What Miss Trotter's exact relations with the great poet had been is uncertain; she not only celebrated his death in a long elegy, in which she speaks on behalf of the Muses, but wrote another and more important poem, in which she gives very sound advice to the poetical beginner, who is to take Dryden as a model, and to be particularly careful to disdain Settle, Durfey, and Blackmore, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... lightly sighed. The time was April's end, and had been squally, with violent storms; but the last onslaughts of the north-wester had routed the rain-clouds. The day was dying under a clear saffron sky, and a thrush piped its mellow elegy. Miss Percival heard him, and listened, smiling with her lips, and with her eyes also which the serene light soothed. Her lips barely moved, just relaxed their firm embrace, but no more. She held the light gratefully with her eyes, seemed ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... have crossed o'er thee many and many a time, And hold my head the higher for having done it; Considering it a prime And rare adventure—worthy of a sonnet Or little flight in rhyme, A monody, an elegy, or ode, Or whatsoever name may be bestowed On this wild rhapsody of lawless chime— When I have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... made up; thoughts hushed quiet into one great thought; in the ripple of the perpetual waters, under the grim cliffs and the eternal stars. Conversing with his people, he was heard to recite some passages of Gray's ELEGY, lately come out to those parts; of which, says an ear-witness, he expressed his admiration to an enthusiastic degree: "Ah, these are tones of the Eternal Melodies, are not they? A man might thank ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... being a little later. Under Elizabeth's successor he greatly strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the Queen's appreciation equalled that of James I. When Jonson wrote in his elegy on Shakespeare of ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... at the clasp of her waist, and letting her chin fall on her throat, shook her body fretfully, much as a pettish little girl might do. Wilfrid grimaced. "Tick-tick" was not a pathetic elegy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... choosing my words nicely, and playing with metaphor, and putting my commas in their proper places, my sorrow is not really and truly poignant. I write elaborately, for that is my habit, and habits are less easily broken than hearts. I could no more 'dash off' this my cri de coeur than I could an elegy on a broomstick I had never seen. Therefore, reader, bear with me, despite my sable plumes and purple; and weep with me, though my prose be, like those verses which Mr. Beamish wrote over Chloe's grave, 'of a character to cool emotion.' For indeed my ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Wakefield' sixty years ago was 'uncollected'; a quarter of a century ago it sold for L5; ten years ago it was worth L10; in 1891 a remarkably tall and clean copy, in the original calf as issued, sold at Sotheby's for L94. Gray's 'Elegy,' 1751, sold for L1 16s. in 1888, and for L70 since then. Apropos of this 'Elegy,' there are only three uncut copies known, and one of these was obtained by Mr. Augustine Birrell, Q.C., a few years ago by a stroke of great good luck. He happened ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... has smiled upon you and flattery falls sweet on your ear, and you are in danger of forgetting the final end of all ambition read "Grays Elegy." ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... the very curious Armenian elegy on the fall of Constantinople, translated by M. Bore, in the Journal Asiatique for March, 1835; and by M. Brosset, in the new edition of Le Beau, (tom. xxi. p. 308.) The author thus ends his poem: "I, Abraham, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... visits that consecrated ground who has not reaped enjoyment from the labors of that man's life. And as the simple epitaph meets the eye, and is read in an audible tone, the heart-felt invocation, "Blessings on his memory!" is his oft-repeated elegy. ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... to the opinion that only a very small part of any man's writings is really immortal. Take out the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and how much is left of Gray for other generations to admire? And so of Goldsmith: besides the "Vicar of Wakefield" and the "Deserted Village," there is little in his writings that is likely to prove immortal. Johnson wrote but little ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Lunatic Asylum The White Peacock Colors A Minor Poet The Lover in Hell Winged Man Music The Innovator Love in Twilight The Fiddling Wood Portrait of a Boy Portrait of a Baby The General Public Road and Hills Elegy for ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... tribute to the French navigator from the pen of an English poet. Thomas Campbell is best remembered by such vigorous poems as "Ye Mariners of England," and "The Battle of the Baltic," which express a tense and elevated British patriotism. All the more impressive for that very reason is his elegy in honour of a sailor of another nation, whose merits as a man and whose charm as a writer Campbell had recognised from his boyhood. The ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... two noblest Beauties, and which constitute the main Difference between Poetry and Versification, between a perfect Poem and a Madrigal, Epigram or Elegy, are entirely lost in those Pieces, and the only Pleasure they can raise, must proceed alone from ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... revenge of Conall Cearnach for the death of Cuchullin. This may be considered as the sequel of the preceding story, and of equal authority and antiquity. It is written in the very same style, and contains a beautiful elegy on Cuchullin ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... with the approval of all the Princes, who had witnessed with ill-concealed envy the sudden ascendancy of the sons of Kennedy. While McLaig was lamenting for Brian, by the cascade of Killaloe, the Laureat of Tara, in an elegy over a ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... at the Bourges College, nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy, melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called Tristesse (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems Paquita la Sevillane and Le Chene de la Messe; three sonnets, a description of the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, with a tale called Carola, published as the work he was engaged ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... short time there had appeared Gray's "Elegy," Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle," Fielding's "Amelia" and Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." Here was menu to fit most palates, and the bill-of-fare was duly discussed in all social gatherings of the upper circles. The afflicted ones fed on Gray; the repentant quoted Richardson; while Smollett ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... with Saunders, a plan for scaling the Heights of Abraham—news of the repulse and subsequent success of, received by Pitt on the same day (note)—presentiment of death upon the mind of, i. 297; impromptu stanzas composed by, on the eve of the attack—Gray's Elegy quoted by, on his way to the Heights of Abraham, i. 298; last words and death of, i. 299; and Montcalm, joint monument erected to the memory of—biographical notice ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Salathiel Pavy, whose excellent acting is celebrated in Jonson's tender elegy, quoted in ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... prey, blood-thirsty souls, brandishing the spear, will quickly distain with blood the fallen, fallen enemy. Wretches, that they ever came to the thought of a single combat! In a foreign strain will I mourn with tears my elegy of groans due to the dead. Destiny is at hand—death is near; this day will decide the event. Ill-fated, ill-fated murder because of the Furies! But I see Creon here with clouded brow advancing toward the house, ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... "charms the storms of the soul," (DER SEELE STURM BESCHWORT,) he sought without doubt forgetfulness, which occupation, by rendering the memory torpid, may sometimes procure, though it cannot destroy the sense of pain. At the close of that fine elegy which he names "The Ideal," a poet, who was also the victim of an inconsolable melancholy, appeals to labor as a consolation when a prey to bitter regret; while expecting an early death, he invokes ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... for the Presidency he was asked for material for an account of his early life. "Why," he said, "it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence; and that sentence you will find in Gray's 'Elegy':— ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... and his father, Joseph Marryat of Wimbledon House, was an M.P., chairman for the committee of Lloyd's, and colonial agent for the island of Grenada—a substantial man, who refused a baronetcy, and was honoured by an elegy from Campbell. He married Charlotte Geyer, or Von Geyer, a ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... poetic hierarchy. It is not the most popular poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry. Gray's "Elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that length. But what shall we say to the "Ars Poetica" of Horace? It is crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... girls did at the decisive instant, and laid it down on the table. When she remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but Arthur seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the fire in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy and brought it back ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... of sea-life, of seamen, and of sea-slang, is generally attributed to the instructions of his brother, the master of a ship. This brother was subsequently lost at sea, and Dibdin is said to have written Poor Tom Bowling as his elegy. Dibdin's sea-lore was, therefore, altogether second-hand and theoretical; and his songs, on the whole, present an idealised and exaggerated embodiment of the characteristics, life, and habits of seamen; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... among many other pieces, Jeffreys's Elegy, the Letter to the Lord Chancellor exposing to him the sentiments of the people, the Elegy on Dangerfield, Dangerfield's Ghost to Jeffreys, The Humble Petition of Widows and fatherless Children in the West, the Lord Chancellor's ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by th' unletter'd muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... land and language. On the French letters he received his hand, as he read, was wont to trace Polish proverbs, Polish turns of phrase. Tears were seen to rise to his eyes as, gazing at the beautiful panorama from a favourite spot of his in the Jura, a French friend recited Arnault's elegy on the homeless and wandering leaf, torn from the parent oak, in which the Pole read the story of his own exile. Education of the lower classes, for which he had already made so strong a stand, continued ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy which begins thus:— ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... were these tales of diablerie believed, that one William Lithgow, a bon vivant, who appears to have been a native, or occasional inhabitant, of Melrose, is celebrated by the pot-companion who composed his elegy, because ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... account arrived in England of Captain Cook's decease, two poems were published in celebration of his memory; one of which was an Ode, by a Mr. Fitzgerald, of Gray's Inn. But the first, both in order of time and of merit, was an Elegy, by Miss Seward, whose poetical talents have been displayed in many beautiful instances to the public. This lady, in the beginning of her poem, has admirably represented the principal of humanity by which the captain was ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... Prince will marry again, after divorcing his wife, and Mr. Southey will write an elegy now, and an ode then; the Quarterly will have an article against the press, and the Edinburgh an article, half and half, about reform and right of divorce; the British will give you Dr. Chalmers's funeral sermon ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... hair and spake, saying, "I am a descendant of Ali;" and he entered the city along with the caravan from Hijaz, saying, "I come a pilgrim from Mecca;" and he presented a Casidah or elegy to the king, saying, "I have composed it!" The king gave him money, treated him with respect, and ordered him to be shown much flattering attention; till one of the courtiers, who had that day returned from ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... notes of lamentation are not wanting, and it cannot be said that the Northern elegies are less sweet or less thrilling in their grief than those of England in the kindred forms of verse. It is enough to think of Gudrun's Lament in the "Elder Edda," or of Sonatorrek, Egil Skallagrimsson's elegy on the death of his two sons. It was not any congenital dulness or want of sense that made the Sagas generally averse to elegy. No mere writer of Sagas was made of stronger temper than Egil, and none of them need have been ashamed of lamentation after ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... always disliked coarse talk and jokes. Nature was ever dear to him; the walks round Eton were his chief recreation, and we can well conceive how he would feel in the lovely and peaceful churchyard of Stoke Pogis, where undoubtedly he would read Gray's Elegy. These feelings would not be sympathised with by the average of schoolboys; but, on the other hand, it is not apparent why Shelley should have changed his character, as the embryo poet would also necessarily not care for all ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... aim at high and, in a strict sense manly, excellence in many of the writers:—nor can that period be justly termed tame and wanting in originality, which produced poems such as Pope's Satires, Gray's Odes and Elegy, the ballads of Gay and Carey, the songs of Burns and Cowper. In truth Poetry at this as at all times was a more or less unconscious mirror of the genius of the age; and the brave and admirable spirit of Enquiry which made the eighteenth century the turning-time in European ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society comparatively new, full of conflicting ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Castle with Dr. Adams and his party, ten of us in all. We drove afterward to see the country church-yard, where Grey wrote his elegy and where he now lies buried. This was a most charming little trip and we all enjoyed it exceedingly. The young folks gathered leaves and flowers for ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... light of a life story and its setting, however slight our knowledge, that creative work tends to assume proper proportions. It is in the surroundings of the author that we find the key to the creation. For, as Gray has pointed out in his "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," there are many in the dust and silence whose hands "the rod of Empire might have swayed, or waked to ecstasy ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... a queer printer. There was an old damaged press, on which Franklin exercised his skill in repairing, and a small worn-out font of type. Keimer himself, who seems to have been a grotesque compound of knave and crank, was engaged at once in composing and setting up in type an elegy on the death of a prominent young man. He is the only poet to my knowledge who ever used the composition-stick instead of a pen for the vehicle of inspiration. The elegy may still be read in Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia, and on perusing it we may well ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... the elegy, sir, fairly enough; I find no fault with your interpretation. What I mean is this: Are you not ashamed to ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... (tree) sambuko. Elder pliagxa. Eldest (first born) unuanaskito. Elect (choose) elekti. Elect (by ballot) baloti. Election elekto. Elector elektanto. Electric elektra. Electricity elektro. Electrify elektrigi. Elegance eleganteco. Elegant eleganta. Elegy elegio. Element elemento. Elementary elementa. Elephant elefanto. Elevate altigi. Elevation (height) altajxo. Elf koboldo, feino. Elicit eltiri. Elide elizii. Eligible elektebla. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... as much as children, when we advised that a great deal of poetry should not be read by very young pupils; the labour and difficulty of explaining it can be known only to those who have tried the experiment. The Elegy in a country church-yard, is one of the most popular poems, which is usually given to children to learn by heart; it cost at least a quarter of an hour to explain to intelligent children, the youngest of whom was at the ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... be pulled off in relays, ladies furst, as they hain't room fer all to onct, but Hank, here, claims he's got grub enough on hand so all will git a chanct to shove right out ag'in their belt. An' I might say right here in doo elegy of our feller townsman that Hank c'n set out as fillin' an' tasty a meal of vittles as anyone ever cocked a lip over, barrin', of ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... his Lives are all that is known to most. But we are now enabled to present those who love his memory with a collection of fugitive pieces, in verse and prose, extending in date of composition over a period of fifty years,—beginning with the Elegy on Donne, in 1633, and terminating only with his death in 1683. All these, however unambitious, are more or less characteristic of the man, and impregnated with the same spirit of genial piety that distinguishes ...
— Waltoniana - Inedited Remains in Verse and Prose of Izaak Walton • Isaak Walton
... subtly with what I can only call the sense of the Eternal. How beautiful, how consoling, that her last book should have been that translation, such as only one who was at once true poet and true scholar could have made, of the sweetest medieval elegy 'The Pearl'!" And Miss Bates, in her preface to the posthumous volume of "Folk-Ballads of Southern Europe", illumines for us the scholarship which went into these close and ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... that the homefelt joy may be more instantly crushed. We know we shall not see dear darling Olivia again for a long, long time; and feel we want a pause and a little diversion—so we will go back to Bill the songster for amusement, and take it if we can; and here is for the purpose Bill's "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog," alas! taught him, too, by honest Mr Williams; we only hope young, sturdy farmers have strong nerves, and don't break their hearts in love's disappointments. Here is Dick's Elegy; and as we, too, have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... eyes, asserted that Shakespeare wrote the line "that wreathes its old fantastic roots so high." This he said because he had been kept in ignorance by Priests; or, perhaps, because he thought craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious and forgotten rhyme called 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'. Anyhow, that orthodox gentleman made a howling error; and received some twenty-five letters and post-cards from kind correspondents who pointed ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... world about it. The lonely embittered heart, craving for sympathy, which he cannot meet with in his fellow-man, finds traces of it in the sighing of the trees or the moaning of the sad sea-wave. Our Poet Laureate, in his great elegy, has abundantly illustrated this impulse of the imagination to reflect its own emotional colouring on to inanimate things: for example ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... Tasso. Neither poet, the one with his cheerfulness, the other with his mild melancholy, brings home, conceives the horror of the situation; the one treats the tragic in the spirit almost of burlesque, the other entirely in the spirit of elegy. So, again, with the novel writers: these professional retailers of anecdotes will pick up any subject to fill their volumes. In default of pleasant stories of filthy intrigue or lewd jest, men like Cinthio and Bandello will gabble off occasionally ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Chichester in 1605, Bishop of Ely in 1609, and moved to Winchester nine years later. As a pious and austere man, a powerful preacher (an "angel in the pulpit," he was called), a scholar versed in patristic literature, and a polemical writer, he is well known. Milton's elegy suffices to prove the great respect and admiration which he inspired in his contemporaries, and he held a considerable influence over James I.; but his "Manual of Devotion" is the only volume of all his writings that can fairly be said to have become a classic ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... population, is a magnificent spectacle; and Montcalm laying down his life to lose Quebec is not less affecting than Wolfe dying to win her. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on the eve of his costly victory, the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," which he would "rather have written than beat the French to-morrow;" but it aches for the defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered, when told how brief his time was, "So much the better; then I shall ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... around to Leipzig. While the songs repay study, they are rather marked by a pianistic meditation than a strictly lyric emotion. "Aufmunterung zur Freude" is a tame allegretto; "Wehmuth" is better; "Taeuschung" is a short elegy of passion and depth; "Ruhe in der Geliebten" is best in its middle strain where it is full of rich feeling and harmony. The ending is cheap. "Der gefangene Saenger" is only a slight variant at first on the "Adieu" credited to ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... are over the clouds are divided in heaven over the green hill flies the inconstant sun. 2. The epic poem recites the exploits of a hero tragedy represents a disastrous event comedy ridicules the vices and follies of mankind pastoral poetry describes rural life and elegy displays the tender emotions of the heart. 3. Wealth may seek us but wisdom must be sought. 4. The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. 5. Occidental manhood springs from self-respect Oriental manhood finds its greatest satisfaction in self-abasement. [Footnote: ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... mind. First, in the shade of his own bays, Great Ben they'll see, whose sacred lays The learned ghosts admire, and throng To catch the subject of his song. Then Randolph in those holy meads, His Lovers and Amyntas reads, Whilst his Nightingale, close by, Sings his and her own elegy. From thence dismiss'd, by subtle roads, Through airy paths and sad abodes, They'll come into the drowsy fields Of Lethe, which such virtue yields, That, if what poets sing be true, The streams all sorrow can subdue. Here, on a silent, shady green, The souls of lovers oft are seen, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... History but the story of the bygone? The elegy, too, comes to us as the last lamenting, sadly solemn swan-song of that glorious golden time. And, indeed, are not all poesies but various notes of that mighty diapason of Thought and Feeling, that has, through the ages, been singing itself ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... thou begin, O Husayn." He said, "'Tis well, O Commander of the Faithful;" and thus began: Some years ago, I dropped down stream to Bassorah, to present to Mohammed bin Sulayman al-Rabi'i[FN152] a Kasidah or elegy I had composed in his praise; and he accepted it and bade me abide with him. One day, I went out to Al-Mirbad,[FN153] by way of Al-Muhaliyah;[FN154] and, being oppressed by the excessive heat, went up to a great door, to ask for drink, when I was suddenly aware of a damsel, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... the Union On Mrs. Biddy Floyd The Reverse Apollo Outwitted Answer to Lines from May Fair Vanbrugh's House Vanbrugh's House Baucis and Philemon Baucis and Philemon The History of Vanbrugh's House A Grub Street Elegy The Epitaph A Description of the Morning A Description of a City Shower On the Little House A Town Eclogue A Conference To Lord Harley on his Marriage Phyllis Horace, Book IV, Ode ix To Mr. Delany An Elegy To Mrs. Houghton Verses written on a Window On another Window Apollo to ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... from a mountain height. A little vagueness of thought, a slight infelicity in the choice of words would be like a cloud upon the mountain, obscuring the scene with a damp and chilling mist. Let anyone try the experiment with a poem like Gray's "Elegy," or Goldsmith's "Traveller" or "Deserted Village," of substituting other words for those the poet has chosen, and he will readily perceive how much of the charm of the lines depends upon their fine ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... XXIV) were by Goethe at all, although they are in the same hand as the rest. To be sure, these two are not numbered, so that I was long undecided as to just what their proper position might be. At one time I imagined they must belong at the middle of the cycle where at the end of Elegy XIII Priapus' mother summons her son. Obviously Goethe, just returned north from his two years in Italy (1786-88), and alienated from prim, courtly friends (especially since he had taken a girlfriend into his cottage), had no thought ...
— Erotica Romana • Johann Wolfgang Goethe
... an expedition to the library. What shall I bring? There is Mosheim's 'Ecclesiastical Ancient History'; that has a solid, venerable sound. Or, if you prefer poetry, I will get Gray's 'Elegy.' That cannot be a literary mushroom, for he was twenty years writing it. But perhaps it is Tupper you would like. That would suit your mood exactly, ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... one of the Commissioners of Array for this county, and on May 28, 1645, had the honour of entertaining his sovereign at Cotes, after which he was fined 1114l. by the parliamentary sequestrators. He was the last of the family who resided at Cotes; and amongst his poems is "An Elegy on the Death of my never enough lamented master, King Charles I." The others are chiefly of a melancholy turn. Sir Henry, his second son, died soon after his father, unmarried; whereupon his title and estate went to his next brother Sir Gray, who, after the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... 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, and does not despise the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... amongst our little circle of friends we may be sure he found admiring listeners. The young General had the romance of a boy on many matters. He delighted in music and poetry. On the last day of his life he said he would rather have written Gray's Elegy than have won a battle. We may be sure that with a gentleman of such literary tastes our friend George would become familiar; and as they were both in love, and both accepted lovers, and both eager for ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not taken any notice of "The Elegy to the Old Beauty," which is perhaps the meanest; nor of "The Allegory on Man," the happiest of Parnell's performances. The hint of "The Hymn to Contentment" I suspect to ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... looking up the church which gave rise to Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," intending when we got there to have a little scene over it; Mr. S., in all the conscious importance of having been there before, assuring us that he knew exactly where it was. So, after some difficulty ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... have been sculptured on this tomb, though it belongs to a woman: but the daughters of heroes may have their monuments adorned with the trophies of their fathers; what a beautiful union is that of innocence and valour! There is an elegy of Propertius which paints better than any other writing of antiquity, this dignity of woman among the Romans, more imposing, more pure than the worship paid to them during the age of chivalry. Cornelia, dying in her youth, addresses to her husband ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... a simpler poet would have "skies" or "heavens." Pope has "sky" more than once, and always with a little false air of simplicity. And one instance occurs in that masterly and most beautiful poem, the "Elegy ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... draperies. Small blame it is therefore to Tegner that Schiller's poems furnished him with frequent suggestions and sometimes also with metres. Schiller had, in "The Gods of Greece," sung a glorious elegy on the Olympian age which stimulated his Swedish rival to write "The Asa Age," in which he regretted, though in a rather half-hearted way, the disappearance of Odin, Thor, and Freya. The poem, it must be admitted, falls much below Tegner ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... balanced it all on his actor's tongue, and read it aloud before the glass. Poe shortened his days and flung away a valuable fag-end of his life, trying to show that life is not worth living, and thus proved it is. Gray spent thirteen years writing his "Elegy," and so made clear the point that the man who does good work does not at the last lay him down and rest his head upon the lap of earth, a youth to fortune and to fame unknown. Gray secured both fame and fortune. He was so successful that he declined the Laureateship, and had the felicity ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... with much liveliness a little Gaelic song, the burlesque elegy of a countryman on the loss of his cow, the comic tones of which, though he did not understand the language, made Waverley laugh more than once. [Footnote: This ancient Gaelic ditty is still well known, both in the Highlands and in Ireland It was translated into ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... an ancient poem, printed among those of Taliesin, called the "Elegy of Owain ap Urien," and containing several very beautiful and spirited passages ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Hence, lyrical poetry re-appeared, not in the shape of religious songs, as in the old time, but in a form to touch all the chords of sentiment. Two new types of verse appeared,—the Elegiac and the Iambic. At first the elegy was probably a lament for the dead. It was accompanied by the soft music of the Lydian flute. The instruments which the Greeks had used were string-instruments. The early Greek elegies related to a variety of themes,—as war, love, preceptive ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... poetical feeling and musical gifts. The character is the nearest one gets in Hebrew to the best heroines of the troubadours. Immanuel and she exchange verses, but the path of flirtation runs rough. They are parted, she, woman-like, dies, and he, man-like, sings an elegy. Even more to Immanuel's credit is his praise of his own wife. She has every womanly grace of body and soul. On her he showers compliments from the Song of Songs and the Book of Proverbs. If this ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... when we come to transcribe some of Sir Philip Sidney's work. There is no irreverence in it. Nor can I take it as any sign of hardness that Raleigh should treat the visual image of his own anticipated death with so much coolness, if the writer of a little elegy on his execution, when Raleigh was fourteen years older than at the presumed date of the foregoing verses, describes him truly when ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald |
