"Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I'm going to watch one of the epic events of our time—" For a moment Beardsley was solemn, almost shocked, as a thought struck him. "In a way it will be sad. Yes, it will! ECAIAC is about to ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... time, this poem contains very touching and beautiful lines. The Ballad of the White Horse is an epic of the struggle between Christian and Pagan. One of the essentials of an epic is that its men should be decent men, if they cannot be heroes. The Iliad would have been impossible if it had occurred to Homer to introduce the Government ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... whole is merely ascribed "to the bards" (see pp. v-vi). It is also evident from the Preface that Macpherson was shifting from the reluctant "translator" of a few "fragments" to the projector of a full-length epic "if enough encouragement were given ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... to speak of it in these days of much muscular activity. What have golfers, and tennis-players, and makers of century runs to do with croquet? Yet there was a time when croquet was spoken of as 'the coming game;' and had not Clintock's friend Jennings written an epic poem upon it in twelve books, which poem he offered to lend to a certain brilliant young lady? But Gwendolen despised boys and cared even less for their poetry ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... Atharva-Veda, or Ayur-Veda. Although the last is admitted to be as a whole not so ancient as the other three, still there are portions of it that are probably as old as any of the others. Even in the oldest epic poems of the Hindoos mention is made of four Vedas as already in existence and as of great antiquity. Sir William Jones estimates the date of its compilation as certainly not after ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... epic has numerous instances of it:—Hector in "Iliad" xi, 297, is setting the Trojans on "like dogs at a wild boar or lion." In xi, 557, Ajax retreating slowly from the Trojans is compared to an ass who has gone to feed in a field, and whom the boys find great difficulty ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... we are soldiers in my family. We have a marshal of France and two officers who died on the field of honor. I have perhaps obeyed a law of heredity. I believe rather that my imagination has carried me away. I saw war through my reveries of epic poetry. In my fancy I dwelt only upon the intoxication of victory, the triumphant flourish of trumpets and women throwing flowers to the victor. And then I loved the sonorous words of the great captains, the dramatic representations of martial glory. My father was in the ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... teeth of Time, So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry; Blot out the Epic's stately rhyme, But ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the nobility attached themselves to their better-situated brethren, becoming their dependents and willing tools. The relation of the nobility to the peasantry is well characterised in a passage of Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz, where a peasant, on humbly suggesting that the nobility suffered less from the measures of their foreign rulers than his own class, is told by one of his betters that this is a ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... will spring a massive monument, which will forever remain a landmark in American history,— aye, in the mighty epic of the world! More imposing cenotaphs have risen, costlier mausoleums have charmed the eye, more gigantic monuments have aspired to kiss the clouds; but to the student of mankind none were more significant, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... contrary, in the very extent of its sphere, can better measure itself with the Universe, and create with epic profusion. In an Iliad there is room even for a Thersites; and what does not find a place in the great epic ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the longitudinal direction. Followed in that direction they are many. Even the embryologist, when he follows the DEVELOPMENT of his object, has to treat the history of each single organ in turn. ABSOLUTE aesthetic union is thus another barely abstract ideal. The world appears as something more epic than dramatic. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... tenderness had provided them with every known toilette luxury filled into silver-topped cut crystal bottles. The sight of these afflicted men carrying their heavy burdens from the station to the prison at Pretoria was both amusing and dramatic. At times their speech reached the epic. ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... lifts Savonarola and Florence to new levels; a great cathedral inspires Michael Angelo's great dome; a Divine Saviour and His transfiguration exalt Raphael; Paradise explains Dante; listening to the sevenfold Hallelujah chorus of God arouses the sweep and majesty of Milton's epic; the woes of three million slaves made eloquence possible for Phillips and Beecher. The saving of a Union, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal, represented a cause into which Lincoln could fling himself. ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... respite, I employ it to give you one. You have misunderstood me, dear Sir: I have not said a word that will lower Mr. Baker's character; on the contrary, I think he will come out brighter from my ordeal. In truth, as I have drawn out his life from your papers, it is a kind of Political epic, in which his conscience is the hero that always triumphs over his interest upon the most opposite occasions. Shall you dislike your saint in this light! I had transcribed about half when I fell ill last week. If the gout ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... of other days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could bring to that one simple phrase What were not rather loss than gain; That elegy so briefly fine, That epic writ in half a line, That little which so much conveys, Whose silence is a hymn of praise And throbs with ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... same kind as that of the Blacksmiths, which should sum up the most poetical methods of human activity, and which should be called (unless you advise otherwise) Labourers, Sailors, and Soldiers, would form a lyric epic of which the genius of Rossini or Meyerbeer would be proud. I know I have no right to make any such claim, but your kindness to me has always been so great that I have a faint hope of obtaining this new and glorious favor. If, however, ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... work in more than one direction. The young litterateur of the present day has not such a very hard fight for a livelihood, if his pen has only a certain lightness and dash, a rattling vivacity and airy grace. It is only the marvellous boys who come to London with epic poems, Anglo-Saxon tragedies, or metaphysical treatises in their portmanteaus, who must needs perish in their prime, or stoop to the drudgery ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... leading families of that resort of shippers, timber-dealers, and fishermen. His father, John Storm Bull, was a pharmaceutist, and among his ancestors he numbered the Norwegian poet Edward Storm, author of the "Sinclair Lay," an epic on the fate of Colonel Sinclair, who with a thousand Hebridean and Scotch pirates, made a descent on the Norwegian coast, thus emulating the Vikingr forefathers of the Norwegians themselves. The peasants slew them to a man by rolling rocks down on them from the fearful pass of the Gulbrands ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... of laying out for posterity a straight and solid path in which it might walk with due rectitude. All this was in itself an ample enough subject to occupy their powerful imaginations. They were enacting a kind of sacred epic, the dangers and the dignity and exaltation of which they felt most fervently. The Bible, the Bay Psalm Book, Bunyan, and Milton, the poems of George Wither, Baxter's Saint's Rest, and some controversial pamphlets, would ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... A noble book! All men's book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem of man's destiny and God's ways with him here on this earth, and all in such free, flowing outlines, grand in its simplicity and its epic melody and repose of reconcilement! There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true every way; true eye-sight and vision for all things—material things no less than spiritual; the horse—'thou hast clothed his neck with thunder;' ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... might be a great future before any artist who could discover a new medium of utterance. It seems at present, to take literature, as if every form of human expression had been exploited. We have the lyric, the epic, the satire, the narrative, the letter, the diary, conversation, all embalmed in art. But there is probably some other medium possible which will become perfectly obvious the moment it is seized upon and used. To take an instance ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... undoubtedly below men. They pretended to no great works in philosophy, in legislation, or in the fine arts, except only that, as to one of these arts, viz. poetry, a single god vaunted himself greatly in simple ages. But he attempted neither a tragedy nor an epic poem. Even in what he did attempt, it is worth while to follow his career. His literary fate was what might have been expected. After the Persian war, the reputation of his verses rapidly decayed. Wits arose in Athens, who laughed ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... system, it was dealt with by people who had sympathies with some form of dualism which was already developing in the later days of the Upani@sads, as evidenced by the dualistic tendencies of such Upani@sads as the S'vetas'vatara, and the like. The epic S'a@mkhya was also the result ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... property of private persons. Every one of them, no doubt, was worth studying for a long, long time; and I suppose I may have given, on an average, a minute to each. What an absurdity it would seem, to pretend to read two or three hundred poems, of all degrees between an epic and a ballad, in an hour or two! And a picture is a poem, only requiring the greater study to be felt and comprehended; because the spectator must necessarily do much for himself towards that end. I saw many beautiful things,—among them some landscapes by Claude, which to the eye were ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... conscience, no turning towards the light, no sorrowful confessions at all. He has given us a great deal, but it is not too much to say that what he rejected, a Catholic poet would have seized with delight as the purplest patches of his epic, and the climax to which ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... Teresia, and of the Cardinal York. In the library were to be found all kinds of books relating to the career of that unhappy family: "Ye Tragicall History of ye Stuarts, 1697;" "Memoirs of King James II., writ by his own hand;" "La Stuartide," an unfinished epic in the French language by one Jean de Schelandre; "The Fate of Majesty exemplified in the barbarous and disloyal treatment (by traitorous and undutiful subjects) of the Kings and Queens of the Royal House of Stuart," genealogies of the Stuarts in English, French and Latin; a fine ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... of reputation. I am an admirer of eloquence [c]; I hold it venerable, and even sacred, in all its shapes, and every mode of composition. The pathetic of tragedy, of which you, Maternus, are so great a master; the majesty of the epic, the gaiety of the lyric muse; the wanton elegy, the keen iambic, and the pointed epigram; all have their charms; and Eloquence, whatever may be the subject which she chooses to adorn, is with me the sublimest faculty, the queen of all the arts ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... subject for senior students of literature to write about, and "My Favourite Elopement in Fiction" would be outside the purview of any of her girls. She would substitute instead (with my permission), "The Debt of Literature (as well as Science) to DARWIN" and "My Favourite Piece of Epic Poetry." In fine, if I did not really mind, she would herself set all the questions and I should examine the answers. She thought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... thousands to fight in this great battle; and the late commanding general of the Army of the Potomac under whom so many of us have fought. If the whole and comprehensive plans of our great lieutenant-general have marked him as the Ulysses of a holier and mightier epic than Homer ever dreamed, in the presence of the great captain who fairly turned the tide of the rebellion on the hills above Gettysburg, we shall not have to look ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... by its title: the 'Exodus' is the period of development for Israel from a family to a nation, and towards the close of the period Balaam, an outsider, bears witness in spite of himself to the growing numbers of the nation and to its glorious future.—In literary form it is a 'mixed epic' or 'canti-fable': a story in prose that breaks into verse at appropriate places. (Compare the expression took up his parable: the parable is an undefined term for a more specialised literary form occurring in the course of more general literature, ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... them what the star Sirius is in the already glorious heavens of a November midnight. As a thing of beauty, of simple grandeur, of wild strength, of heroic nobility, as a song, in short, I do not hesitate to affirm that it finds its like only in the Iliad. It is an epic song, and a song not of an individual soul but of a whole nation. Written down it was indeed by the hands of Gogol, but composed it was by the whole of Little Russia. As the whole of heroic Greece sings in the wrath of Achilles, so the whole of Cossakdom, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... any other epoch of that sublime scrimmage called history. Five or six names may be selected from the list of the early American prophets whose deeds and outcry, if reduced to hexameters, would be not the Iliad, not the Jerusalem Delivered, but the Epic of Human Liberty. ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... descends! Yet a moment, there they are,—age and childhood,—poverty, wealth, station, vagabondage; the preacher's sacred learning and august ambition; fancies of dawning reason; hopes of intellect matured; memories of existence wrecked; household sorrows; untold regrets; elegy and epic in low, close, human sighs, to which Poetry never yet gave voice: all for the moment personified there before you,—a glimpse for the guess, no more. Lower and lower falls the curtain! ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... gradually changed customs and religion. And so the Brahmanic society was established. Many works in Sanscrit are preserved from this time, which, with the Vedas, form the sacred literature of the Hindoos. The principal are the great epic poems, the Mahabarata, which has more than 200,000 verses; the Ramayana with 50,000, and the laws of Manou, the ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... the Bible as the father of Nimrod (Gen. x. 8-12); Hommel and Sayce think that the history of Nimrod is a reminiscence of the Cossaean rule. Jensen is alone in his attempt to attribute to the Cossaeans the first idea of the epic of Gilgames. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... deeply in some, and for the human sympathy, and thence, in part, the photographic fidelity, and for the paramount gift poetically to portray. A consequence of the choice of subject, and, as regards the epic quality of Dante's poem, an important consequence, is that there is in it no unity of interest. The sympathies of the reader are not engrossed by one great group of characters, acting and reacting on ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... of the eighteenth century was a period of predominant English influence. The first half of the century had fostered this ascendency through the popularity of the moral weeklies, the religious epic, and the didactic poetry of Britain. Admiration for English ideals was used as a weapon to combat French dominion in matters of taste, till a kind of Anglomania spread, which was less absolute than the waning ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... Book. But when I speak of the rareness and preciousness of prayers, I mean such prayers as contain three conditions—permanence, capability jot being really prayed, and universality. Such prayers primates and senates can no more command than they can order a new Cologne Cathedral or another epic poem."—The Bishop of Berry's ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... spread over northern Greece, and also occupied the western coast of the Peloponnesus and the Ionian islands. It continued, to the latest times, to occupy the greater part of Greece. The Achaeans were the most celebrated in epic poetry, their name being used by Homer to denote all the Hellenic tribes which fought at Troy. They were the dominant people of the Peloponnesus, occupying the south and east, and the Arcadians the centre. The Dorians and Ionians were of later celebrity; the former occupying a ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... page in which the dollars do not jingle; full of the unrest and movement of our century, so that the reader is hurried from place to place and sea to sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama—in the end, as blood-bespattered as an epic? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and interests; but he who keeps the great theme ever in mind, watching for it as he reads, as one watches for the new entry of a great fugue-subject, will never fail to see in the Aeneid one of the noblest efforts of human art—to understand what makes it the world's second great epic. ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... mingled yarn of human life, tragedy is never far asunder from farce; and it is amusing to retrace in immediate succession to this incident of epic dignity, which has its only parallel by the way in the case of Vasco de Gama, (according to the narrative of Camoens,) when met and confronted by a sea phantom, whilst attempting to double the Cape of Storms, (Cape of Good Hope,) ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Book of the Beginnings creation was effected in successive acts. According to the epic of it, humanity's primal home was a paradise where ten impressive persons—the models, it may be, of antediluvian patriarchs—reigned interminably, agreeably also, finally sinfully as well. In punishment a deluge swept them away. From the flood there escaped one man who separated ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... Tennyson's masterpiece, the "Idylls of the King," an epic of chivalry, interpreted as personifying in its various characters the soul at war with the senses. These appeared during the years 1859 and 1872. Each of the Idylls, which has a connecting thread binding it to its fellow-allegory, takes its plot or fable from the legendary lore that has ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... sacred poetry materialized all it touched. The shadows of Olympus received the breath of Homer, and the gods grew at once life-like and palpable to men. The traditions which connected the deities with humanity—the genius which divested them of allegory—gave at once to the epic and the tragic poet the supernatural world. The inhabitants of heaven itself became individualized—bore each a separate character—could be rendered distinct, dramatic, as the creatures of daily life. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cotemporary of Zonaras. The other is John Tzetzes, who wrote a rambling work consisting of mythological and historical notices in Greek political, civil, or profane verse, as it may be called, (versus politici)—the epic poetry of modern Greece; correctly compared by Lord Byron ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... return to the exploits of the Emden, its mysterious disappearance and the narrative of its heroes—a great epic of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... unnatural, and so are to be avoided. They are really digressions, excrescences—beautiful enough in themselves, perhaps, but assuredly adding no beauty to the narrative. Principal among such figures employed by amateurs are the long complex metaphors and similes in which epic poetry delights; the figure of apostrophe, too, is much affected by tyros, because it affords them opportunity to coin orotund phrases concerning the irony of fate, the haplessness of true lovers, and ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... sung another golden age, The rise of empire and of arts, The good and great inspiring epic rage, The wisest heads and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a young giant ready to run a race, it stood on tiptoe, eager for adventure and discovery— sending ships to the ends of the world, and round the world, on messages of commerce and friendship, and encouraging with applause and rewards that wonderful spirit of scientific invention, which was the Epic of the youthful nation. The skies of Italy were not bluer than the skies above it; the sunshine of Arcadia not brighter or more genial. It was a city of beautiful, and even splendid, homes; and all the length ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... must be directed in the nobler branches of our art. Upon this principle the Roman, the Florentine, the Bolognese schools, have formed their practice; and by this they have deservedly obtained the highest praise. These are the three great schools of the world in the epic style. The best of the French school, Poussin, Le Sueur, and Le Brun, have formed themselves upon these models, and consequently may be said, though Frenchmen, to be a colony from the Roman school. Next to these, but in a very different style of excellence, ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... from which Saturn and the ancient deities had been expelled by Jupiter. But contrary to this pagan instinct, the Cumaean Sibyl stretched forward to a distant heaven of her aspirations and hopes—to a nobler future of the world, not sentimental and idyllic, but epic and heroic. She pictured the blessing or restoration of this earth itself as distinct from an invisible world of happiness. And in this respect she is more in sympathy with the Jewish and Christian religions than with her ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... that his youth engrossed, The Novel of his prime, The Epic that he loved the most, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... High over these rises, in the enormous scale of the scenery of clouds, what no man expected—an heroic sky. Few of the things that were ever done upon earth are great enough to be done under such a heaven. It was surely designed for other days. It is for an epic world. Your eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are the distances of earth to these, and what are the distances of the clear and cloudless sky? The very horizons of the landscape are near, for the round world dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky are unmeasured—you rest upon ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... or grief, regarding chiefly the sufferings of Christ, or the conditions of our own sin: while through the entire system of these musical complaints are interwoven moralities, instructions, and related histories, in illustration of both, passing into Epic and Romantic verse, which gradually, as the forms and learnings of society increase, becomes less joyful, and more didactic, or satiric, until the last echoes of Christian joy and melody vanish in the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Icelanders, easily twenty thousand; and so quickly do they merge with Canadian life that you forget they are foreigners. I was a child in Winnipeg when the first Icelanders arrived, and their rise has been a national epic. I do not believe the first few hundreds had fifty dollars among them. They slept under high board sidewalks for the first nights and erected tar-paper shanties on vacant lots the next day. In these they housed the first winter. Though we Winnipeggers ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... book-lover: knowing Dante, Boccaccio, and in some degree "Franceys Petrark, the laureat poete," who "enlumined al Itaille of poetry," Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Ovid—his favourite author—and Boethius; as well as Guido delle Colonne's prose epic of the story of Troy, the poems of Guillaume de Machaut, the Roman de la Rose, and a work on the astrolabe by Messahala.[1] We have some excellent pictures of Chaucer's habit of reading. When his day's work is done he goes home and ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... an essay. If one matter is of greater importance than another, it should take up a larger part of the essay. When Macaulay passes over Milton's sonnets with a paragraph, while he devotes sixteen paragraphs to "Paradise Lost," he indicates by the greater mass the greater value he ascribes to the epic. So again, a very good proof that he did not intend this essay to be a literary criticism primarily, another evidence beside the closing paragraph, is found in his division of the whole essay. To Milton's poetry he has given forty-one ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Anabasis. Were this the sole book existing in Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to learn the language in order to read it. The Anabasis is an admirable work of art, unique in its combination of concise and rapid narrative with colour and picturesqueness. Herodotus wrote a prose epic, in which the author's personality is ever before us. Xenophon, with curiosity and love of adventure which mark him of the same race, but self-forgetful in the pursuit of a new artistic virtue, created ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Restauraw is one of the few superior hostelries of the Territory. Mrs. Rucker, its charming proprietress, is a cook who might outrival even that celebrated chef, now dead, M. Soyer. Her pies are poems, her bread an epic, and her beans a dream, Mrs. Rucker has cooked her way to every heart, and her famed establishment is justly regarded as the bright particular gem in ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... to write the epic of the Devil's Antechamber; I abode there but ten days, as we reckon time. On a cool and clear Easter Sunday morning the summons came to go forth to further adventures. Accompanied by three deputies, but free of the Henkel handcuffs, we passed the gates and trod the sunny pavements. ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... hopes out of this static medievalism is one of the epic occurrences of history. The causes which furthered the movement seem now in retrospect to be woven into a fabric so tightly meshed as to resist unraveling. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see at least some of the major factors ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Demeter Erinnys is undeniably a blending of the epic tradition [of the ideal war-horse] with the local cult of Demeter. . . . It is a probable hypothesis that the belief in the wedding of Demeter and Poseidon comes from the sight of the waves passing over the ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... polish some rudeness in his verses; had he enjoyed better fortune, and possessed leisure to watch the returns of genius in himself; he had attained the pinnacle of perfection, and borne away the palm of epic poetry. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... remarkable fact that even in mediaeval epics, Charlemagne himself, the emperor of the flowing beard, often plays a comic part. The epic is invaded by the ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... hours that followed Keith felt the strength and courage of the dying man becoming slowly a part of himself. The thing was epic. Conniston, throttling his own agony, was magnificent. And Keith felt his warped and despairing soul swelling with a new life and a new hope, and he was thrilled by the thought of what he must do to live up to the mark of the Englishman. Conniston's ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... fresh impulse from the appearance of the great national epic, Kalevala, songs descending from heathen times, written down by Elias Lnnrot from the lips of the people, as described in a former chapter. In no less degree was the national feeling intensified by the great poet, Johan Ludvig Runeberg. In his poems, inspired by a glowing love for the Finnish ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... instance, a man shall admire and almost adore the Epic poems of the Ancients, and yet despise and execrate the ancient Romances, which are ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... histories escaped his memory when he was penning his grievances. Indeed, there are evidences gleaming through his memorandum that his reflections were harassed by the remembrance of his own conduct, which had plunged to epic depths of wrongdoing in other days. These and other considerations would doubtless have a restraining effect on the action that might have been taken under different circumstances. Sir William Hamilton must have pondered over the parentage of Horatia, who was born on the 29th ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... achievements of science and the handiwork of genius had interested and sometimes amazed him, but never had he looked upon physical effort that thrilled him as did this that he was looking upon now. There was almost the spirit of the epic about it. They were the survival of the fittest—these men and dogs. They had gone through the great test of life in the raw, as the pyramids and the sphinx had outlived the ordeals of the centuries; they were different; they were proven; they were of another ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... note of humanity. In his introduction to, "The Rise of the Greek Epic,"(21) Gilbert Murray emphasizes the idea of service to the community as more deeply rooted in the Greeks than in us. The question they asked about each writer was, "Does he help to make better men?" or "Does he make life a better thing?" Their aim was to be useful, to be helpful, to make ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... that Bowen didn't either. He strikes me as the kind of man who develops slowly, needs a big field, and perhaps makes some big mistakes, but gets where he wants to in the end. Jove, I wish I could put him in a book! There's something epic about him—a kind of ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... song—a far-off, lonesome, plaintive lay. "'Far as the hills,'" says the guide; "a song of the old days and the old people, now seldom heard." All together croon the refrain. The host delivers himself of an epic about his love across the seas, with the most agonizing expression, and in a shockingly bad voice. He is the worst singer I ever heard; but his companions greet his effort with approving shouts of "Yi! yi!" They look so fierce, and yet are so childishly happy, that at the thought of their exile and ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... artistic validity of work in a form never dignified by the practice of the ancients, never hallowed, like much of English literature besides, by a long line of native productions adapting classic forms to new ages and a new speech. The epic, the lyric, the pastoral, the comedy, the tragedy, the elegy, the satire, the myth, even the fable, have been classic, have usually been literature. But the novel has never been a preserve for the learned, although it came perilously near ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... a young nobleman of a literary turn, and that he published poems ever so foolish and feeble, the Snobs would purchase thousands of his volumes: the publishers (who refused my Passion-Flowers, and my grand Epic at any price) would give him his own. Suppose he is a nobleman of a jovial turn, and has a fancy for wrenching off knockers, frequenting ginshops, and half murdering policemen: the public will sympathize good-naturedly with his amusements, ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... balances of human reason. The truce to fanaticism called by Akbar the Great encouraged a poet and reformer named Tulsi Dasa (1532-1623) to point a surer way to salvation. He adored Krishna, the preserving influence incarnate as Rama, and rehandled Valmiki's great epic, the Ramayana, in the faint rays of Christian light which penetrated India during that age of transition. Buddha had proclaimed the brotherhood of man; Tulsi Dasa deduced it from the fatherhood of God. The Preserver, ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... and an old sagamore, Chees-a-kee, is related to have been conducted a la AEneus, in Virgil, to the halls of the spirits and to have seen them all assembled in the spacious wigwam. Had some bard taken up the tale of this fortunate individual, the literature of the red man might have boasted an epic ranking perhaps with the AEneid ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... architecture—one birth of beauty after another—was born. Athens was crowned with marvellous temples, whose exquisite proportions amaze and charm us to-day—inimitable creations of beauty. Homer came, and then epic poetry was born. AEschylus and tragedy came; Pindar and the lyric song; Theophrastus and pastoral music; Anacreon and the strain which bears his special name. And so Phidias and his companions created sculpture, Herodotus history, Demosthenes ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... of Mr. Meeker in this enterprise was to induce people to mark the famous old highway. To him it represented a great battle ground in our nation's struggle to win and hold the West. The story of the Oregon Trail, he rightly felt, is an American epic which must be preserved. Through his energy and inspiration and the help of thousands of loyal men and women, school boys and school girls, substantial monuments have now been placed along the greater part of the old ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... think a gentleman might compose an epic poem without rendering himself amenable to insult, sir," says ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... as it were, they perform. I love to see English poetry move to many measures, to many numbers, but chiefly with the simple iambic and the simple trochaic foot. Those two are enough for the infinite variety, the epic, the drama, the lyric, of our poetry. It is, accordingly, in these old traditional and proved metres that Swinburne's music seems to me most worthy, most controlled, and most lovely. There is his best dignity, and therefore his best beauty. ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... prosperity of some of the clergy, and at least sees nothing droll in it; but the paragrapher can always get a smile out of his readers at the gross disparity between the ten thousand dollars Jones gets for his novel, and the five pounds Milton got for his epic. I have always thought Milton was paid too little, but I will own that he ought not to have been paid at all, if it comes to that. Again, I say that no man ought to live by any art; it is a shame to the art if not to the artist; but as yet there is no means of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... river-bank. Their crews were sitting round them. Diggins beckoned to them to surrender, which they did. He was so blown with running that he felt sick and faint. Nevertheless he recovered, and rose to the occasion. To us, away in the aid-posts, came epic stories of 'Digguens,' with the ease and magnificence of Sir Francis Drake receiving an admiral's sword, shaking hands with the battery commander. He is a singularly great man in action, is Fred Diggins. In all, from several positions, Diggins took seven fourteen-pounders and two ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... Gaul he dominated Rome, and therewith he was penetrating impenetrable forests, trailing legions as a torch trails smoke, erecting walls that a nation could not cross, turning soldiers into marines, infantry into cavalry, building roads that are roads to-day, fighting with one hand and writing an epic with the other, dictating love-letters, chronicles, dramas; finding time to make a collection of witticisms; overturning thrones while he decorated Greece; mingling initiate into orgies of the Druids, and, as the cymbals clashed, ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... three main ways of story-telling, by the epic poem, the drama and prose fiction, the epic seems to be the oldest; poetry, indeed, being the natural form of expression among ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... before peace came German generals paid ungrudging tributes to the efficiency of our Regular Army, writing down in their histories of war that this was the model of all armies, the most perfectly trained... It was spent by the spring of '15. Its memory remains as the last epic of those professional soldiers who, through centuries of English history, took "the King's shilling" and fought when they were told to fight, and left their bones in far places of the world and in many fields ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... influence upon the progress of our own, was at last opened to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain undecided. Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio—both his epic poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which Petrarch praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were mingled with others of undeniable jocoseness—the immortal "Decamerone." He could examine the refined gold of Petrarch's own verse with its exquisite variations of its ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... of the exploits of Myles Standish throws a clearer light upon a heroic figure in our earliest history, and it has an epic quality which will appeal to old and young. While the facts of history are presented, the author has adroitly reconstructed the little-known earlier years of Standish's life, basing his imaginative work upon the probabilities of history. The result is for the most ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... epic and tragic poetry—in the lives of those pioneer women! The lonely cabin in the depths of the forest; the father away; the mother rocking her babe to sleep; the howling of the wolves; the storm beating on the roof; the crafty savage lying in ambush; the war-whoop in the night; the attack ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... an epic, the joint production of himself and Captain Medwin, a school-boy production, St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, and his first story, Zastrozzi, are the first books of the poet; and their history is detailed with more or less interest in the letters which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... whose tale of "The Haunted Island" was wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic school, but whose tragedies, melodramas, comedies, farces, operas, are now forgotten. In addition to these auxiliary labors, which ripened yearly, Pye tried his hand at an epic,—the subject, King Alfred,—the plot and treatment not greatly differing from those which Blackmore brought to the same enterprise. The poem passed at once from the bookshop to the trunk-maker,—not, however, before an American publisher was found daring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... Epic is the most notable literary product of Babylonia as yet discovered in the mounds of Mesopotamia. It recounts the exploits and adventures of a favorite hero, and in its final form covers twelve tablets, each tablet consisting ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... O epic rags! O tatters light, Starred with a cross! Heroic things Of ridicule, ye gleam more bright, More beautiful ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... and so forth, he "painted the life he knew and everyone knew;" that he painted, of course, nothing ideal or heroic, and that the world of thought and passion lay beyond his horizon; but that, with his artificial performers and his feeble-witted audiences, "all the resources of the bourgeois epic were in his grasp; the joys and pains of childhood, the petty tyrannies of ignoble natures, the genial pleasantries of happy natures, the life of the poor, the struggles of the street and back ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the romance of the forests with the romance of a man's heart, making a story that is big and elemental, while not lacking in sweetness and tenderness. It is an epic of the life of the lumbermen in the great forests of the Northwest, permeated in every line by out-of-door freshness and the glory of the labor of the struggle with nature. It will appeal to everyone who cares for trees, the ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... to the attention of mankind. Let us endeavor, in the first place, to ascertain his meaning on this point. The British Constitution was to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on epic poetry. As the latter have considered the work of the immortal bard as the perfect model from which the principles and rules of the epic art were to be drawn, and by which all similar works were to be judged, so this great political critic appears to have viewed the Constitution of England ...
— The Federalist Papers
... in Hawthorne and his descriptions in the "Blithedale Romance" of the life at Brook Farm that the principal interest of most readers centres. This work has come to be regarded as the epic of the community, and it is now generally conceded that Hawthorne was in this novel far more of a realist than was at first admitted. He did not avoid the impulse to tell the happenings of life at the farm pretty nearly as he found them, and substantial as the characters may or may not ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... forbid! not I! (ejaculated the youth). Rhapsodists have a very exact acquaintance with epic poetry, I know, of course; but they are empty-pated creatures ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... SOUTHEY! You're a poet—Poet-laureate, And representative of all the race; Although 't is true that you turned out a Tory at Last,—yours has lately been a common case; And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at? With all the Lakers, in and out of place? A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye Like "four and twenty Blackbirds ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being. To talk of dramatic poetry, epic poetry and narrative poetry is to talk of three different things—epic, drama and narrative; but each is combined with a fourth thing in common, which is poetry, which, in turn, is in itself of precisely the same nature as the lyric of which we are told ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... sort of verse meandering, Bob went without a hitch or fall, Through Epic, Sapphic, Alexandrine, To verse that was no ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... some truth; but it is evident that it is abused, and that if, for instance, reason can be confounded with poetic genius and make one with it in a moral epistle, it cannot be the same thing as the genius, so varied and so diversely creative in its expression of the passions, of the drama or the epic. Where will you find reason in the fourth book of the AEneid and the transports of Dido? Be that as it may, the spirit which prompted the theory, caused writers who ruled their inspiration, rather than ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... and a loftier strain,' And, pray, what follows from his boiling brain? He sinks to S * *'s level in a trice, Whose epic mountains never fail in mice! Not so of yore awoke your mighty sire The tempered warblings of his master lyre; Soft as the gentler breathing of the lute, 'Of man's first disobedience and the fruit' He speaks; but, as his subject ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Roman epic Poet whose Pharsalia describes the struggle between Caesar and Pompey and breathes ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with the love of fame, what throngs pour in, Unpeople court, and leave the senate thin! My glowing subject seems but just begun, And, chariot-like, I kindle as I run. Aid me, great Homer! with thy epic rules, To take a catalogue of British fools. Satire! had I thy Dorset's force divine, A knave or fool should perish in each line; Tho' for the first all Westminster should plead, And for the last, all Gresham ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... over ice, leaving its mark as it goes, yet breaking no crust of frost; and there was the poetic dreamer Dartmore, with his large, dark eyes, and moonlight face, and manner of suffering serenity, on his way to put forth for fame, as he fondly believed, his manuscript epic on the "Sorrows of ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... class raconteur, his musical delivery in reciting apt bits of poetry and other quotations adding to the pleasure of hearing his accounts rendered. He gave us modern versions of the Greek myths and hero legends, of Cadmus and Thebes, of Jason and the Golden Fleece, of the Trojan epic, of ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... and sometimes, in moments of sympathy, their parents would be revealed to them in sudden lights of pathos and old romance. They would listen to some old love-affair of their mother's as though it had been their own, or go out of their way to make their father tell once more the epic of the great business over which he presided, and which, as he conceived it, was doubtless a greater poem than his son would ever write. Yet still even in such genuine sympathy, there was a certain imaginative effort ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... and whilst he was driving in a cab towards the Via Venti Settembre, he recalled to mind the heroic story of old Orlando's life which had been told him in Paris. It was like an epic poem, full of faith, bravery, and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... improve his writing and spelling. Benjamin Franklin was past fifty before he began the study of science and philosophy. Milton, in his blindness, was past the age of fifty when he sat down to complete his world-known epic, and Scott at fifty-five took up his pen to redeem an enormous liability. "Yet I am learning," said Michael Angelo, when threescore years and ten were past, and he had long attained the highest ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... work of eating into and destroying the mountainside. With intense energy men and machines do their task, the white men supervising matters and handling the machines, while the tens of thousands of black men do the rough manual labor where it is not worth while to have machines do it. It is an epic feat, ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... and in the Epos of Pentaur it is stated that this battle took place at Kadesh by the Orontes. The name of the city survives, at a spot just three miles north of the lake of Riblah. The battle itself I have described from the Epos of Pentaur, the national epic of Egypt. It ends with these words: "This was written and made by the scribe Pentaur." It was so highly esteemed that it is engraved in stone twice at Luqsor, and once at Karnak. Copies of it on papyrus are frequent; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... eye!" said my friend, irreverently. "In Shakespeare's day he might have sputtered out some high-cockalorum nonsense of that sort, because in those days they ordered ham and eggs in blank verse and discharged the cook with an epic. But not for B'way in the summer ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... a periphrasis for woman that bears gold on her arm. (2) "Skates that skim." etc.. a periphrasis for ships. (3) "Odin's mocking cup," mocking songs. (4) An allusion to the Beast Epic, where the cunning fox laughs at the flayed condition of his stupid foes, the wolf and bear. We should say, "Don't stop to speak with him, but rather beat him ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... proper perspective—as a member of the general staff riding by, who kept his vision fixed on the aim, that is, the victory that sooner or later would be celebrated to the clinking of glasses—why, from that point of view Weixler was right! It must make him indignant to have events of such epic grandeur made ridiculous by such a chicken-hearted creature as Simmel and degraded into a doleful ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... Virgil and Milton had to attain only by effort intense and sustained. In the high office of drawing human character in its multitude of forms and colors he seems to have no serious rival except Shakespeare. We call him an epic poet, but he is instinct from beginning to end with the spirit of the drama, while we find in him the seeds and rudiments even of its form. His function as a reciting minstrel greatly aided him herein. Again, he had in his language ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... redolent with the spirit of the Odyssey, that glorious primitive epic, fresh with the dew of the morning of time. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read his recital of the adventures of the wily Odysseus, slightly expurgated though it be, and adapted for the intelligence of youthful minds. Howard Pyle's ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was the epic age, over whose departure my late eloquent and prophetic friend and correspondent, Edmund Burke, so movingly mourned. Yes, they were glorious times. But no sensible man, given to quiet domestic delights, would exchange his warm fireside and muffins, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... revelation some day—towards some ampler vision, which [220] should take up into itself and explain this world's delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till then but half-understood, might be taken up into the text of a lost epic, recovered at last. At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its height; the house ready for the possible guest; the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever divine fingers ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... d'esprit, while having reference primarily to Eton, demonstrated that the writers were not insensible to what was going on in the great world without. It was for this college paper that Canning wrote his "Essay on the Epic of the Queen of Hearts," which, as a burlesque criticism, has been awarded a high place in English literature. Lord Henry Spencer, Hookham Frere, Capel Lofft, and Mr. Millish, were also contributors to the ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... Testament is religious; the Song of Deborah, e.g. (Jud. v.), or the Psalm of Hezekiah (Isa. xxxviii.). But, from scattered hints it is abundantly plain that, especially before the exile, Hebrew poetry must have ranged over a wide variety of themes. So far as we know, the Hebrews never had an epic; and though a certain epic power is occasionally suggested by the extant literature, it may be doubted whether the Hebrew genius, which was essentially lyrical, would have been capable of the long sustained ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... Sordavala Festival, an accurate representation of a native wedding of a hundred years ago was given, perhaps for the reason that the performers were thus naturally enabled to introduce many of the bridal songs contained in their great epic poem, Kalevala, and their collection of lyric poems ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... Tsavo man-eaters as told by Col. Patterson. A lion story is usually a tale of adventures, often very terrible and pathetic, which occupied but a few hours of one night; but the tale of the Tsavo man-eaters is an epic of terrible tragedies spread out over several months, and only at last brought to an end by the resource and determination of ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... adventures of this amazing horse and predatory cow. Somewhere near the middle of the epic little Royal Beaudry usually dropped asleep. The rhythmic tale always comforted him. These nameless animals were very real friends of his. They had been companions of his tenderest years. He loved them with a devotion from which no fairy tale could ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... too, my Poet, be never dismayed If they whisper your Epic—"Sir Eperon d'Or"— Is nothing but Tennyson thinly arrayed In a tissue that's taken from Morris's store; That no one, in fact, but a child could ignore That you "lift" or "accommodate" all that you do; Take heart—though your Pegasus' withers be sore— For the man ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... then, for heroine' clamoured he, 'And make her some great Princess, six feet high, Grand, epic, homicidal; and be you The Prince to win her!' 'Then follow me, the Prince,' I answered, 'each be hero in his turn! Seven and yet one, like shadows in a dream.— Heroic seems our Princess as required— But something made to suit with Time and place, A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... which is really the third play of a trilogy, Shakespeare adopted a manner of treatment quite unlike that which characterizes the other two. Henry V is really a dramatized epic, an almost lyric rhapsody cast in the form of dialogue. Falstaff has disappeared from view, and is recalled only by the affecting story of his death. This episode, however, brief as it is, reveals the ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... whom you seek to protect, holding back that bunch of desperadoes, it occurs to me that she can give a fairly good account of herself. Gad, it was epic!" ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... composite, so likely to be crude, as the romance. Their styles of art were all pure, their taste delighted in simplicity and unity, and they strictly forbade a medley, alike in architecture, sculpture, and letters. The history of their development opens with an epic yet unsurpassed, and their literary creations have been adopted to be the humanities of Christian universities. A writer has recently proposed to account for their success in the arts from the circumstance ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... obliged to him for giving us an Homer, yet had he doubled our obligation by giving us—a Pope. He had a strong imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... and elegance, and used it frequently in her mottos and devices: by her encouragement, as we shall see, Harrington was urged to complete his version of the Orlando Furioso, and she willingly accepted in the year 1600 the dedication of Fairfax's admirable translation of the great epic of Tasso. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... by the Symphony depends largely upon the attitude of the hearer. In this work we are not to look for the sublimity and emotional depth of a Bach or Beethoven any more than we expect a whimsical comedy of Aristophanes to resemble an epic poem of Milton. But for daring imagination, for rhythmic vitality and certainty of orchestral effect, it was and ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... just where Jeffrey is apt to fail; though he affects to be a dictator, he is really a follower of the fashion. He could put up with Rogers's flattest 'correctness,' Moore's most intolerable tinsel, and even Southey's most ponderous epic poetry, because admiration was respectable. He could endorse, though rather coldly, the general verdict in Scott's favour, only guarding his dignity by some not too judicious criticism; preferring, for example, the sham romantic business of ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Calmuck Tartars; they hold (see Bergmann's 'Streifereien') that their 'Dschangariade' is the finest of all epic poems, past or coming; and, therefore, the Calmuck Lives of the Poets will naturally be inimitable. But confining our view to the unhappy literatures of Europe, ancient or modern, this is what we think of Dr. Johnson's efforts as a biographer. Consequently, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... (Poems and Songs) in 1870, and in the same year was published 'Arnljot Gelline,' the author's only long poem not dramatic in form. This uneven and in passages extraordinarily beautiful work is a sort of epic in fifteen songs, difficult to read, yet simple enough in general outline. Arnljot Gelline was a sort of freebooter of the eleventh century, whose fierce deeds were preserved in popular tradition. The 'Heimskringla' tells us how, grown weary of his ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... projects after his return from Italy; drafts of "Paradise Lost" among them; the poem originally designed as a masque or miracle-play; commenced as an epic in 1658; its composition speedily interrupted by ecclesiastical and political controversies; Milton's "Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes," and "Considerations on the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church"; Royalist reaction in the winter of 1659-60; Milton ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... possession of the facts so unfamiliar to the modern oracles of classical mythology! Briefly, it appears that in the best period of ancient Greece nine Muses were recognised, namely, Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry; Euterpe, of lyric poetry; Erato, of erotic poetry; Melpomene, of tragedy; Thalia, of comedy; Polyhymnia, of sacred hymns; Terpsichore, of choral song and dance; Clio, of history; and Urania, of astronomy. The last two seem to have very little in common with the addiction ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... used to sit all day by the fire, inscribing "ideas" every now and then in a pocket-book. I think he was writing an epic poem, and I think he was happy in an ineffectual way. He had thin red hair, untidy for want of a valet, a shining, delicate, hooked nose, narrow-lidded blue eyes, and a face with the colour and texture of a white-heart cherry. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... a picturesque village, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, is entitled to notice in the annals of literature, as the family seat of the MILTONS, ancestors of Britain's illustrious epic poet. Of this original abode, our engraving is an accurate representation. One of Milton's ancestors forfeited his estate in the turbulent times of York and Lancaster. "Which side he took," says Johnson, "I know not; his descendant inherited no veneration for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... benign severity shone from his eyes. His friends had flocked in, and he had already begun to tell again at full length the story of the Lieutenant-Governor's visit with still further adornments of a most fantastic kind. The interview was already becoming an epic, both in ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... editor has chosen two from which to reprint brief passages. The first is Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, the simple and straightforward personal narrative of one whom all must now concede to have been a very great man; the other is that human and poignant epic of the stranger from Denmark who became one of us and of whom we as a people are tenderly proud. The Making of an American is in some ways a unique book; concrete, specific, self-revealing and yet dignified; a book that one could wish ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... lively multitude came to us, punctuated at intervals by distant shouts or shots or laughter. On either hand the campfires stretched away like twinkling stars, converging steadily until the horns joined each other away out yonder in the darkness. It was a suitable setting for an epic tale ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... gossamer lariats; then they let go and sailed away to a hazard of new fortunes. The air was full of the tiny adventurers. As he stared up the street, Peter caught the glint of these invisible airships whisking away to whatever chance might hold for them. There was something epic in it. It recalled to the mulatto's mind some of Fabre's lovely descriptions. It reminded him of two or three books on entomology which he had left in his mother's cabin. He felt he ought to go after them while the spiders were migrating. He suddenly made up his mind he would go ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... like ours the appearance of an epic poem more than five thousand lines in length cannot but be regarded as remarkable. Whether such a form of art is the one most suited to our century is a question. Edgar Allan Poe insisted that no poem should take more than an hour to read, the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Stafford Northcote, Disraeli himself never made any vain pretensions to be devoted to pursuits for which he did not care a rap. He once dreamt of an epic poem, and his early ambition urged him a step or two in that direction, but his critical faculty, which, despite all his monstrosities of taste, was vital, restrained him from making a fool of himself, and he forswore the muse, puffed the prostitute away, and ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... the fiery tones in rhythmed laws, Zophiel sketched with glowing pen the joys of virtue, the glories of the intellect, and the pleasures, pains, raptures, woes, and loves of the heart. The deeds of heroes were sung in Epic; Dramas, Elegies, and Lyrics syllabled the inner life; men listened to the ennobling strains, and became freemen as they heard. The intermingling flow of high thought and melodious measures elevated and soothed the soul, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... literature of the middle ages culminates in the Christian poet, Dante. History, theology, politics, paganism, sweet and melancholy elegies, flashes of fiery indignation, all men and all generations, meet in his majestic epic. Yet the closest unity is preserved through this astonishing range of subjects; one sublime idea broods over its every line,—the idea of a God of perfect ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... But there also uprose the eternal Church question, 'What sort of Church are we to have?' The fierce controversy raged, and 'its fair enticing fruit,' spread round 'with liberal hand,' proved too much for the father of English epic. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... and in the poem called the "Karl Meinet," a German compilation of various legends about the Frankish hero.[28] Purely Germanic legends like those of Ortnit-Wolfdietrich and King Rother were orientalized in much the same manner.[29] As might be expected, it is in the court-epic and minstrel-poetry (Spielmannsdichtung) where this Oriental tendency manifests itself most markedly. A typical poem of this kind is "Herzog Ernst." The hero, a purely German character, is made to go through a series of marvelous adventures in the East some of ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... of Tacitus, or the "din" made by the Norse "bards" (skalds) on shields and with shouts as they rushed into battle. It is not in Molbech, but Snorro frequently uses it in his Chronica, 1633.—43. Kalevala: Title of the great Finnish epic, of which the hero is Woinomoinen.—43. Polak: Polander or Pole.—43. Magyar (pron. Madjr): Hungarian.—43. Batuscha: An erratum of the author for his Batuschca (161)—better Batyushca, "father ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... being Athenians, we should yield the leadership to Syracusans, we who boast of a race which is the most ancient of all and who are of all the Hellenes the only people who have not changed from one land to another; to whom also belonged a man whom Homer the Epic poet said was the best of all who came to Ilion in drawing up an army and setting it in array. 151 Thus we are not justly to be reproached ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... of which many different ones related to the same hero. Hence in time there was a disposition on the part of the cleverer minstrels to combine them into a single narration, and to impart to the whole so composed something of an epic character. Thus arose the famous Chansons de Geste already mentioned, the origin and general character of which have been most happily elucidated in the work of M. Gautier, already ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... he did over and over again, with unflagging vehemence, with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers and thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; she calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in this tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is tortured to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. La recherche ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... still more is imitated in form. All the great subjects, the great matieres, are French in their early treatment, with the exception of the national work of Spain, Iceland, and in part Germany. All the forms, except those of the prose saga and its kinsman the German verse folk-epic, are found first in French. Whosoever knows the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, knows not merely the best literature in form, and all but the best in matter, of the time, but that which all the time was imitating, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... wars we fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders of them are unlike other wonders. If we do not see in them the saga and epic, how shall we ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... the true conformation of the sublimest effort of poetic genius, the construction of an "Epic Poem," are numerically three; viz., a beginning, a middle, and an end. The incipient characters necessary to the beginning, ripening in the middle, and, like the drinkers of small beer and October leaves, falling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... copied by Sidney from Bembo and Molza and Costanzo, contained within it the exotic and exquisite ideal passion of the "Vita Nuova" and Petrarch. With the bright, undulating stanza Spenser received from Ariosto and Tasso the richly coloured spirit of the Italian descriptive epic. With the splendid involutions of Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's prose Bacon learned their cool and disimpassioned philosophy. From the reading of Politian and Lorenzo dei Medici, from the sight of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... dramatic form for the story. One almost wishes it were true. How fine a unity it would give our epic! But perhaps, after all, the real truth is more interesting. The life of the nation cannot be reduced to these so simple terms. These two great forces, of the North and of the South, unquestionably existed,—were unquestionably projected in their operation out upon the great plane ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various |
