"Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Tasso remained at Ferrara, constantly writing sonnets and short poems of all descriptions, which were most often addressed to Leonora, but at the same time he was busily working upon that longer poem in epic form, descriptive of the First Crusade, the Gerusalemme liberata, wherein he puts a new feeling into Italian poetry, which had been expressed before by Ariosto in his amatory verse, but which cannot be found to any great extent in his more pretentious work, the Orlando ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... this system is derived from the works of Homer, He'si-od, and other ancient writers, who have gathered the floating legends of which it consists into tales and epic poems, many of them of great power and beauty. Some of these legends are exceedingly natural and pleasing, while others shock and disgust us by the gross impossibilities and hideous deformities which they reveal. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... and perhaps Amelia also. Fielding had high notions of the dignity of an art which he may be considered as having founded. He challenges a comparison between the Novel and the Epic. Smollett, Le Sage, and others, emancipating themselves from the strictness of the rules he has laid down, have written rather a history of the miscellaneous adventures which befall an individual in the course of life, than the plot of a regular and connected epopeia, where every step ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... all. It is thus that we may explain, in part, that penetrating apprehension of human life and character, and that power of touching sympathies common to all ages and nations, which surprises us so much in the unlettered authors of the old epic. Such periodical intercommunion of brethren habitually isolated from each other was the only means then open of procuring for the bard a diversified range of experience and a many-colored audience; ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... prose translation by Kennedy in ten Brink (p. 91) and the rhythmical one by Professor Morley in his "English Writers" (II. 316-17). ten Brink thinks that the poem was not written by an eye-witness, and says (p. 92): "The poem lacks the epic perception and direct power of the folk-song as well as invention. The patriotic enthusiasm, however, upon which it is borne, the lyrical strain which pervades it, yield their true effect. The rich resources derived from the national epos are here happily ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... bodies - is an old and thoroughly Hindu repertory. It is the rude beginning of that fictitious history which ripened to the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and which, fostered by the genius of Boccaccio, produced the romance of the chivalrous days, and its last development, the novel - that prose-epic of modern Europe. ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... a secret avidity: they gave him vague ideas of men and life, or awakened in him splendid visions of literary glory. Klopstock's Messias, combined with his own religious tendencies, had early turned him to sacred poetry: before the end of his fourteenth year, he had finished what he called an 'epic poem,' entitled Moses. The extraordinary popularity of Gerstenberg's Ugolino, and Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, next directed his attention to the drama; and as admiration in a mind like his, full of blind activity and nameless aspirings, naturally issues in imitation, he plunged with ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... acquired a taste for chatting, and I loved to hear the recital of his adventures in the polar seas. He related his fishing, and his combats, with natural poetry of expression; his recital took the form of an epic poem, and I seemed to be listening to a Canadian Homer singing the Iliad of the regions ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... other poems of "Codex Junius 11", is not a direct translation into Anglo-Saxon of the Old Testament "Book of Genesis". Rather, it is an effort to retell the story in the poetry and style of the Germanic Epic, a style still popular with the Anglo-Saxons at the time "Junius 11" ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... 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 ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... bowed distantly to Charles, whom he surveyed through his eyeglass, the gleam of a big diamond in the middle of his shirt-front betrayed the fact that the Briar-rose school, as it was called (from his famous epic), had at least succeeded in making money out of poetry. He explained to us a little later, in fact, that he was over in New York to look after his royalties. "The beggars," he said, "only gave me eight hundred pounds on my last volume. I couldn't stand that, you know; for a modern bard, ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... 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
... 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 ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... epic on Brutus, the legendary found of Britain, "would have more resembled the 'Henriade' than the 'Iliad,' or even the 'Gierusalemme Liberata'; that it would have appeared (if this scheme had been executed) how much, and for what reasons, the man that is skillful in painting modern ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... doubt the 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
... same 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 contractors to the belligerent powers. All the point would ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... Goa on 20th February 1847, taking as usual a pattymar, his mind vibrant with thoughts of his great hero, the "Portingall" Camoens, with whose noble epic all Western India, from Narsinga and Diu to Calicut is intimately associated. Passages from Camoens were frequently in his mouth, and in bitterest moments, in the times of profoundest defection, he could always ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... to his feet, putting down his still half-full glass. "I'll make this epic story short, Max. As you said, the two actually valid methods of rising above the level in which you were born are in the Military and Religious Categories. Like you, even ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... periodical print which has appeared for forty-three years since, to which I did not make some application. I have by me essays and fugitive pieces in fourteen trunks, seven carpet bags of trifles in verse, and a portmanteau with best part of an epic poem, which it does not become me to praise. I have no less than four hundred and ninety-five acts of dramatic composition, which have been rejected even ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... that even in mediaeval epics, Charlemagne himself, the emperor of the flowing beard, often plays a comic part. The epic is invaded by ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... of the ancient religious ballads sung by the "wandering cripples." Joseph (son of Jacob) is called by this appellation, and also a "tzarevitch," or king's son. For a brief account of these ballads see: "The Epic Songs of Russia" (Introduction), and Chapter I in "A Survey of Russian Literature" (I. F. Hapgood). This particular ballad is mentioned on page ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy;—(I forget which,) besides, if it was not so, I should beg Mr. Horace's pardon;—for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any man's ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... in preparing the first edition, published in 1804-07. The work was based chiefly on Washington's own diaries and letters and secret archives and it told not simply the epic story of this great life but the truth about the birth of our nation. Marshall later spent fifteen years revising the first edition, verifying to the last detail every chapter, page and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... liberal accomplishments flourished, having been first introduced by the Bards, the Eubages,[49] and the Druids. The Bards were accustomed to employ themselves in celebrating the brave achievements of their illustrious men, in epic verse, accompanied with sweet airs on the lyre. The Eubages investigated the system and sublime secrets of nature, and sought to explain them to their followers. Between these two came the Druids, men of loftier genius, bound in brotherhoods according to the precepts and example of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... to give to him spontaneously the perfection to which great men like 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... aesthetic beauty in temples, in statues, and in pictures; and the great artist was rewarded with honors and material gains. The love of art is easier kindled than the love of literary excellence, and is more generally diffused. It is coeval with songs and epic poetry. Before Socrates or Plato speculated on the great certitudes of philosophy, temples and statues were the pride and boast of their countrymen. And as the taste for art precedes the taste for letters, so it survives, when the literature has lost ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... knows! But no prose can regenerate that shadowy time. I see it—prehistory—as a swaying mass of ghostly multitudes, but always pressing on—on . . . as we shall appear, no doubt, ten thousand years hence if all histories are destroyed—as no doubt they will be. If I were an epic poet I might possibly find words and rhythm to fit that white vision, but it is wholly beyond the practical vocabulary and mental make-up of a newspaper man of the twentieth century. Some of us write very good poetry indeed, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... substituting a religious Virgil and Ovid merely by adapting his works to their titles. His Christian Virgil consists, like the Pagan Virgil, of Eclogues, Georgics, and of an Epic of twelve books; with this difference, that devotional subjects are substituted for fabulous ones. His epic is the Ignaciad, or the pilgrimage of Saint Ignatius. His Christian Ovid, is in the same taste; everything wears a new face. His Epistles are pious ones; the Fasti are the six days of the Creation; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... interested in the psychology and experience of persons so extraordinary, both for their genius in society, and for the quantity and quality of their private experience full of solid instruction and romantic interest. The inner life of Madame Swetchine was a sacred epic: the outer career of Lacordaire, an electrifying drama. This double interest of a private, spiritual ascent, and of a chivalrous gallantry in the thick of battle, is clearly unfolded in the ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... Berta I should go to London oftener,' said Picotee, to turn the conversation. 'But she lives mostly in the library. And, O, what do you think? She is writing an epic poem, and employs Emmeline ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... high country a great prairie fire usually or quite often was followed by a heavy rainstorm. What Banion now indicated was the approach of yet another of the epic phenomena of the prairies, as rapid, as colossal and as merciless as ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... could read them whenever they pleased. Until then these poems had only been recited, and no written copy existed. Pisistratus, therefore, did a very good work in thus keeping for our enjoyment the greatest epic poems ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... American Bill of so many pounds sterling for the Revolution Book, with a "pathetic feeling" which brought "tears" to her eyes. From beyond the waters there is a hand held out; beyond the waters too live brothers. I would only the Book were an Epic, a Dante, or undying thing, that New England might boast in after times of this feat of hers; and put stupid, poundless, and penniless Old England to the blush about it! But after all, that is no matter; the feebler ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... a recently-discovered tablet published by Langdon under the title The Sumerian Epic of Paradise, the Flood and ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... too much to say that Wordsworth has been wholly successful in the attempt—for such the Prelude virtually is—to write an epic poem on his own education. Such a poem must almost necessarily appear tedious and egoistic, and Wordsworth's manner has not tact enough to prevent these defects from being felt to the full. On the contrary, in his constant desire frugally to extract, as it ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... receive from the public treasury a regular salary, and had among his pupils the younger Pliny and the two grand-nephews of Domitian. The influence of the mania for rhetoric was more and more to impart an artificial character to literature and art. The epic poems of such writers as Lucan and Statitis are to a large extent imitations; although Lucan's principal poem, "Pharsalia," gives evidence of poetic talent. Where there was so little productive genius, it was natural that grammarians and commentators should abound. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of Roland is from the French Epic, probably of the eleventh century, but resting on earlier materials, legend and ballad. William Short Nose is also from the chanson de geste ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... the city "rich in gold," the residence of Agamemnon, whence he ruled over "many islands and all Argos," [Footnote: Iliad II, 108] is seen to have had no merely legendary preeminence. So conspicuous, in fact, does Mycenae appear in the light as well of archaeology as of epic, that it has become common, somewhat misleading though it is, to call a whole epoch and a whole civilization "Mycenaean." This "Mycenaean" civilization was widely extended over the Greek islands and the eastern portions of continental Greece in the second millennium before our era. Exact dates ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... dais rules the scene. The village and ornamental environment have been constructed to augment its majesty. Even the soil has been "molded into new forms" at a monarch's caprice. Versailles is the expression of monarchy, as conceived by Louis XIV. It is the only epic produced in his reign—a reign so fertile in the other forms of poetry, and in talent of all kinds. What epic ever chronicled the destiny of an epoch in a manner more brilliant and complete? In this poem of stone the manners of heroic and familiar life mingle at every step. Besides ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... to the fourth generation. And they were all one family; one sole little nation, assembling in joy and pride to celebrate that diamond wedding, the rare prodigious nuptials of two heroic creatures whom life had glorified and from whom all had sprung! And what an epic, what a Biblical numbering of that people suggested itself! How even name all those who entered the farm, how simply set forth their names, their ages, their degree of relationship, the health, the strength, and the hope that they ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... 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 triumphs of ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... 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 in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... avail to save his own chosen people. They unanimously rejected the son, if I remember, and so he had to be content with a handful of the despised Gentiles. A sorrowful old figure of futility he is—a fine figure for a big epic, it seems to me. By the way, what was the date that this religion was laughed away. I can remember perfectly the downfall of the Homeric deities—how many years there were when the common people believed in the divine origin of the Odyssey, while the educated ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... origin, while more probably he is only the abstract Adam (man), the progenitor of the race; so in Yama the Hindu saw the primitive "first of mortals." While, however, Mitra, Dyaus, and other older nature-gods, pass into a state of negative or almost forgotten activity, Yama, even in the later epic period, still remains a potent ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... our motor were a ship on a deep-sea swell; and such a sense of space and light was in the distances, such a veil of beauty over the whole world, that the vision of that army on the move grew more and more fabulous and epic. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... adopted only in the dramas, while the Odyssey of Livius was written in the national Saturnian measure, evidently was that the iambuses and trochees of tragedy and comedy far more easily admitted of imitation in Latin than the epic dactyls. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Buckingham's chaplain: these three have been thought to be jointly responsible for The Rehearsal. Sprat had published a poem of congratulation to Howard on Howard's The British Princes (1669), the latter a long pseudo-epic of the Blackmore style in dreary couplets which, again, provides no parallel with the Reflections. And what of Howard's plays? Many of these were written in the 1660's during his poetic apprenticeship; none seems akin to our poem. Whereas, as shown in the ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... sunset. In April, the month of piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London, smoking royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray for possession of the portly dames. There is immensity, swinging motion, collision, dusky richness of colouring, to the sight; and to the mind idea. London presents it. If we can allow ourselves a moment for not inquireing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in diplomacy. That is why we have supported, you and I, the democratic reformers in Russia and in the other states of the former Soviet bloc. I applaud the bipartisan support this Congress provided last year for our initiatives to help Russia, Ukraine and the other states through their epic transformations. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... fill page upon page of 1920 magazines. Edison Marshall, represented in the 1919 volume, by "The Elephant Remembers," has delivered the epic of "Brother Bill the Elk." In spite of its length, some fifteen thousand words, the Committee were mightily tempted to request it for republication. Its Western author knows the animals in their native ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... story of duelling, which became a legend in the army, runs through the epic of imperial wars. To the surprise and admiration of their fellows, two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined gold or paint the lily, pursued a private contest through the years of universal ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... 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 of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... soldiers came not merely to win a war, but to win a cause." Every child in every home and in every school should be made familiar with how it was won, and with the separate stories which go to make up the glorious epic. ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... if at all deserving of the name it inherits from its predecessors in the romantic Middle Ages, represents the latest stadium of the epic. ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... the wind with 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 ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... has been made, it is true, between the poet and other artists in this respect. Monsieur Perrot says, "The vase- painter reproduces what he sees; while the epic poets endeavoured to represent a distant past. If Homer gives swords of bronze to his heroes of times gone by, it is because he knows that such were the weapons of these heroes of long ago. In arming them with bronze he makes use, in his way, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... this book be set apart exclusively for those lofty spirits who, like you, are preserved from worldly pettiness by solitude? They might impress on it the melodious rhythm which it lacks, and which, in the hands of one of our poets, might have made it the glorious epic for which France still waits. Still, they will accept it from me as one of those balustrades, carved by some artist full of faith, on which the pilgrims lean to moderate on the end of man, while gazing at the choir of a beautiful ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... life. He is always an aristocrat of the most uncompromising stamp, and has a contemptuous disdain and intolerance for every form of democracy. Poor white people have not the slightest chance of his good opinion. The pedigree and history of his master's family possess an epic dignity in his imagination; and the liberty he takes with facts concerning them amounts to a grand poetical hyperbole. He represents their wealth in past times to have amounted to something of a fabulous superfluity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... that the earth was at first sterile and dry, all the water having been swallowed by a gigantic frog or toad which was compelled, by queer stratagems, to regurgitate it. These are little children's imaginings. Among the Hindoos the same myth takes the form of an alluring epic—the dragon watching over the celestial waters, of which he has taken possession, is wounded by Indra after a heroic battle, and restores them to ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... William Davenant, poet-laureate. It is one our most beautiful songs, and he is remembered by it far more than by his long epic poem called Gondibert which few people now read. But I think you will agree with me that his name is worthy of being remembered ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer of phlebotomy. Both were regarded as the sons of AEsculapius; they were soldiers ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Roman Epic abounds in moral and poetical defects; nevertheless it remains the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the history of an age is revealed in its ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... months of the day on which the benefit was given at Garrick's theatre, the holder of the copyright of Paradise Lost,—I think it was Tonson,—applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction against a bookseller who had published a cheap edition of the great epic poem, and obtained the injunction. The representation of Comus was, if I remember rightly, in 1750; the injunction in 1752. Here, then, is a perfect illustration of the effect of long copyright. Milton's works are the property of a single publisher. Everybody who ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 parlour, the insolence of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Paris, the book created a sensation and was more talked of there than in England. Diderot compared Richardson, as the father of the English novel, to Homer, father of epic poetry. In England men of letters were far less recognised in society. Walpole remarked, "You know in England we read their works, but seldom or never take notice of authors. We think them sufficiently paid if their books sell, and of course leave them in their colleges and obscurity, ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... the words he scattered to the winds. So great a thing as Pickwick is almost a kind of accident; it began as something secondary and grew into something primary and pre-eminent. It began with mere words written to illustrate somebody else's pictures; and swelled like an epic expanded from an epigram. It might almost be said that in the case of Pickwick the author began as the servant of the artist. But, as in the same story of Pickwick, the servant became greater than the master. This incalculable and accidental ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... the Nilghai, then. Of course. Mass-meeting of his wives in Trafalgar Square. That's it. They came from the ends of the earth to attend Nilghai's wedding to an English bride. This shall be an epic. It's a sweet material ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Meng-ts'u under the Sung Dynasty; the Mongols made of their country the kingdom of Chaghan-djang. Li-kiang is the territory of Yue-si Chao, called also Mo-sie (Moso), one of the six Chao of Nan-Chao. The Moso of Li-kiang call themselves Ho. They have an epic styled Djiung-Ling (Moso Division) recounting the invasion of part of Tibet by the Moso. The Moso were submitted during the 8th century, by the King of Nan-Chao. They have a special hieroglyphic scrip, a specimen of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... be sung another golden age, The rise of empire and of arts, The good and great inspiring epic rage, The ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... protection of the powerful Uguccione, lord of Pisa, while he wrote the Purgatorio. The second part of his epic dealt with the region lying between the under-world of torment and the heavenly heights of Paradise itself. Here the souls of men were to be cleansed of their sins that they might be pure ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... the worthiest object any writing can seek, which, as I said before, is to give instruction and pleasure combined; for the unrestricted range of these books enables the author to show his powers, epic, lyric, tragic, or comic, and all the moods the sweet and winning arts of poesy and oratory are capable of; for the epic may be written in prose just as ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... him like a descending wind, and leave him physically prostrate. In Wergeland we see an instance of the poetical temper in its most unbridled form. A glance through the enormous range of his collected works is like an excursion into chaos. We are met almost at the threshold by a colossal epic, Creation, Man and the Messiah (1830); by songs that turn into dithyrambic odes, by descriptive pieces which embrace the universe, by all the froth and roar and turbidity of genius, with none of its purity and calm. The genius is ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... chronicle the petty wars and calamities which harassed their contemporaries; but they paid no attention whatever to the life of the masses, although the masses chiefly used to toil peacefully while the few indulged in fighting. The epic poems, the inscriptions on monuments, the treaties of peace—nearly all historical documents bear the same character; they deal with breaches of peace, not with peace itself. So that the best-intentioned historian unconsciously draws a distorted picture of ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... reciting an epic poem of which she was the heroine and Harcourt the hero? The true epics of the world are generally told in ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... constructed, as a rule, from very unsanctified timber, as may be seen from the examples we have heretofore given. Not only the people and the priests but the poets have paid their tribute to Yermak's fame, epic poems having been written about his exploits and his deeds made ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... companion. But they were woman and woman, not woman and man, the facts were ethereal and refined, and so they could not be worked up into a taking story. Whether, as old critics disputed, a supernatural machinery be necessary to an epic or no, an ungodly machinery is decidedly necessary to ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... borrowed from the Greeks, and that not till a later age. We know no further particulars of these ancestral lays; but it is self-evident that they must have attempted description and narration and thus have developed, along with and out of the lyrical element, the features of epic poetry. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... 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 those who abandoned themselves to it, to be placed in the first rank of classics; to ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... of Delights. Historical research, contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most thrilling of occupations, but I question whether any biographer has ever had a better time gathering his material than I have had. Amid the old scenes, the old epic life of the frontier has been re-created for me by the men who were the leading actors in it. But my contact with it has not been only vicarious. In the course of this most grateful of labors I have myself come to know something of the ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... seen the epic struggle of my compatriots against Greeks and Turks, and I took part with them in order to obtain these national institutions. And did you come there in Ochrida, and everywhere in Macedonia protected by our valiant army ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... his ease the divine image of his lady without any interference from the disturbing original. He was, it is said, meditating an ambitious work, the history of the Roman Polity from Numa to Justinian, an epic in five and twenty books, wherein Selvaggia would have played a fine part, that of the Genius of Natural Law. The scheme might have ripened but for one small circumstance; this ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... the mob died down. The sight of Horatia (I beg her pardon humbly, Madame Tallafferr) in the path smote them with misgivings. As in Macaulay's immortal, if somewhat jingly epic, "those behind cried 'Forward' and those before cried 'Back'!" That single hale and fiery old lady held them. No more could those two hundred ruffians have defied the challenge of her contemptuous eyes than they could have advanced into the ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... pay tribute to the passing of Dr. Shaw. Aside from her epic contribution to the cause of progressive American womanhood it is in no sense perfunctory to say that whether in war time Washington, organizing and directing the eighteen thousand units of the Woman's ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... which yielded 8,000 pounds: see Voltaire, OEuvres Completes, xiii. 408.] An incomparable piece, patronized by Royalty in England; the delight of all kindred Courts. The light dancing march of this new "Epic," and the brisk clash of cymbal music audible in it, had, as we find afterwards, greatly captivated the young man. All is not pipe-clay, then, and torpid formalism; aloft from the murk of commonplace ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... which produced the Faerie Queene II. The Author of the Faerie Queene III. Study of the Faerie Queene: 1. A Romantic Epic 2. Influence of the New Learning 3. Interpretation of the Allegory 4. The Spenserian Stanza 5. Versification 6. Diction and Style ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... I read through and through in early childhood to great profit. This was Cottle's "Alfred," an epic of some merit, but chiefly in this, that it sets forth tolerably clearly the old Norse life and religion. George Boker owned and gave me some time after a book entitled "Five Norse Poems," in the original, and translated. This with Grey's poems, which latter I possessed, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... letters in ten minutes that you could no more deliver to order in ten days than a river can play like a fountain. They can sparkle gems of stories: they can flash little diamonds of poems. The entire sex has never produced one opera nor one epic that mankind could tolerate: and why? these come by long, high-strung labor. But, weak as they are in the long run of everything but the affections (and there giants), they are all overpowering while their ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... the presence of this simple and practical man amid the more mystical western problems and dreams which were very distant from his mind, an element which clings to all his career and gives it an unconscious poetry. He had many qualities of the epic hero, and especially this—that he was the last man in the world to be the epic poet. There is something almost provocative to superstition in the way in which he stands at every turn as the symbol of the special trials and the modern transfiguration of England; from ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... on to yarn about his African campaigns. Gigantic adventures worthy of the tales of a Pizarro and a Cortez! Christophe was delighted with the vivid narrative of that marvelous and barbaric epic, of which he knew nothing, and almost every Frenchman is ignorant: the tale of the twenty years during which the heroism, and courage, and inventiveness, and superhuman energy of a conquering handful of Frenchmen were spent far away in the depths of the Black Continent, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... the soft light. A horned owl "hoo-hoo-ed," and a far-off wolf uttered a drawn-out, soft, melancholy cry, as Rolf finished his dried meat, tightened his belt, and set out on a long, hard run that, in the days of Greece, would have furnished the theme of many a noble epic poem. ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... a counter accusation, only that yours would be the epic form," answered Marta. "For you, too, seem fond ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... place of the deeds of old-time heroes. For this new departure he apologizes in the introductory verses (preserved in the scholiast on Aristotle, Rhetoric, iii. 14), where he says that, the subjects of epic poetry being all exhausted, it was necessary to strike out a new path. The story of his intimacy with Herodotus is probably due to the fact that he imitated him and had recourse to his history for the incidents of his poem. The Perseis was at first highly successful ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... lord of battle, hail In your newly-tempered mail! Learn to conquer, learn to fight In the foremost flanks of right, Like Valmiki's heroes bold, Rubies girt in epic gold. Lord of battle, may you be, ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... Baruch, Ch. VI, p. 43. Modern scholars confirm the statements of Herodotus from the study of Babylonian literature, though inclined to deny that religious prostitution occupied so large a place as he gives it. A tablet of the Gilgamash epic, according to Morris Jastrow, refers to prostitutes as attendants of the goddess Ishtar in the city Uruk (or Erech), which was thus a centre, and perhaps the chief centre, of the rites described by Herodotus (Morris Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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 and breadth of its streets were shaded by trees, ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... and of the spirit of revelry. But shy reticence finds compensation in good-natured humor. Unenthusiastic but substantial realism, speculative meditation, and a certain didactic tone make the Low German country the home of the fable and the great epic. That such a great dramatist as Hebbel was also a scion of this stock seems almost exceptional. The stubborn peasant family-stocks, the urban culture of the Hanseatic cities, and the scattered seats of the nobility, even as far east as the Russian Baltic provinces, bear ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... great kindness I am indebted for a biographic and critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological treatises, profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed, this poem perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and the Rhetoric; but the poet patiently began ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... oblivion. But at the same time there 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
... young, and ardent. For there is a poetry in wildness, and every alligator basking in the slime is in himself an Epic, self-contained. I aspirate for fame. It is my yearning ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... rate 'meritent bien de l'etre.' There are such few fictions as bear the stamp of much individual thought, character, and observation. Especially there is a great deal of biography; for biography is the great, all-embracing epic ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... silently in his hand, has no poetry in it, and that machinery is not a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging for myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowded into their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also a great foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing the bodies and the souls of men around the world, beating out the floors of cities, making the limbs of the great ships silently striding the sea, and rolling ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... representation is lost, and the mind is displeased to find a picture which bears no resemblance to any original. Nor are such excessive refinements more agreeable in the epistolary or philosophic style, than in the epic or tragic. Too much ornament is a fault in every kind of production. Uncommon expressions, strong flashes of wit, pointed similes, and epigrammatic turns, especially when laid too thick, are a disfigurement rather than any embellishment of discourse. As the eye, in surveying ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... to profound emotional susceptibility. They had no statuary, their architecture does not remain for us to criticise it, their literature alone supplies us with material for comparison, and even in this there is not that diversity of epic, dramatic, and lyric matter, of history, oratory and philosophy, which we have from Greece. Nevertheless, so far as material offers itself, we find in Hebrew art just those qualities we might ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... proceed without any stated repetitions; and those circles of action, when the parts of them return at certain periods, though the trains, of which they consist, are not exactly similar. The reading an epic poem is a train of actions; the reading a song with a chorus at equal distances in the measure constitutes so ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of the varying theories would be out of proportion, and out of place, in this essay. Nor is it possible to give to any extent a detailed description of the epic struggle which the Rumanians carried on for centuries against the Turks. I shall have to deal, therefore, on broad lines, with the historical facts—laying greater stress only upon the three fundamental epochs of Rumanian ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... is there in despising Thackeray and extolling Mr. Wells? Pray, Mr. Bennett, how good is this book? Let us see; I think I have a note on the subject: "his scientific romances" are "on the plane of epic poetry" and "in 'Tono-Bungay' he has achieved the same feat, magnified by ten—or a hundred"; "there are passages toward the close of the book which may fitly be compared with the lyrical freedoms of no matter what epic, and which display an unsurpassable ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... schools of art in detail; and we have so many symphonies and orchestras and operas, that it is becoming difficult even for us to listen to them. But what have we added to the popular bylini [the epic songs], legends, tales, songs? What music, what pictures, have we given ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... could escape. These were scarcely the thoughts with which a man should set out to meet his bride. Desires to meet and avoid her alternated even now, when with each fresh thrust of the paddle he approached her nearer presence. Yet, even to his way of thinking, there was something epic in the situation—that this girl of an alien tradition and a savage race, with her copper skin, and blue-black hair, and timid eyes, should be threading her passage up her native river, through the early summer, toward her western lover who ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... eyes, and all his eyes are full of light. It does not stagger me to hear his disciples calling him, as HEGEL does, 'a man of a mighty mind,' or, as LAW does, 'the illuminated Behmen,' and 'the blessed Behmen.' 'In speculative power,' says dry DR. KURTZ, 'and in poetic wealth, exhibited with epic and dramatic effect, Behmen's system surpasses everything of the kind ever written.' Some of his disciples have the hardihood to affirm indeed that even ISAAC NEWTON ploughed with Behmen's heifer, but had not the boldness to acknowledge the debt. I entirely ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... veiled. The triumphal hero-march of the stars,—the brief, bright rhyme of the flashing comet,—the canticle of the rose as she bears her crimson heart to the smile of the sun,—the chorus of green leaves chanting orisons to the wind—the never completed epic of heaven's lofty solitudes where the white moon paces, wandering like a maiden in search of love,— all these and other unnumbered joys he has lost—joys that Sah- luma, child of the high gods and favorite of Destiny drinks in with the light and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... after which its scenery alternates, like the Rhine's below Constance, between rocky gorges and flat moist meadows dotted with hamlets, churches and towns. Bala—otherwise Lin-Jegid and Pimblemere ("Lake of the Five Parishes")—has some traditional connection with the great British epic, or rather with its accessories—the Morte d'Arthur—of which Tennyson has availed himself in Enid, mentioning that Enid's gentle ministrations soothed the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... we have seen, in returning to nature, had redeemed the pastoral, and had cultivated sentiment at the expense of the epic. As a slight reaction, and yet a progress, and as influenced by the tales of modern fiction, and also as subsidizing the antiquarian lore and taste of the age, there arose a school of poetry which is best represented by its Tales ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... in vain, for they were wasted on the rocks of rocks, a strong will and a vulgar soul. But indeed the whole thing was like epic poetry wrestling with the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... organization than the lowest Fishes, but we bring together two kinds of animals so remote from each other in structure that the wildest imagination can scarcely fancy a transition between them. A comparison may make my meaning clearer as to the relative standing of these groups. The Epic Poem is a higher order of composition than the Song,—yet we may have an Epic Poem which, from its inferior mode of execution, stands lower than a Song that is perfect of its kind. So the plan of certain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... which were the chief claims to interest in the first volume of my chronicle can not be restated in these pages. The action of this book moves forward into the light of manhood, into the region of middle age. Furthermore, its theme is more personal. Its scenes are less epic. It is a study of individuals and their relationships rather than of settlements and migrations. In short, "A Daughter of the Middle Border" is the complement of "A Son of the Middle Border," a continuation, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... who calls him eloquent. Swift scribbled in the margin, "A great lie." And certainly Swift was inclined to do more than justice to Harley. "That lord," said Pope, "talked of business in so confused a manner that you did not know what he was about; and every thing he went to tell you was in the epic way; for he always began in the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 100 B.C., a member of the great Julian gens, which claimed descent from AEneas and Venus, the glories of which are celebrated in Vergil's immortal epic. Thus the future leader of the turbulent democracy, and the future despot who was to humble the nobles of Rome, was by birth an aristocrat of bluest blood. His life might easily have come to an untimely end in the days of Sulla's bloody ascendency, for he was connected by marriage with ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... are recorded at such length in the Mahavamsa (XXII.-XXXII.) as to suggest that they formed the subject of a separate popular epic, in which he figured as the champion of Sinhalese against the Tamils, and therefore as a devout Buddhist. On ascending the throne he felt, like Asoka, remorse for the bloodshed which had attended his early life and strove to atone for ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... three most widely read books of the thirteenth century were Reynard the Fox, a profoundly humorous animal epic; The Golden Legend, which so deeply impressed Longfellow; and the Romance of the Rose, for three centuries the most read book ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... of fugitive pieces; but noyour fugitive poetry is apt to become stationary with the bookseller. It should be something at once solid and attractivenone of your romances or anomalous noveltiesI would have you take high ground at once. Let me see: What think you of a real epic?the grand old-fashioned historical poem which moved through twelve or twenty-four books. We'll have it soI'll supply you with a subjectThe battle between the Caledonians and RomansThe Caledoniad; or, Invasion Repelled;let that be the titleit will suit the present taste, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... has, indeed, ever been slow to reveal itself in the West. It took a Crusade to bring to our knowledge anything of the schner Geist of the Orient; and it was not until the day of Matthew Arnold that the Epic of Persia[1] was brought into the proper realm of English poesy. What wonder, then, that not until the first Omaric madness had passed away were the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Jr., lifted into the light after an infinity of sudor et labor spent in excavating ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... There was nothing epic in that fight, nothing heroic at all. It was a wildcat struggle in the dust, no more science on either side than nature put into their hands at the beginning. But they surely did kick up a lot of dust. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... 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 Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Epic events have a stunning quality. They paralyse the faculties. For a moment there was a pause. The world stood still. Mr. Brewster bubbled inarticulately. Mr. Gossett dried himself sketchily with a napkin. The ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... buffeted by fate. If you think Resurrection strong, then read Dostoievsky's The House of the Dead. If Anna Karenina has wooed you—as it must—take up The Idiot; and if you are impressed by the epical magnitude of War and Peace, study that other epic of souls, The Brothers Karamazov, which illuminates, as if with ghastly flashes of lightning, the stormy hearts of mankind. Tolstoy wrote of life; Dostoievsky lived it, drank its sour dregs—for he was a man accursed by luck and, like the apocalyptic dreamer of Patmos, a seer of visions ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... age, what they will be When they are old as she. But now she sits And smokes away each night till dawn comes round, Thinking, beside the pinyons' flame, of days Long past and gone, when she was young — content To be no longer young, her epic done: ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... epic poem, suggested by the life and adventures of his brother, James Wilde, in the Seminole war. But it was never finished: all that remains of it now is the fine lyric, "My Life is Like the Summer Rose." This song was translated ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... charming poem of Malayan Literature is the Epic of Bidasari. It has all the absorbing fascination of a fairy tale. We are led into the dreamy atmosphere of haunted palace and beauteous plaisance: we glide in the picturesque imaginings of the oriental poet from the ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... the South of Europe) has observed of the greatest epic of the Middle Age, that 'Dante, in common with many fathers of the Church, under the supposition that paganism, in the persons of the infernal gods, represented the fallen angels, has made no scruple to adopt its fables.' Tasso, at a later ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... individual vision and personal conviction which constituted her strength. There are always stupid, well-meaning busybodies in the world, who go about making question of the sonneteer why he does not attempt something epic and homicidal, or worrying the carver of cherry-stones to try his hand at a Colossus; but though they disturb and discompose, they luckily do no material harm. They did no material harm to Kate Greenaway. ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... which the fictitious element predominates. Here, again, there are all imaginable gradations, from such works as Defoe's quasi-historical account of the Plague year, which probably gives a truer conception of that dreadful time than any authentic history, through the historical novel, drama, and epic, to the purely phantasmal creations of imaginative genius, such as the old "Arabian Nights" or the modern "Shaving of Shagpat." It is not strictly needful for my present purpose that I should say anything about narratives which are professedly ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... forming a model state and 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 suffice to appease whatever ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... were better then than they are now. I dare assert too, in defiance of the favourers of the ancients, that Homer's hero Achilles was both a brute and a scoundrel, and consequently an improper character for the hero of an epic poem; he had so little regard for his country, that he would not act in defence of it, because he had quarrelled with Agamemnon about a—; and then afterwards, animated by private resentment only, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... his lays, and the epic resumes its story. The time-relations are not altogether good in this long passage which describes the rejoicings of "the day after"; but the present shift from the riders on the road to the folk at the hall ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... graduated at Bowdoin College, and was for more than forty years professor of Belles Lettres in Harvard University. Died in Cambridge, March 4, 1882. Of his longer poems the most read and admired are his beautiful romance of "Evangeline," and his epic of "Hiawatha," but it is hardly too much to say that for the last sixty years, his "Psalm of Life" has been the common property of all American, if not English school-children, and a part of their education. When he was in London, Queen Victoria sent for him to come ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... or other events of thrilling interest, are the theme of song, and the personal emotion of the bard is out of sight through his absorption in the subject. Description flows on, the narrator himself being in the background. This epic poetry culminates in the Iliad and Odyssey (900-700 B.C.). Their verse is the hexameter. These poems move on in a swift current, yet without abruptness or monotony. They are marked by a simplicity and a nobleness, a refinement and a pathos, which have charmed all ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the Nibelungenlied is published with the simple purpose of placing one of the world's great epic poems within the reach of English readers. Translations are at best but poor substitutes for originals. A new translation of a poem implies also a criticism of those that have preceded it. My apology for presenting this new ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... flattering attention as she began the epic of Major Christopher Selby's doings in New York. Whatever his emotions, he ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... exercise of genius. "Fancy," on the other hand, is more an employment of ingenuity and taste, though it also requires inventive power. Secondly, "imagination" implies a longer flight; "fancy," rather a succession of short efforts: the one is a steady blaze; the other, a series of sparkles. An epic poem would require an exercise of the first; a ballad, or other lighter production, of the last: hence, we may see that the difference between the two is, in some measure, one of subject-matter; for the same power which we call "fancy" when employed in a melody of Moore, would be called "imagination" ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various |
