"Homer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... either of Byron or Cowper; and he did not even try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil which his father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the small copper-plates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion to him. Afterward he read Goldsmith's Deserted Village, and he formed a great passion for Pope's Pastorals, which ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... tribute, which the adversity of their supposed relatives had been inadequate to call forth; and that the honour of superintending the funeral rites of the dead Godfrey Bertram (as in the memorable case of Homer's birthplace) was likely to be debated by seven gentlemen of rank and fortune, none of whom had offered him an asylum while living. He therefore resolved, as his presence was altogether useless, to make a short tour of a fortnight, at the end of which period the adjourned sale of ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... for the Scotch lawyer, one of the keenest, or at any rate the rarest, sensations a man could give himself. Is it not the incognito of genius? To write the "Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem" is to take a share in the human glory of a single epoch; but to endow his native land with another Homer, was not that usurping the work ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... pleasure. The three great tribes which compose the Maratha caste are the Kunbi or farmer, the Dhangar or shepherd and the Goala or cowherd; to this original cause may perhaps be ascribed that great simplicity of manner which distinguishes the Maratha people. Homer mentions princesses going in person to the fountain to wash their household linen. I can affirm having seen the daughters of a prince who was able to bring an army into the field much larger than the whole Greek confederacy, making ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... Society of New York. There were two performances, on March 25 and 26, 1892, the conductor being Mr. Walter Damrosch and the principal singers being Frau Marie Ritter-Goetze, Sebastian Montariol, H. E. Distelhurst, Homer Moore, Emil Fischer, and Purdon Robinson. London had heard the work twice as an oratorio before it had a stage representation there on April 26, 1909, but this performance was fourteen years later than the first at the Metropolitan ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... at once,—he gave up the attempt to picture the scene in words. But when he had to deal with any part of nature that had life or motion in it—in fact, any element of time—then he was as minute as the most thorough Wordsworthian could wish. How admirably, for instance, does Homer describe the advance of a foam-crested wave, or the rush of a lion, the swoop of an eagle, or the trail ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... simple and rude work, neither to reply against the saying of the matters touched in this book, though it accord not unto the translation of others which have written it. For divers men have made divers books which in all points accord not, as Dictes, Dares, and Homer. For Dictes and Homer, as Greeks, say and write favorably for the Greeks, and give to them more worship than to the Trojans; and Dares writeth otherwise than they do. And also as for the proper names, it is no wonder ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... obliging creatures, make me see All that disgraced my betters met in me. Say, for my comfort, languishing in bed, Just so immortal Maro held his head; And when I die, be sure you let me know— Great Homer died three thousand ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... workman, thoughtful in experience, touch, and vision of the thing to be done; no machine, witless, and of necessary motion; yet not cunning only, but having perfect habitual skill of hand also; the confirmed reward of truthful doing. Recollect, in connection with this passage of Pindar, Homer's three verses about getting the lines of ship-timber true, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... the Greeks contains much eroticism and much nudity, but there is nothing whatever immoral in either. Innocence and beauty are so apparent that no one can think of evil. When we look at the antique statues of the Greek sculptors; when we read Homer, especially the story of Ares and Aphrodite; when we read the bucolic idyll of Daphnis and Chloe, we can no longer have any doubt on the point. It is not nudity, it is not the natural description of sexual life, but the obscene intention of the artist, his improper ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... pages, profusely illustrated with over 100 full page engravings, and having sixteen forceful cartoons by Homer C. Davenport, the famous ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... have followed all the antique poets historical: first Homer, who in the persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man, the one in his Ilias, the other in his Odysseis; then Virgil, whose like intention was to do in the person of AEneas; ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... than the repetition of identical judgments, which nobody endeavours to verify, every one ends by repeating what he learnt at school, till there come to be names and things which nobody would venture to meddle with. For a modern reader the perusal of Homer results incontestably in immense boredom; but who would venture to say so? The Parthenon, in its present state, is a wretched ruin, utterly destitute of interest, but it is endowed with such prestige that it does not appear to us as ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... of commerce; and, though they must have been a most inconvenient one, yet, in old times, we find things were frequently valued according to the number of cattle which had been given in exchange for them. The armour of Diomede, says Homer, cost only nine oxen; but that of Glaucus cost a hundred oxen. Salt is said to be the common instrument of commerce and exchanges in Abyssinia; a species of shells in some parts of the coast of India; dried cod at Newfoundland; tobacco in Virginia; sugar in some of our West ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... artist who treats in this way a classical story comes very near, if not to the Hellenism of Homer, yet to the Hellenism of Chaucer, the Hellenism of the Middle Age, or rather of that exquisite first period of the Renaissance within it. Afterwards the Renaissance takes its side, becomes, perhaps, ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... wakened the whole household, he had been unable to go to sleep again and he had gone from his sleeping chamber into an adjoining room, and, lighting a lamp, had taken down and read out of the "Iliad" of Homer. After he had been reading for about half an hour he heard a voice calling him very distinctly by his name, but as soon as the sound had ceased he was not quite certain whether he had heard it or not. At that moment one of his slaves, who had ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... Englishmen do not seem to think it is worth their while. Nor would I fail to include, in the course of study I am sketching, translations of all the best works of antiquity, or of the modern world. It is a very desirable thing to read Homer in Greek; but if you don't happen to know Greek, the next best thing we can do is to read as good a translation of it as we have recently been furnished with in prose.[83] You won't get all you would get from the original, but you ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitudes and resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think, for thousands; and so there were fountains all around Homer, Manu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,—all perished—which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... poor father, helpless and undone, Mourns o'er the ashes of an only son; Takes a sad pleasure the last bones to burn, And pour in tears, ere yet they close the urn. HOMER ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... there may be in your own mind must never be communicated to theirs, not even (I would rather say especially not) in little things. Let your doubt be to yourself, your decision to them. People who think outside their heads, the whole process of whose thought appears, like Homer's, in the act of secretion, who tell everything that led them towards this conclusion and away from that, ought never to be ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... this is the only womb whose activity could usher to an admiring world, the sublime stanzas which develope the story of the unfortunate Priam, and immortalize their author. A head organized like that of Homer, furnished with the same vigour, glowing with the same vivid imagination, enriched with the same erudition, placed under the same circumstances, would necessarily, and not by chance, produce the poem of the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... shot a shaft, That play'd a dame a shavie, A sailor rak'd her fore and aft, Behint the chicken cavie. Her lord, a wight o' Homer's craft, Tho' limping wi' the spavie, He hirpl'd up and lap like daft, And shor'd them Dainty ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... altogether a matter of the mores. It is not conceivable that the Lysistrata of Aristophanes could be presented on any public stage in Christendom. The whole play is beyond the toleration of modern mores. We meet with jugglers in Homer,[1994] also mountebanks and tumblers.[1995] The kubisteteres spun around on the perpendicular axis of the body, and are compared to the wheel of the potter. Then they pitched down head-foremost, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes; and it seems superfluous, when we consider the remote geographical position of the Ethiopians, and how very little the Greeks had to do with them, to inquire further why Homer ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it." One wonders what he would have made of a blow-fly ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... born till after the carriage arrived in Flanders; so that, all these extraordinary circumstances considered, the task of determining to what government he naturally owed allegiance, would be at least as difficult as that of ascertaining the so much contested birthplace of Homer. ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... whether the destiny which seems to bring to us just what we chance to be interested in is a real ordinance of fate or only a seeming one—because interest in a subject makes us observant. Am reading Greek with Julia. We began the sixth book of the Iliad. Tuesday.—Fifty lines in Homer; Companion proofs; Schleiermacher; the prologue and first scene of Terence's comedy of Andria; two Nos. of N. Nickleby, and walked round the Common with Julia twice. Wednesday.—Studies the same as yesterday, except that ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... thought! The true war poets, after all, have been warriors themselves. Koerner and Alcaeus fought as well as sang, and sang because they fought. Old Homer, too,—who can believe that he had not hewn his way through the very battles which he describes, and seen every wound, every shape of agony? A noble thought, to go out with that army against the northern Anarch, singing in the van of battle, as Taillefer ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... Virtue?'—or rather, to restrict the enquiry to that part of virtue which is concerned with the use of weapons—'What is Courage?' Laches thinks that he knows this: (1) 'He is courageous who remains at his post.' But some nations fight flying, after the manner of Aeneas in Homer; or as the heavy-armed Spartans also did at the battle of Plataea. (2) Socrates wants a more general definition, not only of military courage, but of courage of all sorts, tried both amid pleasures and pains. Laches replies that ...
— Laches • Plato
... the preceding. This was the sale catalogue of the library of Caillard, who died in 1807, in his sixty-ninth year, and of whose bibliomaniacal spirit we have a most unequivocal proof in his purchasing De Cotte's celebrated uncut copy of the first printed Homer, at an enormous sum! [vide COTTE, post.] "Sa riche bibliotheque est a-la-fois un monument de son amour pour l'art typographique, et de la vaste etendue de ses connoissances," p. xiv. Some excellent indexes close this volume; of which Mr. Payne ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the instruments were sharpened and refined. Here Wolf, a philologist with historical instinct, was a pioneer. His "Prolegomena" to Homer (1795) announced new modes of attack. Historical investigation was soon transformed by the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... I have gone through Homer's Iliad—sorry to have finished it. The accounts of the Zoolu people, with Dingarn their king, etc., {64} give one a very good idea of the Homeric heroes, who were great brutes: but superior to the Gods who governed them: which also has been the case with most nations. It is a ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... followed the conflicts there with keen interest may be gathered from his works. (See Doellinger, "Hippolytus und Calixtus" p. 254 ff.) On the other hand, Clement was quite unacquainted with that city. Bigg therefore l.c. rightly remarks: "The West is as unknown to Clement as it was to his favourite Homer." That there was a formulated [Greek: pistis kai homologia] in Alexandria about 250 A.D. is shown by the epistle of Dionysius (Euseb., H. E. VII. 8). He says of Novatian, [Greek: anatrepei ten pro loutrou ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... on nicknames, ain't you?" he said to Eliza, regarding her with his never-failing curiosity. "Who's this Homer Keim ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... member of the Committee. Among the other members were also such persons as Bishop Greer, of New York, Reverend Adolph Guttman, president of the Hebrew Relief Society, Syracuse, New York, Mrs. William Einstein, president of Emanu El Sisterhood, New York; Mr. Homer Folks, Secretary State Charities Aid Association and Reverend William J. White, of Brooklyn, Supervisor of Catholic Charities. The Committee was deputed to make the investigation by the New York State Conference of Charities and Corrections, and made ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... Old Person of Cromer, Who stood on one leg to read Homer; When he found he grew stiff, He jumped over the cliff, Which concluded that ...
— Book of Nonsense • Edward Lear
... who generally accompanies him. Of course, true daughter of Eve that you are, you will wish to know "right off" what Chock's other name is. Young woman, I am ashamed of you! Who ever asks for the other name of Alexander, of Hannibal, of Homer? Suffice it that he is Chock by himself,—Chock, and assistant violinist to Paganini ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... worthy to be named for authors. Homer, an old tedious, prolix ass, talks of curriers, and chines of beef. Virgil of dunging of land, and bees. Horace, of I know ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... times natural to the writer, many times his peculiar bye-election and art, and such as either he keepeth by skill or holdeth on by ignorance, and will not or peradventure cannot easily alter into any other. So we say that Cicero's style and Sallust's were not one, nor Caesar's and Livy's, nor Homer's and Hesiodus',[14] nor Herodotus' and Thucydides', nor Euripides' and Aristophanes', nor Erasmus' and Budeus' styles. And because this continual course and manner of writing or speech sheweth the matter and disposition of ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... in a large apartment house, called The Wimbledon, and it was Patty's first visit there. Miss Homer and her mother were receiving their guests in a ballroom, and when Patty greeted them, a ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... Manu.), such have certainly since been found associated with extinct animals and prehistoric remains. It is, therefore a strange fact that the fowl is not mentioned in the Old Testament, nor figured on the ancient Egyptian monuments. It is not referred to by Homer or Hesiod (about 900 B.C.); but is mentioned by Theognis and Aristophanes between 400 and 500 B.C. It is figured on some of the Babylonian cylinders, between the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., of which Mr. Layard sent me an impression; and on the Harpy Tomb in Lycia, about 600 B.C.: so that the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... has shown a white man's capacity. In calling attention to the Negro's achievement in this particular, it may be well to note the fact that the Negro's white neighbor, although he lives in a clime similar to that which produced in Greece, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and poets like Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles, and in Italy poets like Virgil and Horace, has not produced a philosopher or a first-class poet, with all the leisure he enjoyed while the Negro has been engaged in enforced labor for him. In the highest field of thought as in philosophy and the works ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... his instructions. This itself is the only thing to be proud of. But if I admire the interpretation and that alone, what else have I turned out but a mere commentator instead of a lover of wisdom?—except indeed that I happen to be interpreting Chrysippus instead of Homer. So when any one says to me, Prithee, read me Chrysippus, I am more inclined to blush, when I cannot show my deeds to be in harmony and accordance with ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... finish, monsieur," said Bussy; "it was very well for Homer's heroes, who were demigods, to talk before they fought; but I am a man—attack ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... as a queen upon her throne, with shining eyes, scornful lips, and arms tightly folded under her cashmere shawl, with that haughty gesture familiar to her, the young woman looked as invulnerable under this light wrap as if she had been covered with Ajax's shield, formed, if we can credit Homer, of seven bulls' hides ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... writings no mention is made of either the coffee plant or the beverage made from the berries. Pierre (Pietro) Delia Valle[28] (1586-1652), however, maintains that the nepenthe, which Homer says Helen brought with her out of Egypt, and which she employed as surcease for sorrow, was nothing else but coffee mixed with wine.[29] This is disputed by M. Petit, a well known physician of Paris, who died in 1687. Several ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... paintings of Raphael, and Titian, and Correggio, and other illustrious men will perish and pass away. "How long," said Napoleon to David, "will a picture last?" "About four or five hundred years!—a fine immortality!" The poet multiplies his works by means of a cheap material—and Homer, and Virgil, and Dante, and Tasso, and Moliere, and Milton, and Shakspeare, may bid oblivion defiance; the sculptor impresses his conceptions on metal or on marble, and expects to survive the wreck of nations ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... what inspired it, till I felt it beat True cadence to unconquerable strains; Oh, then may she first wooed from heaven by prayer From thy pure lips, and sympathy austere With suffering, and the sight of solemn age, And thy gray Homer's head, with darkness bound, To me descend, more near, as I am far Beneath thee, and more ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... the members of the National Archery Association—men and women who can shoot as pretty a shaft as any who ever drew a bowstring. The names of Will Thompson, Louis Maxson, George P. Bryant, Harry Richardson, Dr. Robert P. Elmer, Homer Taylor, Mrs. Howell, and Cynthia Wesson are emblazoned on the annals of archery history for all time. To them and the many other worthy bowmen who have fostered the art in America, we are eternally grateful. ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... Perhaps it was a good paper and perhaps it was bad enough to make Homer turn over in his grave. I've studied and mulled over notebooks until I'm incapable of forming an opinion of anything. How thankful little Phil will be when ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... In the history of ancient religions, Odin belongs to the same stratum of mythological thought as Dyaus in India, Zeus in Greece, Jupiter in Italy. He was worshipped as the supreme deity during a period long anterior to the age of the Veda and of Homer. His travels in Greece, and even in Tyrkland,(64) and his half-historical character as a mere hero and a leader of his people, are the result of the latest Euhemerism. Buddha, on the contrary, is not a mythological, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... not, he had no opportunity of attending the most difficult and the most honorable of school business, when the Greek plays were taught—and it was the custom at Harrow to teach these at least every year. He went through his lessons in Horace, and Virgil, and Homer well enough for a time. But, in the absence of the upper master, Doctor Sumner, it once fell in my way to instruct the two upper forms, and upon calling up Dick Sheridan, I found him not only slovenly in construing, but unusually defective in his Greek grammar. Knowing him to be a clever fellow, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... man, to wit, Sheridan, whose look, whose voice, whose traditional character, formed a prologue to what was coming. Here let the reader understand that, throughout the "Iliad," all speeches or commands, questions or answers, are introduced by Homer under some peculiar formula. For instance, replies are usually ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Christ—the renowned city of Sidon being their great sea-port, whence their ships put forth to trade with Cyprus and Rhodes, Greece, Sardinia, Sicily, Gaul, and Spain. Little is known of the state of trade in those days, or of the form or size of ancient vessels. Homer tells us, in his account of the Trojan War, that the Phoenicians supplied the combatants with many articles of luxury; and from Scripture we learn that the same enterprising navigators brought gold to Solomon from Ophir ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... broken, crushed. Nothing there to remind her of the stalwart, manly young fellow whose voice had once stirred her pulse to admiration and love. All the more reason why she should be good to him now, all undeserving as he might be. Our British Homer showed a true appreciation of the best side of feminine ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... Naturalistic View of the Bible.—The Bible is not inspired at all, or at least in no way differing from any other book. Its authors were inspired, perhaps, just as Homer, or Thucydides, or Cicero were inspired, but not differently. It has no authority, therefore, over any other book, and is just as liable to be in error as any other. If you should bind in one ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... satire of Juvenal was written very early, and may, therefore, be forgiven, though it have not the massiness and vigour of the original. In all his versions strength and sprightliness are wanting: his hymn to Venus, from Homer, is, perhaps, the best. His lines are weakened with expletives, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... to refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of your adventure to groups of admiring friends. It would grow into a mighty story. Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a Homer. ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... and most plentiful relief to bees, even before our abricots blossom. The hopping-sallows open, and yield their palms before other sallows, and when they are blown (which is about the exit of May, or sometimes June) the palms (or olesikarpoi frugiperdae, as Homer terms them for their extream levity) are four inches long, and full of a fine lanuginous cotton. Of this sort, there is a salix near Dorking in Surrey, in which the julus bears a thick cottonous substance. A poor body might in ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... week. Felix de Azara writes about it in his 'Historia del Paraguay',*4* but he does little more than reproduce the account given by the Boundary Commissioners. He places it in 24d 4' 27" lat., and refers to it as 'a tremendous precipice of water*5* worthy of Homer or of Virgil's pen.' He says the waters do not fall vertically as from a balcony or window ('como por un balcon o/ ventana'), but by an inclined plane at an inclination of about fifty degrees. The river close to the top of the falls is about four thousand nine hundred Castilian ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... writers he had studied, and found himself not inferior. The great misfortune of his life, as he confessed himself, was never to have an aim. He had felt early some stirrings of ambition, but they were like gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave. Now, however, we have come to a period of his life when he certainly did have an aim, but necessity compelled him to renounce it as soon as it was recognised. It was not a ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... the same space and made the same figure as the bags that were really filled with money, had been blown up with air, and called into my memory the bags full of wind, which Homer tells us his hero received as a present from AEolus. The great heaps of gold on either side the throne now appeared to be only heaps of paper, or little piles of notched sticks, bound up together in bundles, like ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... the text "of Tor": see vol. ii. 242. The pear is mentioned by Homer and grows wild in South Europe. Dr. Victor Hehn (The Wanderings of Plants, etc.) comparing the Gr. {Greek letters} with the Lat. Pyrus, suggests that the latter passed over to the Kelts and Germans amongst whom the fruit was not indigenous. Our fine pears ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... it is not greater for having continued longer, so do I hold of truth, that for being older it is none the wiser. I often say, that it is mere folly that makes us run after foreign and scholastic examples; their fertility is the same now that it was in the time of Homer and Plato. But is it not that we seek more honour from the quotation, than from the truth of the matter in hand? As if it were more to the purpose to borrow our proofs from the shops of Vascosan or Plantin, than from what is to be seen in our own village; or ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... avoided falling into precipices, off the quays, or down staircases is a great mystery. The sides of his overcoat bulged out with pocket editions of various poets. When not engaged in reading Virgil, Homer, or Mistral, in parks, restaurants, streets, and suchlike public places, he indited sonnets (in French) to the eyes, ears, chin, hair, and other visible perfections of a nymph called Therese, the daughter, honesty compels me to state, of a certain Madame ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... consulted the same oracle; they celebrated the same national festival: mingled their deliberations in the same amphictyonic and subordinate assemblies, and sat together upon the free benches to hear their glorious history read aloud, in the prose of Heroditus, the poetry of Homer and of Pindar. We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we consult no common oracle but the Constitution. We can meet together to celebrate no national festival. But the thousand tongues of the press—clearer far than the silver trumpet of the jubilee,—louder ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... for the more special purposes of the jurist to express compendiously the characteristics, of the situation in which mankind disclose themselves at the dawn of their history, I should be satisfied to quote a few verses from the "Odyssee" of Homer:— ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... thousand a year to your talker, and a shilling a day to your fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for. How much do you think Homer got for his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise? only bitter bread and salt, and going up and down other people's stairs. In science, the man who discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid with ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... gods with men conspire And Furies blast the Grecian fire; Yet Troy must rise again. Troy's daughters were a spoil and sport, Were limbs for a labor gang, Who crooned by foreign loom and mill Of Trojan loves they cherished still, Till Homer heard, ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... It was a time, too, when there were almost as many able writers as in Queen Elizabeth's time. The two books written at that day, which you are most likely to have heard of, are Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe, and Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad. ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which spread their branches over a little green, surrounded by barns and cottages. I have seen few places more retired and peaceful. I send for a chair and table from the old woman's, and there I drink my coffee and read Homer. It was by accident that I discovered this place one fine afternoon: all was perfect stillness; everybody was in the fields, except a little boy about four years old, who was sitting on the ground, and holding ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... from the attractive subject of the satellites, we may just mention two points of a literary character. Mr. Hall consulted his classical friends as to the designation to be conferred on the two satellites. Homer was referred to, and a passage in the "Iliad" suggested the names of Deimos and Phobos. These personages were the attendants of Mars, and the lines in which they occur have been thus construed by my ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... only celebrated as possessing the loveliest women, but also as the birthplace of one of the greatest men. {85} O Homer, in the Greece of to-day thou wouldst find no materials for thine ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... the State Suffrage Association, Mrs. Homer M. Hill, said in her official report: "The People's Party was composed of Silver Republicans, Populists and Democrats. At the State convention these met in separate sessions. The Democrats voted down a resolution demanding that the Committee on Platform bring in a report favoring the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... an exordium, I feel a little ashamed of my hero, and could wish, for the credit of my tale, it were not more necessary to invoke the historic muse of Fielding, than that of Homer or Tasso; but imperious Truth obliges me to confess, that Tallien, who is to be the subject of this letter, was first introduced to celebrity by circumstances not favourable for the ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Homer had the sorrow to be blind, Yet a hundred people with good eyes would listen to him all night; For they took great enjoyment in the heaven of his mind, And were glad when the old blind poet let them share ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... radiant face, however, and Charlotte could hear him moving about his study; now rolling out a grand march of musical Greek syllables from Homer or Euripides, anon breaking into some familiar verse of Christian song. And, when tea was served, he went up-stairs for the ladies, and escorted them to the table with a manner so beaming and so happily predictive ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... so happened that my father was at that moment engaged in the important consideration whether the Iliad was written by one Homer, or was rather a collection of sundry ballads, done into Greek by divers hands, and finally selected, compiled, and reduced into a whole by a Committee of Taste, under that elegant old tyrant Pisistratus; and the sudden affirmation, "It is a boy," did not seem to him pertinent to the thread ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from the first; and we have not, perhaps, gained so much with our New-Roman Trinity or still less with our Jewish unity. Perhaps the old mythology was not in reality so immoral as we imagine, and it was, for example, a very decent idea of Homer to give to much-loved ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... horizon being invaded by the rocks was thus repeated with the grand monotony of the abyss. The battles of the ocean have the same sublime tautology as the combats of Homer. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... justly. Cicero was severe towards Caesar, and he was right. That severity is not diatribe. When Zoilus insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Vise insults Moliere, when Pope insults Shakspeare, when Frederic insults Voltaire, it is an old law of envy and hatred which is being carried out; genius attracts insult, great men are always more or less barked at. But ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Socrates, Gentlemen, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Homer,—yea, Clement, Augustin, Origen, Burnt brightlier towards their ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... to Roger Pemberton, 1695, with a line from Homer in Greek, "The race of men is as the race of leaves." In the north choir aisle John Workman, Prebendary, 1685, is described as Proto-Canonicus, probably meaning that he held the first stall. The tablet to Frances Cosin (d. 1642), wife ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... and who have met again after an absence ten thousand times accursed, be good enough to recall their first glance: it says so many things that the lovers, if in the presence of a third party, are fain to lower their eyes! This poem, in which every man is as great as Homer, in which he seems a god to the woman who loves him, is, for a pious, thin and pimpled lady, all the more immense, from the fact that she has not, like Madame de Fischtaminel, the resource of having several copies of it. In her case, her ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination. What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... modern nations, from Chaucer through Tennyson; from Luther through Goethe; from Rabelais through Victor Hugo; from Bryant and Irving through Hawthorne and Longfellow! How much they will translate from Homer and Virgil and Tacitus; from Schiller, Racine, Fenelon, and Moliere! How much philosophy they will read from Darwin, Spencer, Huxley! How they will trace the stars in the heavens, and the marks of God's fingers on the rocks and sands! How they will separate ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... termination of the feud on the curious ground that it was impossible for abuse to go further. It was an age when literary men were more inclined to comment on writings of the past than to produce original work. Literature was engaged in taking stock of itself. Homer was, of course, professedly admired by all, but more admired than imitated. Epic poetry was out of fashion and we find many epigrams of this period—some by Callimachus—directed against the "cyclic" poets, by whom were meant at that time those who were always dragging ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... Even good Homer nods, and I confess I am still haunted by the memory of a day when my Chief was my guest, and the butler served up red herrings neatly done up ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... first preacher who told them of their innermost selves, they called him the Prophetes or prophet, the man that speaketh forth as from an illimitable deep; and when they listened to the soul of music coming from the lips of a Homer or a Sappho, they called it by the most expressive name of all, "making" or "creation". The poet was a creator. And so he is if we come to think of it. Out of the materials supplied to him by the thinking of other intelligences, he weaves his song of joy and beauty which ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... the whirling wheel of fortune can change, nor the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, nor age abolish." And next I should point them to those pages in Mr. Gladstone's "Juventus Mundi," where he describes the ideal training of a Greek youth in Homer's days; and say—There: that is an education fit for a really civilised man, even though he never saw a book in his life; the full, proportionate, harmonious educing-that is, bringing out and developing—of all the faculties of his body, mind, and heart, till he becomes at once ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... have been less controversy about the proper method of Homeric translation, if critics bad recognised that the question is a purely relative one, that of Homer there can be no final translation. The taste and the literary habits of each age demand different qualities in poetry, and therefore a different sort of rendering of Homer. To the men of the time of Elizabeth, Homer would have appeared bald, it seems, and lacking in ingenuity, if ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... all through the three stories of the castle. At the upper end of the hall was the grand painted window, sixty feet high, on which was delineated the pilgrimage of Duke Bogislaff the Great to Jerusalem, all painted by Gerard Homer; [Footnote: A Frieslander, and the most celebrated painter on glass of his time.] and round on the walls banners, and shields, and helmets, and cuirasses, while all along each side, four feet from the ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... himself, as Shakspeare could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate other existences, but in himself he had an eye to perceive and a soul to embrace all forms and modes of being. He would have made a great epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one; for his Homer is not so properly a translation as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses rewritten. The earnestness and passion which he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. His ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... than honest labour, or that my particular kind of labour had something more objectionable about it than any other? In old times it was the most honourable office there was. Look at the priests of the Old Testament! Read Homer!" ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... immense cutting on the face of the steep northern slope, about 66 feet from my last year's work. Notwithstanding the difficulties due to coming on immense blocks of stone, the work advances rapidly. My dear wife, an Athenian lady, who is an enthusiastic admirer of Homer, and knows almost the whole of the Iliad by heart, is present at the excavations from morning to night. All of my workmen are Greeks from the neighbouring village of Renkoi; only on Sunday, a day on which the Greeks do not ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... would not rather be Helen than Homer, her face launching a thousand ships and burning the topless tower of Ilion—fairer than the evening air and simply but effectively attired in the beauty of a thousand stars? What poet has ever said things like that of an old man, even ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... conspicuous both in the poetical books and in those that are didactic or historical. It has had the same influence on the thoughts and imagination of all Christian people and upon the poetry and imitative arts of the Middle Ages (and nearly the same upon later and more cultivated times) that Homer had upon the Ancients. For in it we find the standard of all our Christian images and figures, and it gives us a model of imitation that is far more beautiful in itself, and far more world-wide in its application ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... his adventurous life; an entertaining story, told with abundant vigour, with humorous originality. Though he had in his possession scarce a dozen volumes, Alexander was really a bookish man and something of a scholar; his quotations, which were frequent, ranged from Homer to Horace, from Chaucer to Tennyson. He recited a few of his own poetical compositions, and they might have been worse; Piers made him glow and ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... rolled away When his return the Gods no more delay. Lo! Ithaca the Fates award; and there New trials meet the Wanderer." HOMER: Od. lib. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely mechanical process, is seeable by the mind. But can you see or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of that mechanical art, and from these individually dead atoms, sensation, thought, and emotion are to arise? Are you likely to extract Homer out of the rattling of dice, or the Differential Calculus out of the clash of billiard balls?" Could any vitalist, or Bergsonian idealist ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... of his own life; but that he anticipated the inability of future ministers to avert revolution, and foreboded the worst. Two persons may use the same words, and yet their sayings be as different as the first line of Homer from the first of Virgil. The omission of the French verb disguises the fact, that the one was said in the optative, and the other in the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... Greeks assumed that all the countries of the earth were surrounded by the ocean. STRABO, in the first century before Christ, after having shown that HOMER favoured this view, brings together in the first chapter of the First Book of his geography reasons in support of it in the ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... and Virgil read at chance intervals, when a storm interrupted out-door work, or while waiting at the upper mill for a grist, or of nights at the shop by the light of the forge fire. The paradigms were committed to memory with an anvil accompaniment; and long after, he never could scan a line of Homer, especially the oft-repeated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... for October, 1877, is an interesting article by Mr. Gladstone on the "colour-sense" in Homer, proving that Homer, and all nations in the earlier stages of their existence, have a very limited perception of colour, and a very limited and loosely applied nomenclature of colours. The same remark would certainly apply to the ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... group of primitive people in the Philippine Archipelago, except the Negrito, is from that same old tongue. Mr. Homer B. Hulbert[41] has recorded vocabularies of ten groups of people in Formosa; and those vocabularies show that the people belong to the same great linguistic family as the Bontoc Igorot. Mr. Hulbert believes ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... sense a classical scholar, he undoubtedly had an elementary knowledge of Latin, and may possibly, in later years, have acquired a smattering of Greek. George Chapman accuses Shakespeare of spreading the report that his alleged translations of Homer from the original Greek were, in fact, made from Latin versions. Whatever truth there may have been in Chapman's accusation against Shakespeare in this connection, modern scholarship has found that there were good grounds for such a report, and ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... of dwarfs, so called from a Greek word which means the cubit (a cubit was a measure of about thirteen inches), which was said to be the height of these people. They lived near the sources of the Nile, or according to others, in India. Homer tells us that the cranes used to migrate every winter to the Pygmies' country, and their appearance was the signal of bloody warfare to the puny inhabitants, who had to take up arms to defend their cornfields against the rapacious ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... Carlyle's Teufelsdrockh. 'Could I unfold the influence of names, I were a second greater Trismegistus!' Names occupy a place in literature peculiarly their own. From Homer downwards, all great writers have recognized their magical value. The most superficial readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey must have noticed how liberally every page is sprinkled with capital letters. The name of a god or of a hero blazes like an oriflamme ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... floor to ceiling with dark oak, and had a little fireplace in one of the corners. The window-panes were small, and set in lead. The curiosity of this room is, that it was once the residence of Pope, and that he here wrote a considerable part of the translation of Homer, and likewise, no doubt, the admirable letters to which I have referred above. The room once contained a record by himself, scratched with a diamond on one of the window-panes, (since removed for safe-keeping to Nuneham Courtney, where it was shown me,) purporting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... cannot detect a good point in Pegasus himself; like a certain philologist, who, though acquainted with the exact value of every word in the Greek and Latin languages, could observe no particular beauty in one of the most glorious of Homer's rhapsodies. {81} What knew he of Pegasus? he had never mounted a generous steed; the merest jockey, had the strain been interpreted to him, would have called it a brave song!—I ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... conception. She was supposed, as already related, to have issued from the head of Zeus himself, clad in armour from head to foot. The miraculous advent of this maiden goddess is beautifully described by Homer in one of his hymns: snow-capped Olympus shook to its foundation; the glad earth re-echoed her martial shout; the billowy sea became agitated; and Helios, the sun-god, arrested his fiery steeds in their headlong course to welcome this wonderful ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... example of this rule may be seen in that mirror of historians, the immortal Thucydides. Having arrived at the breaking out of the Peloponnesian War, one of his commentators observes that "he sounds that charge in all the disposition and spirit of Homer. He catalogues the allies on both sides. He awakens our expectations, and fast engages our attention. All mankind are concerned in the important point now going to be decided. Endeavors are made to disclose futurity. Heaven ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... 'Maker,' 'Preserver,' 'Benefactor,' 'Great Friend.' Though compact of all good qualities, the being has allowed the world to 'come under the control of evil spirits,' who, alone, receive religious worship. Though he leaves things uncontrolled, yet the chief being (as in Homer) ratifies the Oath, at a treaty, and is invoked to punish criminals when ordeal water is to be drunk. So far, then, he has an ethical influence. 'Grossly wicked people' are buried outside of the regular place. Fetishism prevails, with spiritualism, and Wilson ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... Light and Darkness, or the Four Winds. Yet this is not Algonkin theology; nor is it at all related to that of the Iroquois. It is the story of Sarama in the Rig Veda, and was written in Sanscrit, under the shadow of the Himalayas, centuries before Homer. ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... 'Speaking of Homer, whom he venerated as the prince of poets, Johnson remarked that the advice given to Diomed[384] by his father, when he sent him to the Trojan war, was the noblest exhortation that could be instanced in any heathen writer, and comprised ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... were essentially foreign to the clear intelligence and sober temperament of the Greek race. Yet appealing as it did to that love of mystery and that proneness to revert to savagery which seem to be innate in most men, the religion spread like wildfire through Greece until the god whom Homer hardly deigned to notice had become the most popular figure of the pantheon. The resemblance which his story and his ceremonies present to those of Osiris have led some enquirers both in ancient and modern times to hold that Dionysus ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of this century were far less scholarly than those of Italy and France. At the same time they might well be proud of a queen who "could quote Pindar and Homer in the original and read every morning a portion of Demosthenes, being also the royal mistress of eight languages." With our knowledge of the queen's scholarship in mind we might look to her for such patronage of art and literature ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... physical powers, that the superior quality of study would, I doubt not, more than atone for whatever deficiency in quantity might result. And even suppose a little less attention should be given to Euclid and Homer, which is of the greater importance nowadays, an ear that can detect a false quantity in a Greek verse, or an eye that can sight a Rebel nine hundred yards off, and a hand that can pull a trigger and shoot ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar—while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy!—Many were the "wit-combats," (to dally awhile with the words of old Fuller,) between him and C.V. Le G——, "which two I behold like ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Scottish border, by EDWARDI., in the year 1300. In addition to very curious descriptions of the muster of the Royal troops at Carlisle, their march northwards, and the incidents of the siege (which last have a strange resemblance to what Homer has recorded of incidents that took place during the siege of Troy), this Roll gives some graphic personal sketches of the princes, nobles, bannerets, and knights, whose banners and shields of arms are set forth in it with minute exactness. ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... the trouble," replied Lawrence, "Isabella won't let anything remain commonplace. She pulls everything out of its place,—makes a hero or heroine out of a piece of clay. I don't want to be in heroics all the time. Even Homer's heroes ate their suppers comfortably. I think it was a mistake in your father, bringing her here. Let her stay in her sphere queening it, and leave us poor mortals ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... with her crocodiles and Anubis; the Persians were yet devoted to Ormuzd and Ahriman, holding them in equal honor; in hope of the Nirvana, the Hindoos moved on patient as ever in the rayless paths of Brahm; the beautiful Greek mind, in pauses of philosophy, still sang the heroic gods of Homer; while in Rome nothing was so common and cheap as gods. According to whim, the masters of the world, because they were masters, carried their worship and offerings indifferently from altar to altar, delighted in the pandemonium they had erected. Their discontent, if they were discontented, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... gentleman watched the pair with interest and amusement; for both liked young people, and were anxious to know these two better, since they were to be their guides and guardians for six months. Professor Homer was going abroad to look up certain important facts for his great historical work, and as usual took his wife with him; for they had no family, and the good lady was ready to march to any quarter of the globe at short notice. Fearing to be lonely while her husband pored over old papers in foreign ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... history, and I can remember his often turning back to Hume, Macaulay, Hallam, and other historical works. He read various books on the French Revolution with great interest. He had several classics always near him, such as Homer and Virgil; and he always carried about with him a small edition of Horace. Of Shakespeare he could repeat much, and knew the plays well, entering into and discussing the characters. He admired Milton very greatly and was fond of reading ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... Cyprus was a centre of Phoenician enterprise. And, as we are told in that fine work 'Kypros, the Bible, and Homer: Oriental Civilisation, Art and Religion in ancient times,' "The oldest extant Phoenician inscriptions, themselves the earliest examples of letters properly so ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... pastured honey-bee drops choicer sweet; The flowers turn double, and the leaves turn flowers; That young and tender crescent-moon, thy slave, 135 Sleeping above her robe as buoyed by clouds, Refines upon the women of my youth. What, and the soul alone deteriorates? I have not chanted verse like Homer, no— Nor swept string like Terpander, no—nor carved 140 And painted men like Phidias and his friend: I am not great as they are, point by point. But I have entered into sympathy With these four, running these ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... with perfect confidence, indulged in such proud language? Was it a Homer, a Dante, a Corneille, one of those great poetical geniuses whose works can move a whole people, are addressed to all the world, and "will live forever"? No; it was a poet of the court and of the fashionable world of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... monumental is rejected. Oral literature, popular legends, ballads and rites, are all stifled in one word— superstition; and popular antiquities have become "fables" and "folk-lore." The ruder style of Cyclopean masonry, the walls of Tyrius, mentioned by Homer, are placed at the farthest end—the dawn of pre-Roman history; the walls of Epirus and Mycenae—at the nearest. The latter are commonly believed the work of the Pelasgi and probably of about 1,000 years before the Western era. As to the former, they were hedged in and driven ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... my stupidity quite incredible? Remember, if you please, what a weight of trouble and anxiety had lain on my mind while I was at Marseilles. Can one think of everything while one is afflicted, as I was? Not even such a clever person as You can do that. If, as the saying is, "Homer sometimes ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... with the mots of literature, and many proverbs have, in fact, drifted into literature and become connected with the names of great writers. Indeed, the saying that there is nothing new under the sun applies with such force and fidelity to literature that, if we should strip Hesiod and Homer and Chaucer of such phrases as "The half is greater than the whole," "It is a wise son that knows his own father" (which Shakespeare quotes the other end about), and "To make a virtue of necessity," and if we should ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... Mr Wales's journal. As this gentleman was continually on shore amongst them, he had a better opportunity of seeing what they could perform, than any of us. The passage is as follows: "I must confess I have been often led to think the feats which Homer represents his heroes as performing with their spears, a little too much of the marvellous to be admitted into an heroic poem; I mean when confined within the strait stays of Aristotle. Nay, even so great ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... and other travellers testify, that this practice is preserved in modern times. In Homer's Odyssey the custom of taking a bath before a banquet is frequently mentioned, III, 467; IV, ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... enjoying since you left me, the most exquisite entertainment, in the perusal of the noble works of Ossian, the greatest poet, in my opinion, that ever composed, and who exceeds Homer, Virgil, and Milton. He transports us by the grandeur of his sublime, or by some sudden start of tenderness he melts us into distress: Who can read, without the warmest emotions, the pathetic complaints of the venerable ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... 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 ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... feelings of the liveliest pain that we inform our readers of the death of the Reverend Homer Wilbur, A.M., which took place suddenly, by an apoplectic stroke, on the afternoon of Christmas day, 1862. Our venerable friend (for so we may venture to call him, though we never enjoyed the high privilege of his personal acquaintance) ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... said the poetical gentleman, with a preparatory flourish of his ruler, "have possessed localities famous in the history of literature:—as Athens, in Greece; the Island of Scio, where Homer first saw the light; and Stratford, where Shakspeare appeared. Now, sir, reasoning from analogy, which is the finest possible way of reasoning, we must conclude that Virginia has such a locality, and I leave you to decide the probable situation of it. It cannot ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... inroad of the Scythians in Media took place about the same time that the Cimmerians invaded Lydia, a nomad race which probably inhabited the Tauric Chersonessus (Crimea), and had once before desolated Asia Minor before the time of Homer. The Cimmerians may have been urged forward into Asia Minor by an invasion of the Scythians themselves, a nomadic people who neither planted nor reaped, but lived on food derived from animals—prototypes of the Huns, and also progenitors—a formidable race of barbarians, in ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... the concert came, and I was very reluctant to leave my arm-chair and the fire and the slippers. And now that my curate and I had set to work steadily at our Greek authors, to show the Bishop we could do something, I put aside my Homer with regret, and faced the frost of November. The concert was held in the old store down by the creek; and I shivered at the thought of two hours in that dreary room, with the windows open and a sea draught ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... is as if one should be so enthusiastic a lover of poetry as to care nothing for Homer or Milton. ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... up of certain things taken from the Iliad, certain from the AEneid, certain from the Divina Commedia, certain from Paradise Lost,—if he runs over the list and says to the chanson, "Are you like Homer in this point? Can you match me Virgil in that?" the result will be that the chanson will fail to ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... thus out-do Stentor, we have anything worth saying. We have now made the serene spaces of the upper Heavens our media to transmit market reports and sporting news, second-rate music and worse oratory and in the meantime the great masters of thought, Homer and Shakespeare, Bach and Beethoven remain unbidden on our library shelves. What a sordid Vanity Fair is our ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... breezy country, and knew it not,—so pleasant is the fragrant turf that has been often pressed by the feet of Nature's best-beloved high-priest! Round the mahogany tree that night we hear the hunters tell the glories of their sport,—how their horses, like Homer's steeds, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... judged it safe to inform her of the predicament in which they were placed. Mary turned pale, and crossed herself again and again, when she heard the imminent danger in which she had stood. But, like the Ulysses of Homer, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... Russia is!" And Alexander Hertzen characterized it as "a wonderful book, a bitter, but not hopeless rebuke of contemporary Russia." Aksakov went so far as to call it the Russian national epic, and Gogol the Russian Homer. ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... the work with which his name is most closely linked, his translation of Homer. The first instalment, entitled Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere, Prince of Poets, was published in 1598, and was dedicated to the Earl of Essex. After the Earl's execution Chapman found a yet more powerful patron, for, as we learn from the letters printed recently ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... fault with their living in the market-place; but I commend it. For if it had been bad, Homer would never have been for representing Nestor as an orator; nor all the other wise men. I will return, then, from thence to the tongue, which this fellow says our youths ought not to exercise, while I maintain they should. And again, he says they ought ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... insensibly imbibed new knowledge as well as devotion from the great centre, the other brought with them to our shores importations of books, including copies of such religious classics as Josephus and Chrysostom, and of such literary classics as Homer. About 680, died Caedmon, a monk of Whitby, one of the first who composed in Anglo-Saxon, and some of whose compositions are preserved. Strange and myth-like stories are told by Bede about this remarkable natural genius. He was originally a cow-herd. Partly from want of training, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the dog Argus was told two thousand years ago by the great Greek poet, Homer. Argus may not have been a real dog, but the poet must have known some dog like him or he could not have told the story ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... Turks own. In ancient times Croesus lived here after he had made his pile, and at the present day great numbers of wealthy men make it their home, and there is a good deal of luxury seen in the suburbs. It has the trade from Asia Minor. Homer was born here, and wrote and sang his immortal poetry along its rocky shores. It was conquered by Alexander the Great, and after he had destroyed it he ordered it rebuilt a few miles farther off so as not to forget ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... blue vault of heaven. Every man in the ship, from the commander to the youngest boy, could feel and understand this natural beauty; but there were many on board the squadron who had still higher enjoyment, as they gazed on those isles and shores which recalled the classic verse of Homer and of Virgil. For them every island, cape, river, and mountain was fraught with interest. There lay Tenedos, renowned of old; there the mountain isle of Imbros stood out in bold relief from the snow-clad summits of Samothracia. In the distance appeared Mount ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... Lucan colours it with his wildest and most exaggerated hyperbole. (30) See Book I., 463. (31) The ocean current, which, according to Hecataeus, surrounded the world. But Herodotus of this theory says, "For my part I know of no river called Ocean, and I think that Homer or one of the earlier poets invented the name and introduced it into his poetry." (Book II., 23, and Book IV., 36.) In "Oceanus" Aeschylus seems to have intended to personify the great surrounding stream. ("Prom. Vinc.", lines 291, 308.) (32) Comp. VI., ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... Gomer and Homer, Selah and Telah, Rasman and Tasman, Barak and Sarak, Janet and Nanet, Heavenbella and Sevenbella, Ahaz and Azaz, Antimeg and Antineg, Are all ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... patriarchal scheme of domestic servitude is indeed well calculated to awaken the higher and finer feelings of our nature. It is not wanting in its enthusiasm and its poetry. The relations of the most beloved and honored chief, and the most faithful and admiring subjects, which, from the time of Homer, have been the theme of song, are frigid and unfelt compared with those existing between the master and his slaves—who served his father, and rocked his cradle, or have been born in his household, and look forward to ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... and the "true God," save that remote power of God which is divided up and parceled out among them. Their morals were the worst. The whole mythical system is simply one grand demonstration of human apostacy from the "true God." Homer introduces Zeus in love, and bitterly complaining and bewailing himself, and plotted against by the other gods. He represents the gods as suffering at the hands of men. Mars and Venus were wounded by Di-o-me-de. He says, "Great Pluto's self the stinging arrow felt ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... the hope of New France was gone. Born and educated in camps, Montcalm had been carefully instructed, and was skilled in the language of Homer as well as in the art of war. Greatly laborious, just, disinterested, hopeful even to rashness, sagacious in council, swift in action, his mind was a well-spring of bold designs; his career in Canada a wonderful ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... his attention chiefly on the manners and institutions of peoples and the memoirs of great generals—as Turenne, Conde, Luxembourg, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugene, and Charles XII. Of the poets he selected the so-called Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, and the masterpieces of the French theatre; but he especially affected the turgid and declamatory style of Ossian. In romance, English literature was strongly represented by forty volumes of novels, of course ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... old many cities in Greece asserted that they were the birthplace of Homer, the national poet, so a number of cities disputed for the honor of being the birthplace of Rashi, or of having been his residence, or the scene of his death. Worms claimed him as one of its rabbis, Lunel, thanks to a confusion of names, has passed as his birthplace, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... this base world. Pale HELEN steps out upon the battlements and turns to FLAUBERT her appealing glance, and CELLINI paces with Madame DE SEVIGNE through the eternal shadows of unrevealed realism. And BROWNING, and HOMER, and MEREDITH, and OSCAR WILDE are with them, the fleet-footed giants of perennial youth, like unto the white-limbed Hermes, whom Polyxena once saw, and straight she hied her away to the vine-clad banks of Ilyssus, where Mr. PATER stands contemplative, like some ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... I; "the 'Cowydd of Judgment' contains some of the finest things ever written—that description of the toppling down of the top crag of Snowdon, at the day of Judgment, beats anything in Homer." ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... recalls his father's sportive way of teaching him at five years old, with the aid of piled-up chairs and tables—the cat for Helen, and Towzer and Tray as the Atreidai,—the story of the siege of Troy, and, later, his urging the boy to read the tale "properly told" in the translation of Homer by his favourite poet, Pope. He lived almost to the close of his eighty-fifth year, and if he was at times bewildered by his son's poetry, he came nearer to it in intelligent sympathy as he grew older, and he had for long the satisfaction ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... comes in section two of his poem. Unlike Dryden, in whose Discourse the account of the "progress" of satire is confined almost exclusively to a few Roman writers, Harte begins his account of its progress with Homer and brings it down to Pope. Deriving the ancestry of The Dunciad from Homer, the greatest epic poet, obviously enhances Pope's satire. Perhaps less obviously, by extending Dryden's account to the present, Harte makes The Dunciad not only a chronological ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... 1.]—The Watchman, like most characters in Greek tragedy, comes from the Homeric tradition, though in Homer (Od. iv. 524) he is ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... original interpretation of the land-grabbers' clever schemes to defraud. However, not satisfied with his own opinion, he decided to seek a little expert advice on the subject, and to that end he went the following morning to his father's old friend and his own former employer, Homer Dunstan, the corporation attorney, whom he knew to be an authority on ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... pipes. What was the best way to colour them, the advantages of colouring them, the beauty of the 'culotte,' the coolness it gave to the smoke, &c. We listened to the venerable sage - he was then forty-three and we only five or six and twenty - as we should have listened to a Homer or an Aristotle, and he thoroughly enjoyed ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... career. One of their merits was the unexpected spontaneity of their humour—the faculty that is distinctive of some of the best of his mots, such as that when looking at Edmund Yates's book-shelves which caused him to pause before one of the volumes and read off "Homer's Iliad," and murmur, "Homer's—Yes—that is the best." On one occasion he, with Mr. George Chester (my informant), was on a visit to Mark Lemon at Crawley, and at the breakfast-table a discussion arose between the two men upon noses, their shapes ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... were at times members of the club, Mr. Dickie was the ripest scholar, but my predecessor at the school-house had a way of sneering at him that was as good as sarcasm. When they were on their legs at the same time, asking each other passionately to be calm, and rolling out lines from Homer, that made the inn-keeper look fearfully to the fastenings of the door, their heads very nearly came together although the table was between them. The old dominie had an advantage in being the shorter man, for he could ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie |
