"Idyll" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and of what Sam had said to her in the lane yesterday; of his clean-cut face, and the look in his eyes—so vastly superior to any look that ever came into the eyes of Bream Mortimer. She was telling herself that her relations with Sam were an idyll; for, being young and romantic, she enjoyed this freshet of surreptitious meetings which had come to enliven the stream of her life. It was pleasant to go warily into deep lanes where forbidden love lurked. She cast a swift side-glance at her father—the unconscious ogre in her fairy-story. ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... came, as they sometimes did, to stay with Christina, they said the life led by their sister and brother-in-law was an idyll. Happy indeed was Christina in her choice, for that she had had a choice was a fiction which soon took root among them—and happy Theobald in his Christina. Somehow or other Christina was always a little shy of cards when her sisters were staying with her, though at other ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... defend himself; he even courted Sybil's attack. They both enjoyed their ride through the bare woods, by the rippling spring streams, under the languid breath of the moist south wind. It was a small idyll, all the more pleasant because there was gloom before and behind it. Sybil's irrepressible gaiety made Carrington doubt whether, after all, life need be so serious a matter. She had animal spirits in plenty, and it needed an effort for her to keep them down, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... should do wrong, however, to the literary, and even to the moral, character of the work, were we not to point out that there are frequent oases of sweetness and beauty set in the wastes of incredible foulness which overspread so widely the pages of Rousseau's "Confessions." Here, for example, is an idyll of vagabondage that might almost make one willing to play tramp one's self, if one by so doing might have ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... day of his. From bathing in pastoral he had been suddenly soused into tragedy's seething-pot. His idyll of the tanned gipsy, with her glancing eyes and warm lips, had been spattered out with a brushful of blood; the scene was changed from sunny life to wan death. Here were the staring eyes of a dead man, and his mouth twisted ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... fancied scorn of the wealthy cadets. At Valence, while shrinking from his brother officers, he sought society more congenial to his simple tastes and restrained demeanour. In a few of the best bourgeois families of Valence he found happiness. There, too, blossomed the tenderest, purest idyll of his life. At the country house of a cultured lady who had befriended him in his solitude, he saw his first love, Caroline de Colombier. It was a passing fancy; but to her all the passion of his southern nature welled forth. She seems to have returned his love; ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... at all. He had ceased to snort his scorn; indeed, for ten minutes or so he had uttered no word or sound; but there was something in the pose of his ungainly body which strangely suggested that of a great dog preparing to spring. Presently the violinist recalled what he termed a "charming idyll of Normandy." ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... Vaughan had been a pet of society for the last half-dozen years, and being by nature susceptible to girlish charm had more than once imagined himself seriously in love. There had been, for example, that beautiful blonde whose society had turned a summer holiday into a veritable idyll. He had been on the verge of proposing to her when his uncle had suddenly summoned him home, and—well, somehow the restless misery of the first few days had disappeared with surprising rapidity, the vision had grown dim, ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... roaring generations flit and fade. To this one, fading, flitting, like the rest, We come to proffer - be it worst or best - A sketch, a shadow, of one brave old time; A hint of what it might have held sublime; A dream, an idyll, call it what you will, Of man still Man, ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... "That's the maddening part of it. Every French bed is an idyll—a poem of repose. The upholsterer puts his soul into its creation. A born genius, he expresses himself in beds. The rest of the junk he turns out..." He broke off and glanced about the room. His eye lighted upon a couch, lozenge-shaped, hog-backed, featuring the Greek-Key pattern in brown upon ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... A summer idyll, with love, music, and nature for its themes, and the mountains and lakes for its scenes. The heroine, Peggy, is charming, fresh, and unconventional, with a genuine love for song. The country neighbors ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... motherland,—his characteristic is more contemplative and brooding,—yet his range is unusually comprehensive and his power varied and sustained, as well as marked by the highest qualities of rhythmic beauty. In the idyll, where he specially shines, we have much that is lovely and limpid, with abounding instances of that felicitous word-painting for which he was noted. This is especially seen in the simple pastoral idylls, such as 'Dora,' 'The May Queen,' and 'The Miller's ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Fire Saying Good-bye On the tune called The Old-hundred-and-fourth The Opportunity Evelyn G. Of Christminster The Rift Voices from things growing in a Churchyard On the Way "She did not turn" Growth in May The Children and Sir Nameless At the Royal Academy Her Temple A Two-years' Idyll By Henstridge Cross at the year's end Penance "I look in her face" After the War "If you had known" The Chapel-organist Fetching Her "Could I but will" She revisits alone the church of her marriage At the ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... seat, her eyes bent towards some AEgean isle; the translucent robe clung about her perfect body; her breast was warm against the white stone; the mazes of her woven hair shone with unguent. The gazer lost himself in memories of epic and idyll, warming through worship to desire. Then his look strayed to the next engraving; a peasant girl, consummate in grace and strength, supreme in chaste pride, cheek and neck soft-glowing from the sunny field, eyes revealing the heart at one with nature. Others there were, women of ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... scarlet, the sunset flashed out. Black clouds darkened the visible idyll. A chill gust swept across the stream, showering rain and darkness. Each at an oar, we forged on, until we lost the channel in the gloom. At the first peep of day we were off again, after a breakfast of pancakes, ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... cried Isobel, with a show of intense interest, when Courtenay had gone. She had decided on a line of conduct, and meant to follow it carefully. The more sympathy she extended towards her friend's love idyll, the less likelihood was there of disagreeable developments in other respects. That trick of calculating gush was Isobel's chief failing. She was so wrapped up in self that her own interests governed every ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... lucky as to have a steady brother Who could talk to me as we are talking now to one another— Who could give me good advice when he discovered I was erring (Which is just the very favour which on you I am conferring), My story would have made a rather interesting idyll, And I might have lived and died a very decent indiwiddle. This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter Isn't generally heard, and if it is it ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the more, redoubled her tenderness. And this wan idyll of theirs, as nearly incorporeal as though she were indeed an ethereal visitor, took on a new pathos which was accentuated by the withering of the flowers in the garden, the first hints ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... verse. The bitter personalities do not concern us, but, at Naples, to amuse Robert of Artois and his court, Adam composed the first of French comic operas, which had an immense success, and, as a pastoral poem, has it still. The Idyll of Arras was a singular contrast to the Idyll of Beaucaire, but the social value was the same in both; Robin and Marion were a pendant to Aucassins and Nicolette; Robin was almost a burlesque on Aucassins, while Marion was a Northern, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... of the drama to absorb pastoral elements rather from the lyric and the idyll than from regular plays in that kind is significant. It is the acknowledgement of an important fact, which pastoralism failed to recognize; namely, that as the expression of the pastoral idea gained in complexity of artistic structure it lost in vitality. The pastoral drama, born late in time, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... little idyll is that of Simple Susan, who was a real maiden living in the neighbourhood of Edgeworthstown. The story seems to have been mislaid for a time in the stirring events of the first Irish rebellion, and overlooked, like some little daisy by a battlefield. Few among us will not have shared Mr. Edgeworth's ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... banks of the Cher or the Loire, right away from Paris. A visit to Sache, after an illness, afforded him the excuse for searching; and, as he still proposed to write—for his pleasure,—it was congruent he should meditate a sort of Heloise and Abelard idyll—two lovers drawn to the cloister, and telling in epistles to each other the history of ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... "It is an idyll, a lovely one, conceived by some one whose childhood has been happily impressed on him.... The reader lives amid the pastures and the orchards of Ty-Cremed, and eats the brown bread and drinks the milk there, and Auntie Gwen, with her white teeth, cracks filberts for ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... in the first steps of the evolution of the State, had lighted quite naturally on what turns out to be a mistaken or inadequate ideal of it, in an idyll pretty enough, indeed, from "The Golden Age."—How sufficient it seems for a moment, that innocent world! is, nevertheless, actually but a false ideal of human society, allowing in fact no place at all for ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... history, which are always wearisome and usually inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been due to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all the wide meaning of that word. In fact, we owe it everything, except the sonnet, to which, however, some curious ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... person in the world who could bring to its making so fine a compound of sentiment and common sense. She frankly loved it all and though, at the moment, occupied with the work of at least a dozen women, and with a family that needed her most earnest care, she hastened to assist the Idyll. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... spot! to his own absolute consternation. This was how it happened. The moment was not romantic, the situation was not sublime. A little motherless housekeeper crying because her father scolded her in public for a piece of bad cookery. There is nothing in this to make an idyll out of; but such as it was, it proved enough for Horace Northcote; he yielded himself on the spot. Not a word was said, for Ursula felt that if she tried to talk she must cry, and anything further from her troubled thoughts than love it would be impossible to imagine; but then and there, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... in the retrospect was the faultless woman—the ideal wife and love's young dream in one. "I have had my day," was the thought of his heart, as he looked across the gulf of strenuous, chequered, disappointing years to that idyll of the far past which her pictured form brought back to him. "Whatever is lacking now, I HAVE known the fullness of love and bliss—that there is such a thing as a perfect union between man and woman, rare as it may be." It will be remembered ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... powerful pen of Banneker, his idyll, fulfilled, lengthened out over radiant months. Io was to him all that dreams had ever promised or portrayed. Their association, flowering to the full amidst the rush and turmoil of the city, was the antithesis to its budding in ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... courage to describe the beauty of this picture; its atmosphere of holy peace, the dignity of its composition, the golden richness of its colouring. The most tragic situation has here again been alchemised by Luini's magic into a pure idyll, without the loss of power, without the sacrifice ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... he was well-set in life. This sudden anemia was most extraordinary; fellow showed no signs of it previously. All he had really needed was rest. If he had recovered, that lovely Eve Orcaczy might have made both their lives happier, richer. Sad ending to what might have been an idyll. Good of her to claim the body. She said she was going to inter it in the family vault ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... Hester's first book, An Idyll of East London, was reaping its harvest of astonished indignation and admiration, and her acquaintances—not her friends—were still wondering how she came to know so much of a life of which they decided she could know nothing, when suddenly Lady Susan Gresley ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... moment she felt like an accomplice in the furtive wooing, and it seemed to her that she had forfeited both the confidence of her husband and the respect of her daughter. Months ago she had meant by force of some initiative to regularise this idyll which by its stealthiness wounded the self-respect of all concerned. Vain aspiration! And now the fact that Fred Ryley had begun to call at Church Street appeared to indicate between him and Uncle Meshach a closer understanding which could only be ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... simple utterance of its closing words—"And when he touched that French officer's glass with his own that day at dinner, he secretly forgave him—forgave him in the name of the Divine Forgiver." With a moral no less noble and affecting, no less grand and elevating than this, the lovely idyll closed. The final glimpse of the scene at the old Aix chateau was like the view of a sequestered orchard through the ivied porchway of a village church. The concluding words of the prelection were like the sound ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... Servius on the 8th Eclogue of Virgil; Theocritus, Idyll, ii., 22; Hudibras, part ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... "Your idyll with that fellow Jolyon Forsyte is known to me at all events. If you pursue it, understand that I will leave no stone unturned to make things unbearable for him. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... identifications are all-important, not only in connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first time satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students of Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of the Venetian idyll generally. ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... in a few words, the history of this heroic idyll. It is perhaps as well to remind the public now and then that the hours of distraction they enjoy by means of art may represent years of suffering for ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... of domestic life, of knighthood, of the idyll, of cruelty, and so forth? How should these contents be represented? Such is the absurd problem implied in the theory of artistic and literary classes. It is in this that consists all search after laws or rules of styles. Domestic life, knighthood, idyll, cruelty, and ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... grew suppler and more docile, answered more truly to the individuality behind it. He told her of his bringing up, of his wandering with the sheep on the mountains, of his reading among the heather, of 'Lias and his visions, of Hannah's cruelties and Louie's tempers—that same idyll of peasant life to which Dora had listened months before. But how differently told! Each different listener changes the tale, readjusts the tone. But here also the tale pleased. Elise, for all her leanings towards new schools ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... clearer indication of the line he was to follow. It came out at a time when Gissing was still in favour, and the odour of mean streets was accepted as synonymous with literary honesty and courage. There is certainly no lack of either about this idyll of Elizabeth Kemp of the lissome limbs and auburn hair. The story pursues its way, and one sees the soul of a woman shining clearly through the racy dialect and frolics of the Chingford beano, the rueful futility of faithful Thomas and the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... managed an occasional peep at them, sitting hand in hand. He wished the idyll to last as long as the clear daylight, but the hour for closing was four o'clock—"Il n'y avait pas a nier." Either they were husband and wife, reunited, after years of war-severance; or they were mature lovers, and probably of the most respectable. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... confectioner, and, like Marion in the "Ballad of Forty Years," "Adrienne's dead" in a convent. That is all the story, all the idyll. Gerard also wrote the idyll of his own delirium, and the proofs of it (Le Reve et la Vie) were in his pocket when they found him dead in La ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... himself to wander all night among the vine-clad glens of Lebanon, amid the gardens of lilies, and the beds of spices; while shepherds' music lured him on and on, and girlish voices, chanting the mystic idyll of his mighty ancestor, rang soft and fitful through his ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... them the lullaby, "Come little babe, come silly soule,"[1]—it is incorporated in A.H. Bullen's Lyrics from Elizabethan Romances (1890). His keen observation of country life appears also in his prose idyll, Wits Trenchmour, "a conference betwixt a scholler and an angler," and in his Fantastickes, a series of short prose pictures of the months, the Christian festivals and the hours, which throw much light on the customs of the times. Most of Breton's books are very rare and have great bibliographical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... unlikely," he said; "M. de Hausee will have a bad half-hour with Mrs. Parflete. The idyll will be spoilt for ever, and our pretty tale for angels about a Saint and a little Bohemian will sink to its proper level. It always takes three to make a really edifying Platonic history. The third in this ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... of a young Venetian girl, perhaps a sister of his own. The comfortable bed, the dainty furniture, are carefully drawn. The clear morning light streams into the room. The saint lies peacefully asleep, her hand under her head, her long eyelashes resting upon her cheek: the whole is an idyll, full of insight into girlish life. The tiny slippers made, no doubt, one of the details that caught his eye. The crown lying on the ledge of the bed is an arbitrary introduction, as naif as the angel. In the funeral scene the ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... conventionality inseparable from the pastoral form, and the obvious artificiality of the style in which it is written, "Rosalynde" is really charming. Its charm is much like that of Watteau's landscapes. Like them, it is an idyll in court dress, a fete elegante, a kind of elegant picnic. Yet, like Watteau's pictures it is of more than merely historic interest, for it is far more than simply a reminder of the fopperies of ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... picture of the Syracusan Bride which decided his future election as a full member of the Academy; but as a matter of fact, it was in 1869 that this election took place. The picture, let us add, was suggested to the painter by a passage in the second Idyll of Theocritus: "And for her then many other wild beasts were going in procession round about, and among them a lioness." The Painter's Honeymoon and a Portrait of Mrs. James Guthrie were also exhibited ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... Troilus and Cressida. Both these poems are in ottava rima, a metre which, if Boccaccio did not invent it, he was the first to apply to such a purpose. Both works were dedicated to Fiammetta. A graceful idyll in the same metre, Ninfale Fiesolano, was written later, probably at Naples in 1345. King Robert was then dead, but Boccaccio enjoyed the favour of Queen Joan, of somewhat doubtful memory, at whose instance ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... idyll, written in 1864, made a great hit. It was followed by several plays—Queen Mary, Harold, Becket and others—all finely written, but none appealing to the great public. Up to his last years Tennyson remained the real laureate of his people, his words always tinged ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... out Virgil's spirit, so serious and tender! The poet has put a cosmogony in an idyll. Antiquity called him the Virgin. The name well befits his Muse, and we should picture her as a Mnemosyne pondering over the works of men ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... the shelter I had made out of the old canoe, and I used to tell him lies about my friends at home. And after a storm we would go round the island together to see if there was any drift. It was a kind of idyll, you might say. If only I had had some tobacco it would have been ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... say that I was getting thinner and thinner every day. Madame F—— told me one day that my sickly looks were very disagreeable to her, because wicked tongues would not fail to say that she treated me with cruelty. Strange, almost unnatural thought! On it I composed an idyll which I cannot read, even now, without feeling tears in ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... be so happy," she said. "I would housekeep for you, and you could work as much as you pleased. Our life would be a long idyll." ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... creepers had been cut out by a decorator's skilful hands. It was as though the real sky, the real flowers, the real earth were forbidden her for all time and she condemned to breathe no other air than that of the theater. An occasional fireman passed, watching over their melancholy idyll from afar. And she would drag him up above the clouds, in the magnificent disorder of the grid, where she loved to make him giddy by running in front of him along the frail bridges, among the thousands of ropes fastened to the pulleys, the windlasses, the rollers, in the midst of a regular forest ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... literature. Everybody knows who the Poet is, but if they want to know him as a kind of Good Samaritan in a different way than they know him in his verses, they should read this charming idyll."—Boston Transcript. ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of most of his poems he holds us steadily in his own pure grave, passionate world.... The beauty of it (In Praise of Ysolt) is the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity, not of beautiful words and images and suggestions ... the thought dominates the words and is greater than they are. Here (Idyll for Glaucus) the effect is full of human passion and natural magic, without any of the phrases which a reader of modern verse would expect in the treatment of such ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... sides, the wild growths of roses and blackberry-bushes, the tangle of ivy and woodbine, and the lovely vistas through leafy framings of sunny hillsides and woods, of pastures dotted with grazing cattle, and of peaceful farm homes. It is a country idyll, sweet and restful! We may slacken our horses reins while he crops the wayside grass, or we may sit on a fallen stone from the old wall, while we muse of early days when there was no turnstile to block our path, but we should wander on around the loops ...
— Annals and Reminiscences of Jamaica Plain • Harriet Manning Whitcomb
... moment very softly, almost as if to himself. "Neither will he forget," he said, "that our love was a summer idyll that came to us unawares in the days when we were young, and that though the idyll will come to an end, our love is a gift immortal—imperishable—indestructible—a flame that burns upwards and always upwards—reaching the Divine. And because he remembers ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell |
