"Lyric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... September, Gluck finished a new opera, "Echo et Narcisse," and with this work decided to close his career, feeling he was too old to write longer for the lyric stage. He was then nearly seventy years old, and retired to Vienna, to rest and enjoy the fruits of all his years of incessant toil. He was now rich, as he had earned nearly thirty thousand pounds. Kings and princes came to do him honor, and ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... Barty to begin a lyric that will probably last as long as the English language with an innocent jingle worthy ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... and had cultivated the same without judgment. His intricate disposition and extreme sensitiveness frightened him away from much effort at self-expression; yet not a few trifling scraps and shreds of lyric poetry had fallen from his pen in high moments. These, when the mood changed, he read again, and found dead, and usually destroyed. He was more easily discouraged than a child who sets out to tell its parent a story, and is all silence and shamefaced blushes at the first whisper of laughter ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... lyric breathe Above her hero-urns; And Scotland, with her holly, wreathe The flower he ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... virtue. Yet to him it must be confessed that we are indebted for the connection of a national error, and for the cure of our Pindaric madness. He first taught the English writers that Pindar's odes were regular; and though certainly he had not the lire requisite for the higher species of lyric poetry, he has shown us that enthusiasm has its rules, and that in mere confusion there ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... soul and lie Blind to the beauty of the earth, Deaf tho' a lyric wind goes by, Dumb in ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... weary and spirit-broken chorus girls in costume were sprawling on the chairs in the lower boxes, some sleeping, some too tired to sleep, and some eating ravenously from paper bags. Chorus men and costumers, wig makers and lyric writers, authors and friends of the company, sat about singly and in pairs in the orchestra seats. They were mostly bored so far beyond mere impatience by all this super-inefficiency and chaos as to have arrived at a state of intellectual coma. The various men out of whose brains had originally ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... ever arise to sing a Devastation or a Glatton? Can a Devastation or a Glatton ever inspire poetic thoughts and images? One would say that the singer must be endowed in no ordinary degree with the sacred fire whom such a theme as a modern ironclad turret-ship should move to lyric utterance. It has been said that all the romance of the road died out with the old coaching days; and certainly a locomotive engine, with its long black train of practical-looking cars, makes hardly so picturesque a ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the restaurant until it closed, I could not describe to you how passionately Tricotrin, the devoted Tricotrin, worked for her. He has studied her without cease; he has studied her attitudes, her expressions. He has taken his lyric as if it were material and cut it to her figure; he has taken it as if it were plaster, and moulded it upon her mannerisms. There was not a moue that she made, not a pretty trick that she had, not a word that she liked to sing for which he did not ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... cutting pigeon-wings, the concertina played "Matamoras," Jones continued his lyric, when two Mexicans leaped at each other, and the ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... skimming desultorily through the verses till she came to a brief two-verse lyric which caught and held her interest. It was a very simple little song, but it appealed to the shining optimism and belief which was a fundamental part of her own nature—to that brave, sturdy confidence which had brought her, still buoyant and unspoiled ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... a life that was wild and free, free, free, And a life that was wild and free." To this charming lyric there was a chorus of, "Then hurrah for the pirate bold, And hurrah for the rover wild, And hurrah for the yellow gold, And hurrah for the ocean's child!" the mild enunciation of which highly moral and appropriate chant appeared ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... his childhood, not one of the ancient poets has systematically touched upon the theme at all. From Lydgate down to Tennyson, it would be easy to quote from our English poets a continuous line of lyric songs on the subject of boyish years. How to the young child the fir-trees seemed to touch the sky, how his heart leaped up at the sight of the rainbow, how he sat at his mother's feet and pricked into paper the tissued flowers of her dress, how he chased the bright butterfly, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... of lyric stuff; Her bows, I grant, are merely bluff, Her sternmost pile of windy fluff Would leave one cool; Yet never since the world was planned Was aught more lofty and more grand Regarded as a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... could not bear to be so misconceived. I was determined to show the English that, in spite of them, I was an artiste. I longed to bring them to my feet, as Jupiter did the Titans. So I ordered from one of those poetasters to be found in every land, a sort of libretto called, in theatrical parlance, a lyric drama; and to the words of this monstrosity I arranged the very finest airs of my several operas. When I had completed this musical kaleidoscope I called it 'Pyramus and Thisbe.' I dished up my olla podrida, and set it before the hungry ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... lyric and monologue in which Browning set forth the varieties of passionate experience was an art-form of immense possibilities, which it was a work of genius to discover. To say that Browning, the inventor of this amazingly fine form, was indifferent to form has always seemed to ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... that the effect of this amazing lyric grows upon me every time that I hear it. Some Psalms, like the delicate and tender cxix., steal into the heart after long and quiet use. How dull I used to find it as a child; how I love it now! But this is not the case with the Venite; its noble simplicity and directness has no touch ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Oct. 24. American debut of Marcella Sembrich, great lyric soprano, in "Lucia di Lammermoor" at the Metropolitan Opera House, New ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... Daniel. The contact with the outside world makes possible a phase of literature such as that to which the books of Job and Ecclesiastes belong. The deepening of the inner life gave the world the lyric of the Psalms, some of which are credibly assigned to a period so late as that ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... sat there with the bunches of the camel-dates above him, golden as the sunlight. Then, as the scent of the lyric-flowers, released by evening, warned him of the night dropping like a flight of dark birds on the plain, he rose stiffly, and made his way as usual toward the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... overflows the lips in song As sweet and limpid as a mountain spring; But—when it's bitter with base treachery— It dams itself against all utterance, And either mines the soul, or, breaking forth, Sweeps downward to destruction. Oh! 'tis true, Love is the lyric happiness of youth; And they, who sing its perfect melody, Do from the honest parish register Still take their tune. And so must you. For you Are now in the very period of youth When myriads of unborn beings knock loud and long Upon the willing portals of the heart For ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... ineradicably complex, varying endlessly in their instances, and changing as we deal with them. I am inclined to think that the only really profitable discussion of sexual matters is in terms of individuality, through the novel, the lyric, the play, autobiography or biography of the frankest sort. But such generalizations as I can ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... with a blue and fragrant mist proceeding from twenty pipe-bowls. Mr. Peyton sang a pretty song of his own composing. The company applauded. Sir Charles Carew, in a richly plaintive tenor voice, sang a lyric of Rochester's. Several of the gentlemen looked askance (the clergyman had left the room with the ladies), but on the Governor's crying out "Excellent!" they considered themselves over-squeamish, and ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... Thumbelina and the Toad, Thumbelina and the Swallow and Thumbelina as Queen of the Flowers—these at once suggest a cradle rhythm, a toad rhythm, the flight of birds, and a butterfly dance. Because the rhythm is a lyric form it must be remembered that the part of a story suited to a rhythm play is always a part characterized by a distinct emotional element. In the performance of rhythm plays the point is to secure the adjustment of ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... iterate Mr. Thompson's tremendousness, we cannot help it, he thrusts the word upon us. We do not think we forget any of the splendid things of an English anthology when we say that the 'Hound of Heaven' seems to us, on the whole, the most wonderful lyric (if we consider 'Sister Songs' as a sequence of lyrics) in the language. It fingers all the stops of the spirit, and we hear now a thrilling and dolorous note of doom and now the quiring of the spheres and now the very pipes of Pan, but under all the still sad ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... lyric poetry there are two extremes to be avoided. One is the musical tendency to obscure the sense, as in "sing-song" rendering; the other is the reactionary effort made by many would-be sensible people to make prose of the poetry by excluding all the music and rhythm ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... styled from the dignity and excellence of her song. She presided over epic and lyric poetry. To her the invention of all mournful verses, and, particularly, of tragedy, was ascribed; for which reason Horace invokes her when he laments the death of Quintilius Varus. She is usually represented of a sedate countenance, ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... [This noble lyric is perhaps the happiest of all those poems in which Schiller has blended the classical spirit with the more deep and tender philosophy which belongs to modern romance. The individuality of the heroes introduced is carefully preserved. The reader is every where ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... in his Purple Island as long ago as 1633. Three centuries have brought to the development of lyric passion no higher form than that of the sonnet cycle. The sonnet has been likened to an exquisite crystal goblet that holds one sublimely inspired thought so perfectly that not another drop can be added without overflow. Cast in the early Italian Renaissance ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... perceive that Mr. Swinburne has dedicated a rousing lyric and some vigorous sonnets to the memory of Gondremark; that name appears twice at least in Victor Hugo's trumpet-blasts of patriot enumeration; and I came latterly, when I supposed my task already ended, on a trace of the fallen politician ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... most ethereal of all sounds, the song of crickets, coming in full choir upon the wind, and fancied that, if moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that. Finally, he took a draught at the Shaker spring, and, as if it were the true Castalia, was forthwith moved to compose a lyric, a Farewell to his Harp, which he swore should be its closing strain, the last verse that an ungrateful world should have from him. This effusion, with two or three other little pieces, subsequently written, he took the first opportunity to send, by one of the ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... did not write poetry himself, but he read poetry with a good deal of effect, and he would sometimes take a hint from one of Gifted Hopkins's last productions to recite a passionate lyric of Byron or Moore, into which he would artfully throw so much meaning that Myrtle was almost as much puzzled, in her simplicity, to know what it meant, as she had been by the religious fervors of the ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in a different order in the 'Poems Lyric and Pastoral' (c. 1606) with one additional poem there numbered the ninth. This describes a rustic gathering of shepherds and nymphs, and contains several songs. The verse exhibits no small advance on the earlier work, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Ben! Say how or when Shall we, thy guests, Meet at those lyric feasts, Made at the "Sun," The "Dog," the "Triple Tun," Where we such clusters had As made us nobly wild, not mad? And yet each verse of thine Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine. My Ben! Or come again, Or send to us, Thy wit's great overplus. But ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... has his limitations and idiosyncrasies. First of all, he may be a writer of prose alone or of poetry alone. In prose he may confine himself to a single department, as fiction or history; or in poetry he may be chiefly lyric, didactic, or dramatic. Within these narrower spheres he may identify himself with a single tendency or group of writers. In history he may be philosophic or narrative; in fiction he may be a romanticist or a realist; in poetry he may be subjective or objective ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... of the novel's style, which is turgid because the lyric note intrudes, the most legitimate objection to the book is the sentimentalism which pervades it throughout, and palls on the reader before he reaches the conclusion. Like Richardson in his Pamela, but far to a greater extent than Richardson, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... those who stood waiting in the churchyard near the reminder of an open grave, the lyric tunefulness of this June morning refused to surrender unconditionally to sadness. Off between the fence and the rising slope of the nearest hill a ripple ran across a yellow field of buckwheat and from a fence-post ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... interesting her friends, or producing good humour and happiness in the family circle. She had formed the acquaintance of Neil Gow, the celebrated violinist, and composed, at his particular request, the words to his popular tune "Farewell to Whisky,"—the only lyric from her pen which has hitherto been published. In all the collections of Scottish song, it appears as anonymous. In the present work, it is printed from a copy in one of her ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... smiling valley under the blue canopy of heaven, and near the shimmering sea, form a picture of entrancing loveliness. It is the most peaceful spot on the Adriatic. It seems as if the breezes from sea and land wafted a lyric harmony over the valley, expanding the heart and filling the soul with visions of beauty and happiness. Pesaro is the birthplace of Rosini, and also of Terenzio Mamiani, the brilliant poet and statesman ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... most striking songs which the war has brought forth, we must class that grim Puritanical lyric, 'The Kansas John Brown,' which appeared originally in the Kansas Herald, and which is, as we are informed, extensively sung in the army. The words ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... poetic realm. Beyond it lies still another; for there are spiritual harmonies which the mind alone cannot compass, and which the senses alone cannot interpret. The hand-books know little of spiritual harmonies, and do not go beyond their academic classifications of lyric and epic, and their catalogues of pentameters, hexameters, or alexandrines. But the student can for himself push his observation beyond, and come to the poetry of the higher imagination, where he can be forgetful of the mere form and disdainful of ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... his "Playboy." The first was written straight from the heart. We feel Synge must have followed those people carrying the dead body, and touched to the quick by the caoine, passed the touch on to us, for in the lyric swell of the close we get the true emotion. Here alone is he in the line of greatness. This gripped his heart and he wrote out of himself. But in the other work of his it was otherwise. He has put his method on record: he listened through a chink in the floor, and wrote ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... have a peculiar respect for Lyric Poetry. We have not time for the Epic. If anything with us is good, it is superlatively good for being brief. Short sermons, short prayers, short hymns, and short metre are peculiarly interesting. We are, too, a miscellaneous people, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was discovered that she had a sweet lyric soprano, charmingly cultivated, her popularity winged another flight; San Francisco from its earliest days was musical, and she made a brilliant success as La Belle Helene in the amateur light opera company organized by Mrs. McLane. It was rarely that she spent an evening ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... for the feet of the dancers on the crowded cabaret floor. The feet follow the umpah umps. The thoughts of the dancers follow the clarinet. The thoughts of the boobilariat dance easily to the tangled lyric of the clarinet. The thoughts tie themselves into crazy knots. The music of the clarinet becomes like crazily uncoiling whips. The thoughts of the dancers shake themselves loose from words under the spur of the whips. They ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... lyric begins by wondering how and why the strangers have come: then come thoughts of the voyage and places they must have passed; the coast, where Phineus was haunted by the Harpies, the enchanted sea beyond the Symplegades, and the mysterious Isle of Leuce ("White") where Achilles ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... beech-wood lullaby that seemed never to end. The other bird voices were of the willow-wren, the wood-wren, the coal-tit, and the now somewhat tiresome chiffchaff; from the distance would come the prolonged rich strain of the blackbird, and occasionally the lyric of the chaffinch. The song of this bird gains greatly when heard from a tall tree in the woodland silence; it has then a resonance and wildness which it appears to lack in the garden and orchard. In the village I had been glad to find that the chaffinch was ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... Theatre, such a performance as Gorboduc must have been hailed as not only a novelty but a wonder. It was the first piece composed in English on the ancient tragic model, with a regular division into five acts, closed by lyric choruses. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... a slave under the lash, and Moldini and the Rivi system were her twin relentless drivers. She learned to rule herself with an iron hand. She discovered the full measure of her own deficiencies, and she determined to make herself a competent lyric soprano, perhaps something of a dramatic soprano. She dismissed from her mind all the "high" thoughts, all the dreams wherewith the little people, even the little people who achieve a certain success, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... author also gives the well known 'Korner's Prayer,' and 'The Vow.' From Mrs. T. Sedgwick we find a fine bold song, 'For a' that and a' that,' of course to the good old air of that name—a lyric of such decided merit in most respects that we regret to notice in it the venerable bull of 'polar stars,' quizzed long ago in another writer. Our contributor, Henry Perry Leland, has in this collection two songs, both strongly marked with the camp, neither setting forth the slightest ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... they might pursue the footsteps of Diomede and Menelaus, and conduct their own horses in the rapid career. [41] Ten, twenty, forty chariots were allowed to start at the same instant; a crown of leaves was the reward of the victor; and his fame, with that of his family and country, was chanted in lyric strains more durable than monuments of brass and marble. But a senator, or even a citizen, conscious of his dignity, would have blushed to expose his person, or his horses, in the circus of Rome. The games were exhibited at the expense of the republic, the magistrates, or the emperors: but ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... we have to notice is the collected edition of Motherwell's Poems, which has just issued from the Glasgow Press, under the auspices of Mr James M'Conechy. William Motherwell must always stand very high in the list of the minor Scottish poets, and one lyric of his, "Jeanie Morrison," is as pathetic as any in the language. But of him so much has already been said in former numbers of MAGA, that we may dispense with present criticism: and we shall merely draw the attention of the lovers of the supernatural to a more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... stress Of yearning notes that gush and stream, The lyric joy, the tenderness, And once ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... classical Lyric Poets, Know a thing or two in a scurvy Planet: Don't we, now? Eh? Brother Horatius Flaccus, Tip us your ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... effects, which were well known to the Greeks, they associated Music with Medicine as an attribute of Apollo.[178:1] Chiron the centaur, by the aid of melody, healed the sick, and appeased the anger of Achilles. By the same means the lyric poet Thales, who flourished in the seventh century B. C., acting by advice of an oracle, was able to subdue a ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... was the greatest poet of Poland during its existence as an independent kingdom. His Laments are his masterpiece, the choicest work of Polish lyric poetry before the time ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... Letter to Harley (1712); and Arthur Mainwaring, The British Academy (1712). Pierre Nicole, De Epigrammate. [In preparation as "An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in Which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams"] Andre Dacier, Essay on Lyric Poetry. [Published in year 13 as "The preface to ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... these! Who could tell under what new phases of uneasy life Europe was labouring even then, while we, two of her lonely children, rehearsed the tale of her late woes and glories? More worthily, perhaps, had the tongue of a lyric Demodocus recounted them; but, in the absence of the poet, the newspaper correspondent performed his part as well ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... the early nineteenth century any novelist who did not write tales of amatory interest was a fool: the time was not ripe to consider an extension of the theme nor a shifted point of view. For the earlier story-tellers, in the language of Browning's lyric, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Singha poems were coming out in the Bharati, Dr. Nishikanta Chatterjee was in Germany. He wrote a thesis on the lyric poetry of our country comparing it with that of Europe. Bhanu Singha was given a place of honour as one of the old poets such as no modern writer could have aspired to. This was the thesis on which Nishikanta Chatterjee ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... give them additional polish, and bring them to the highest possible perfection of which they were susceptible, even had I written them down with the utmost care. Maroncelli did the same, and, by degrees, retained by heart many thousand lyric verses, and epics of different kinds. It was thus, too, I composed the tragedy of Leoniero da Dertona, and ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... of Italian poetry, which now followed at the end of the fifteenth century, as well as the Latin poetry of the same period, is rich in proofs of the powerful effect of nature on the human mind. The first glance at the lyric poets of that time will suffice to convince us. Elaborate descriptions, it is true, of natural scenery are very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age, the novels and the lyric or epic poetry had something else to deal with. Bojardo and Ariosto paint nature vigorously, but as briefly as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... told that Cowper's poetry lacked the true note of passion, that there was an absence of the "lyric cry." I protest that I find the note of passion in the "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture," in his two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce not less marked than I find it in ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... when the contralto was prominent, or the tenor, or the baritone, or the basso, each of whom it was confidently asserted by competent Delisleville judges might have rendered him or herself and Delisleville immortal upon the lyric stage if social position had not placed the following of such a profession entirely out of the question. There had indeed been some slight trouble in one or two of the best families, occasioned by the musical fervour of youthful scions who were in danger of being ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... lyrics, and a lyric to be lyrical and heart appealing, must be inevitable. It must be the spontaneous expression of the heart of the author—an expression which had to come. It is the latent secret of the power of true hymns, for what must ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... national and lyric, have made their appearance in Germany. The one is by GEORGE SCHERER, and is called Deutsche Volkshelier, the other, by WOLFGAND MENZEL, is entitled Die Gesange der Volker (The Songs of the Nations). The former is exclusively German; the latter contains ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Notwithstanding the obstacles stated by Dryden himself, every line seems to flow in its natural and most simple order; and where the music required repetition of a line, or a word, the iteration seems to improve the sense and poetical effect. Neither is the piece deficient in the higher requisites of lyric poetry. When music is to be "married to immortal verse," the poet too commonly cares little with how indifferent a yoke-mate he provides her. But Dryden, probably less from a superior degree of care, than from that divine impulse which he could ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... his having been born in "a country harsh and frightful,"—"un pays aspre et affreux." Even the early troubadours and trouveres, poets and rhapsodists, loving to admire and enlarge and extol, are silent concerning the mountains. Despourrins, the poet of the Pyrenees, sang of love and lyric inspiration; but he rarely looked up to seek the higher inspiration of their hills and snows. It is inexplicable that the power of the sublime should have been withheld from the age of romance and poetry and nearness ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... degree of literary finish, compared with all that preceded them. But their happiest sentiments are frequently involved in such a cloud of metaphor, as to become nearly unintelligible; while they invoke the pagan deities with a shameless prodigality that would scandalize even a French lyric. This cheap display of school-boy erudition, however it may have appalled their own age, has been a principal cause of their comparative oblivion with posterity. How far superior is one touch of nature, as the "Finojosa" or "Querella de ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... to sing only of the lawful and good. The poets are again expelled or rather ironically invited to depart; and those who remain are required to submit their poems to the censorship of the magistrates. Youth are no longer compelled to commit to memory many thousand lyric and tragic Greek verses; yet, perhaps, a worse fate is in store for them. Plato has no belief in 'liberty of prophesying'; and having guarded against the dangers of lyric poetry, he remembers that there is an equal danger in other writings. He cannot ...
— Laws • Plato
... lines—some practical people!—but I cannot convey the pleasure I had in the very elusiveness and mystery of the sign, nor how I wished I might at the next turn come upon the poet himself. I decided that no one but a poet could have contented himself with a lyric in one word, unless it might have been a humourist, to whom sometimes a single small word is more blessed than all the verbal riches of Webster himself. For it is nothing short of genius that uses one word when twenty ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... is somewhat unpleasantly superhuman, and if, at times, he mixes sex and religion like a mystic of the Middle Ages or a Spaniard of the Counter Reformation, he rises to wonderful lyric heights when he touches his own experiences, or when he expresses the note of the people. His use of the supernatural, of the subconscious mood, gives rise to such poems as The Lore-Lay, the legend of which was actually invented by Brentano. Like all Romanticists, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... says that if his life were extended to twice its length, he should not have time to read the lyric poets. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... gratuitous pain of anticipation. Today he had an additional bulwark against such self-inflicted worries, for he had spent his last two hours in town at the vocal recital of a singer who a month before had stirred the critics into rhapsody over her gift of lyric song. Up till now he had had no opportunity of hearing her; and, with the panegyrics that had been showered on her in his mind, he had gone with the expectation of disappointment. But now, an hour afterwards, the wheels of the train sang her songs, and in the inward ear he could recapture, with the ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... to Spry. Bragg was once used for bold or brave, without any uncomplimentary suggestion. The New English Dictionary quotes (c. 1310) from a lyric poem— ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... another picture of that youth which we see—youth reduced to ineffectiveness by fatalism and by the egoism of the lyric nature which longs to gain dramatic freedom, but cannot achieve it. It is one of a series of portraits, wonderfully traced psychological studies of the Russian dreamers and incompatibles of last mid-century, of which the most moving figure is the hero of the earlier novel, Dimitri Rudin. If ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... the van and front of fate, Eager as champions to be In the divine knight-errantry Of youth, that travels sea and land Seeking adventures, or pursues, Through cities, and through solitudes Frequented by the lyric Muse, The phantom with the beckoning hand, That still allures and still eludes. O sweet illusions of the brain! O sudden thrills of fire and frost! The world is bright while ye remain, And dark and dead ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... presence in the neighbourhood was in no wise surprising, for it was one of his favourite haunts when he was not engaged farther up the Avenue, in his daily labour, which was, as he explained to the chance acquaintance met at the ball in Lyric Hall described in "Cinderella," "mixing cocktails at the Knickerbocker Club." Only a few doors distant from the Ninth Street house there is an apartment hotel known as the Berkeley, and it was to a Berkeley apartment ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... say that this gratifying and welcome strangeness, this lyric originality, is nearly all that M. De Banville has in common with the English poet whose two priceless volumes were published in the same year as "Les Cariatides?" The melody of Mr. Tennyson's lines, the cloudy ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... subdivided into sundry more special denominations; the most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satyric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others; some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with; some by the sort of verse they like best to write in; for, indeed, the greatest part of ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... listen to that?" cried Solling, amid the hearty laughter of the others. "Simsen's so lyric, he certainly must be drunk. I must have that arm ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... lyric soloist in you, Jack," commented Jim. "Jokes aside, it's fair enough for them to investigate us. If the members of the committee are straight, it ought to do a lot toward stopping this everlasting kicking of the farmers. We've nothing to fear ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... true folk-song—has often been exalted at the expense of other forms of verse. It is idle to attempt to arrange the various forms of poetry in an order of absolute values; it is enough that each has its own quality, and, therefore, its own value. The drama, the epic, the ballad, the lyric, each strikes its note in the complete expression of human emotion and experience. Each belongs to a particular stage of development, and each has the authority and the enduring charm which ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... volume is now out of print and I hold the copyright. The three poems following these originally appeared in my second volume, "The Falconer of God and Other Poems." For permission to reprint a few of the remaining poems I have to thank the editors of Reedy's Mirror, The Bang, The Lyric, The Madrigal, The Sun Dial (New York Evening Sun), Everybody's Magazine, The Century Magazine, and "Books and the Book World" (New York Sunday Sun). For the group, "The Long Absence" in the section entitled, "After," I owe ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... has been for years eminently lyric; the few attempts at the epic or dramatic having been laid aside, if not permanently, at least for a time. The age has been too busy in working out, with machinery and steam, its own great epic thought, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... song of Moses' and 'of the Lamb,' in token of the essential unity of the two dispensations, and especially of the harmony of both in their view of the divine judgments. Its ringing praises are modelled on the ancient lyric. It, too, triumphs in God's judgments, regards them as means of making known His name, as done not for destruction, but that His character may be known and honoured by men, to whom it is life and peace to know and love Him ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... impossible. To overcome that difficulty of accounting for time, which is effected on the modern stage by dropping a curtain, the judgment and great genius of the ancients supplied music and measured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of AEschylus, the capture of Troy is supposed to be announced by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and the transmission of the signal by successive beacons to ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... of Pushkin's lyric productions which we shall present to our countrymen, "done into English," as Jacob Tonson was wont to phrase it, "by an eminent hand," is a production considered by the poet's critics to possess the very highest degree ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... much about Habbakuk. He left two or three pages of passionate complaint against the iniquity of the land, but his "burden" lacks those outbursts of lyric poetry which are found in most of the other minor prophets. Donatello gives him the air of a thinker. He holds a long scroll to which he points with his right hand while looking downward, towards the door of the Cathedral. It is a strong head, as full of character as the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... subdue the world, Lyceum there, and painted Stoa next: There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power Of harmony in tones and numbers hit By voice or hand, and various-measur'd verse, Aeolian charms and Dorian Lyric Odes, And his who gave them breath, but higher sung, Blind Melesigenes thence Homer call'd, Whose Poem Phoebus challeng'd for his own. 260 Thence what the lofty grave Tragoedians taught In Chorus or Iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight receiv'd ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... stay in Milan, and breathed with rapture the incense burned in abundance before him. The Italian Journal in its account of the coronation reached lyric heights: ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... lyric repertoire you have, ARTHUR! Old English glee, Puritan psalmody. Music-hall song, all come equally well to you, it seems. But those ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... composition may be, yet am I willing to speak a word or two, of the nature of lyric poetry; to show that I have, at least, some idea of perfection in that kind of poem in which I am engaged; and that I do not think myself poet enough entirely to rely on inspiration for success ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... I have designedly omitted all special treatment of the lyric metres of Horace and Catullus, as well as of the measures of the comic poets. Our standard editions of these authors all give such thorough consideration to versification that repetition in a separate place ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... light The grey and sparkling crags. The breath of morn Still lingers in the valley; but the bee With restless passion hovers on the wing, Waiting the opening flower, of whose embrace The sun shall be the signal. Poised in air, The winged minstrel of the liquid dawn, The lark, pours forth his lyric, and responds To the fresh chorus of the sylvan doves, The stir of branches and the fall of streams, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... intellectual as Shelley's, rivals it in truth. Mackay's is the lark itself, Shelley's is himself listening, with unwearied ears and tightly-stretched imagination, to the lark. Who is surprised that Eric Mackay's lyric, 'The Waking of the Lark,' sent a thrill through the heart of America? This poem, which appeared in the New York Independent, is undoubtedly the lark-poem of the future. From the opening to the closing stanza ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... passions? Or the furious competitions in petty things with which the social life of Rome was daily intoxicated? Yet English Christianity is neither so dramatic and full of contrasts as Dante's Catholicism, nor so vibrating a lyric as Dostojevsky's Orthodoxy, but rather a quiet, smooth epic like ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... publish a work on Finnish national poetry, which brought to light the beauties of the Kalevala. It appeared in 1733, and bore the title: De Effectibus Naturalibus. The book contains a quaint collection of Finnish poems in lyric forms, chiefly incantations; but the author was entirely at a loss how to account for them, or how to appreciate them. He failed to see their intimate connection with the religious worship of the ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... Moon, show a faculty of comic treatment less graceful indeed, but scarcely inferior, and the lyrics called Odes (of which the Ballad of Agincourt is sometimes classed as one) exhibit a command of lyric metre hardly inferior to the command displayed in that masterpiece. In fact, if ever there was a poet who could write, and write, perhaps beautifully, certainly well, about any conceivable broomstick in almost any conceivable manner, that poet was Drayton. His historical poems, which ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... now at his best; about this time he wrote most of 'Fredman's Songs' and 'Actions concerning the Chapter of Bacchus order.' both rich in lyric gems; he was the favorite companion of the King, to whom his devotion was boundless, and he was happy in his chosen friends whose company inspired him. Nevertheless he was now, as ever, in need of money. Atterbom tells that "One day the King met him on the street, so poorly dressed that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... when he was left alone, set to work on a little lyric of joy, with which to welcome the return of his forgiven ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... half lines of lyric—especially when it came to the last verse—here, there, and everywhere he scored them through with a ruthless hand; and with a renewed sense of usefulness, and a conscience well at ease, he returned the much deleted copy to ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... food became the poetry of love, chivalry and glorious war. The lyric had a vivid personal interest. Tales of romantic daring and achievement were suggestions of possibilities in Harry's career. Her waking hours were mainly spent, book in hand, under the old apple-tree that daily grew ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... Thrice should her captive dames to Greece return, And their dead sons and slaughtered husbands mourn.' But hold, my Muse, forbear thy towering flight, Nor bring the secrets of the gods to light: In vain would thy presumptuous verse The immortal rhetoric rehearse; The mighty strains, in lyric numbers bound, Forget their majesty, and lose ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... care, from the adorably finished prologue—it is the disgrace of our Navy that we cannot produce a commissioned officer capable of writing one page of lyric prose—to the eloquent, the joyful, the impassioned end; and my first notion was that I had been cheated. In this sort of book-collecting you will see how entirely the bibliophile lies at the mercy of ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and lyric. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... trilled high in the heavens; his heart was lyric with joy; He plucked a posy of lilies; he sped like a love-sick boy. He stole up the velvety pathway—his cottage was sunsteeped and still; Vines honeysuckled the window; softly he peeped o'er the sill. The lilies dropped from his fingers; devils were choking his breath; Rigid with ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... in the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... conflict, we can only wonder at the gift of vivid imagination by which this recluse woman can delineate, by a few touches, the very crises of physical or mental struggle. And sometimes again we catch glimpses of a lyric strain, sustained perhaps but for a line or two at a time, and making the reader regret its sudden cessation. But the main quality of these poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor sometimes exasperating, seemingly ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... in the northern part of the country. This, the langue d'oil, became at length the French language. But the langue d'oc, a soft and musical tongue, survived long enough to become the vehicle of lyric strains, mostly on subjects of love and gallantry, still familiar in mention, and famous as the songs of the troubadours. The flourishing time of the troubadours was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Provencal is an alternative ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... as possible—Pope introduced into a note his wicked little brazen solution of his own wicked and brazen conundrum. France, such was the proposition, had worked a miracle upon English ground; as if with some magician's rod, she had called up spawn innumerable of authors, lyric, epic, dramatic, pastoral, each after his kind. But by whom had France moved in this creation as the chief demi-urgus? By whom, Mr. Pope? Name, name, Mr. Pope! 'Ay,' we must suppose the unhappy man to reply, 'that's the very question which I was going to answer, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe. This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play-writers be; and show them what religious, what ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... not long ago befell The tear-compelling incident I now propose to tell; So come, my sweet collector friends, and listen while I sing Unto your delectation this brief, pathetic thing— No lyric pitched in vaunting key, but just a requiem Of blowing twenty dollars in by ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... occasions, both in youth and maturer age, he seems to have indulged in conviviality. He liked choice wine, and in the society of friends scrupled not to enjoy the luxuries of his time. He was never married. The Odes of Horace want the higher inspirations of lyric verse. His amatory verses are exquisitely graceful, but they have no strong ardor, no deep tenderness, nor even much light and joyous gayety; but as works of refined art, of the most skillful felicities of language and of measure, of translucent expression, and of agreeable images embodied ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... him; until the very streets are his chums and certain buildings and corners his best friends. Then he is hopeless, and to live elsewhere would be death. The Bowery will be his romance, Broadway his lyric, and the Park his pastoral, the river and the glory of it all his epic, and he will look down pityingly on all ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the fire reading,—or trying to read. He was conscious of a great depression,—a 'fit of the blues,' which he attributed partly to the damp, lowering weather. Idly he turned over the leaves of a first edition of Tennyson's poems,—pausing here and there to glance at a favourite lyric or con over a well-remembered verse, when the echo of a silvery horn blown clear on the wintry silence startled him out of his semi-abstraction. Rising, he went instinctively to the window, though from that ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... the one by M. Persuis, the other by M. Rey, both leaders of the Emperor's bands. M. Lais, first singer to his Majesty, M. Kreutzer, and M. Baillot, first violinists of the same rank, had gathered the finest talent which the imperial chapel, the opera, and the grand lyric theaters possessed, either as instrumental players or male and female singers. Innumerable military bands, under the direction of M. Lesuem, executed heroic marches, one of which, ordered by the Emperor from M. Lesueur for the army of Boulogne, is still to-day, according to the judgment of connoisseurs, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... exquisite as that slight hand Could Raphael or Leonardo trace. Nor could the poets know in Fairyland The changing wonder of your lyric face. ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... habitues; the Dutch cafe, the haunt of Jacobites; Terre's, in the rue Neuve des Petits Champs, which Thackeray described in The Ballad of Bouillabaisse; Maire's, in the boulevard St.-Denis, which dates back beyond 1850; the Cafe Madrid, in the boulevard Montmartre, of which Carjat, the Spanish lyric poet, was an attraction; the Cafe de la Paix, in the boulevard des Capucines, the resort of Second Empire Imperialists and their spies; the Cafe Durand, in the place de la Madeleine, which started on a plane with the high-priced Riche, and ended its career early ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... those blithe notes, I slipped once more From lyric dawn through dreamland's open door, And there was God, Eternal Life that sings, Eternal joy, brooding all mortal things, A nest ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... I suppose, one of the supreme lyric expressions in the English language of the passion of love. Furthermore, Whitman's free unmetered swing, the glorious length of his stride, fell in with March's rhythmic idiom as though they had been ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... to the poet Gascoigne, and the elder of our fascinating trio, is conspicuous for an unswerving, whole-hearted attachment to nature and rural scenes. It is in the pastoral lyric where, with tenderest devotion, he pursues, untrammelled, a light and free-born fancy. His fertile, varied muse, laden with the passionate exaggerations of love-lorn swain, is yet charged with richest imagery and thought, full to overflowing with ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... artistic, because it is not brought within the rules of the prosodical system, and does not appeal to our sense of the consciously shaped and cultivated. It is essentially the prose form heightened and intensified by a deep, strong, lyric ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... of "Fidelio," or "Oberon," or "Freischuetz," they have not the organization for it, have not the chorus, the secondary singers, the artists who know and love the music; it will not pay, and so forth. Our Academies must justify their name and be domestic institutions, permanent lyric organizations, before we can call in singers to illustrate an opera, instead of worn-out operas to illustrate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... event of the evening! General Hardshell Jackson, Senor Lupe de Tamale, and the renowned lyric barytone, James Russell Lowell Mason, will combine in a grand farewell concert. Ascend the platform, Senor!" he cried to the Mexican lad, who stood, wide-eyed, in a corner. Then he gestured ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... of the gods to be found in other early epics probably did not differ essentially from that we find in the Iliad and Odyssey; but with the Homeric hymns and with some of the earlier lyric poets we find a change setting in. There seems to be a new interest in the adventures of the gods themselves, apart from their relation to mankind; romantic and even pathetic stories are told about them, implying almost a psychological appreciation of their personality—the ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... nummy-num!" sang the child Monona loudly, and was hushed by both parents in simultaneous exclamation which rivalled this lyric outburst. They were alone at table. Di, daughter of a wife early lost to Mr. Deacon, was not there. Di was hardly ever there. She was at that age. ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... eighty poems are lyric. In the usual sense. They are not much different from poetry that praises gardens. The content is the distress of love, death, universal longing. The impulse to formulate them in the "cynical" vein (like cabaret songs) may, for example, might have arisen from the wish to ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... to lyric poetry, because Sappho and Alcaeus were natives of Lesbos in Aeolia, and ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... quaint, and honey-sweet, just such a song as in that full dawn of poesy Englishmen struck from the lyre and thought naught of it. His lips did not move; had he spoken, at the sound of his own voice the charm had cracked, the little lyric had shrunk away before tragedy that was yet as fierce as it was profound, that had as yet few other notes than ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... of Mickiewicz as a whole two characteristics predominate: a great intensity of feeling, which sometimes sinks into sentimentality, and at others rises into lyric fervour; and a wonderful truth, not only to the general impressions of his experience, but to the actual concrete facts of it, even to such trifles as the names of persons and places. Thus The Forefathers, despite all its fantastic elements, reproduces many incidents in which the poet himself ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... of intense fire and heat, but an almost finished art—a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities with clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in perfect lyric language. Each poem renders a single mood, and ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... Mr. Henry James.' True it is, that the songs are excellent, as are all Cartwright's; for grace, simplicity, and sweetness, equal to any (save Shakspeare's) which the seventeenth century produced: but curiously enough, his lyric faculty seems to have exhausted itself in these half-dozen songs. His minor poems are utterly worthless, out Cowleying Cowley in frigid and fantastic conceits; and his varied addresses to the king and queen are as bombastic and stupid and artificial as anything which bedizened the reigns ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... kings with sceptral song for staff, [Ep. 3. Gladdest heart that God gave ever milk and wine of thought to quaff, Clearest eye that lightened ever to the broad lip's lordliest laugh, Praise be thine as theirs whose tragic brows the loftier leaf engirds For the live and lyric lightning of thy honey-hearted words, Soft like sunny dewy wings of clouds and bright as crying of birds; Full of all sweet rays and notes that make of earth and air and sea One great light and sound of laughter from one great God's heart, to be Sign and ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... heart still,—then is revealed the cherished secret over which it toiled, which was elaborated from the living alembic of the soul, through painful days and weary nights,—the sentiment which could not find expression to contemporaries,—the gift, the greatness, the lyric power, which was disguised and unknown so long. Who, that has communed with the work of such a spirit, has not felt in every line that thrilled his soul, in every wondrous lineament that stamped itself upon his ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... fortieth Olympiad, and the early inscriptions are rude and unskilfully executed; nor can we even assure ourselves whether Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, Kallinus, Tyrtaeus, Xanthus, and the other early elegiac and lyric poets, committed their compositions to writing, or at what time the practice of doing so became familiar. The first positive ground which authorizes us to presume the existence of a manuscript of Homer, is in the famous ordinance of Solon, with regard to the rhapsodies ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... Was he some 'Frenchman' imported from sunny Champagne, where Thibaut, the mawkish singer was making verses which his people loved to listen to? Did he teach the young novices French as well as writing? Did he touch the lute himself on Feast-days, and charm them with some new lyric of Gasse Brusle, or delight them with one of Rutebeuf's merry ditties? France was all alive with song at this time, and princes were rivals now for poetic fame. It may be that this 'foreigner' brought in a taste for light ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets, whose works have come down to us, were not mere imitators of foreign models; and it is therefore the only sort of composition in which they have never been rivalled. It was not, like their tragedy, their comedy, their epic and lyric poetry, a hothouse plant which, in return for assiduous and skilful culture, gave only scanty and sickly fruits. It was hardy and full of sap; and in all the various juices which it yielded might be distinguished the flavor of the Ausonian soil. ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... person of Director Holtei, thanks to a magnanimous oversight on the part of Franz Listz. The preference of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. for church scenes contributed to secure him eventually his important position at the greatest lyric theatre in Germany, the Royal Opera of Berlin. For he was prompted far less by his devotion to the dramatic muse than by his desire to secure a good position in some important German city, when, as already hinted, through Liszt's recommendation he was ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... taken from the little-read play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, may serve to illustrate the perfection of the Shakespearean lyric. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... "there is, to my mind, no English diction for your purposes equal to Milton's in his minor poems. Of course any man would be an intensified ass who should attempt to reach the diction of the 'Paradise Lost', or aspire to the tremendous style of Shakespeare. You must not confound things, though. A Lyric diction is one thing—a Dramatic diction is another, requiring the utmost force and conciseness of expression,—and Epic diction is still another; I conceive it to be something between the Lyric and Dramatic, with all the luxuriance of the former, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... can haf all your wishes," asserted the Professor, still in the German lyric strain over his triumph. "It iss the box of enchantments. You haf but to will the change you would haf taig place—it iss done. The substance of ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... could never explain satisfactorily what the "pea-vine" was. His "Ring around and shake a leg, ma lady," was a triumph in the lyric line. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... was sent to various schools, great and small; and was very early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially for my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen I wrote Greek with ease; and at fifteen my command of that language was so great that I not only composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but could converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment—an accomplishment which I have not since met with in any scholar of my times, and which in my case was owing to the practice of daily reading off the newspapers ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... here for a free-thinker, and, what is still worse in my esteem, for a man whose heart does not feel the encomiums he gives to virtue and honour in his poems. I like his odes mightily; they are much superior to the lyric productions of our English poets, few of whom have made any figure in that kind of poetry. I don't find that learned men abound here; there is, indeed, a prodigious number of alchymists (sic) at Vienna; the philosopher's stone is the great object of zeal and science; and those who ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... whose poems though small in number are rich in vivid imagery and beautiful description, was born in Chichester, England, December 25, 1720, and died in 1756. His odes are acknowledged to be the best of their kind in the language. His finest lyric is his Ode on the Passions, which has been called "a magnificent gallery ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... scheme of the poem, partly for the views expressed on questions of the day, Maud provoked more hostile criticism than anything which he wrote; yet it seems to have been the poet's favourite work. The story of its composition is curious. It was suggested by a short lyric which Tennyson had printed privately in 1837 beginning with the words 'Oh, that 'twere possible after long grief'. His friend, Sir John Simeon, urged him to write a poem which would lead up to and explain it; and the poet, adopting the idea, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... the lyric. It told its own simple story and could at once have been dismissed but for its divined and puzzling relationship to the popular society favourite of Nome, Alaska. What could ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... assumption of tyrannic fire which must have been greatly admired by the theatre-goers of his time. He could not sing, to be sure, when he graced the "Beggars' Opera," but the audiences took the will for the deed, applauded his gaiety of action, and quickly pardoned his lyric short-comings. We are equally lenient nowadays to many a comic-opera comedian, so called. Chetwood tells us that Walker was the supposed author of two pieces, "The Quakers' Opera," and a tragedy styled "The Fate of Villainy." The latter, it appears, "he brought to Ireland ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... ago in a family, for one of the best and bravest whom this country has ever known. And more than one has brought back from the war a sorrowful narrative of a long farewell inclosed in as brief and touching words as those of the following lyric:— ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... protest and the remarks thereon by members of the military committee. The officers gathered in the club-room and drank long life to Leonard and confusion to Devers, and then little Sanders tuned up his guitar and sang. He was just back from leave, and a popular lyric of the day was one they called "The Accent On," for the last line of every verse was "with the accent on" some syllable of the last word of the previous line. There was nothing especially poetic or refined about ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... tense, and her future, if she could have it after her taste, would be the past made present. She has many aspirations, and few of them are realized, but all of them are sketched in faint hues upon the mist of her mediaeval atmosphere. She is, in the language of a lyric from ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... saw the Lyric Dance Arcade and Indian Palace of Asiatic Mystery. And I found myself close to the platform, listening to the cry of a ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... The antiseptic smell, the ominous hum from the operating-rooms, the 1921 "Literary Digests," and the silent, sullen, group of waiting patients, each trying to look unconcerned and cordially disliking everyone else in the room,—all these have been sung by poets of far greater lyric powers than mine. (Not that I really think that they are greater than mine, but that's the customary form of excuse for not writing something you haven't got time or space to do. As a matter of fact, I think I could do it much better ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... a sense in which the stage alone can give the full significance to a dramatic poem, just as a lyric finds its full interpretation in music; but we prefer that a song of Goethe or Shelley should wait for its music, and in the meantime suggest its own aerial accompaniment, rather than be vulgarized in the setting. And even when set for the ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... himself. "It might work—it might add interest—" Mr. Heatherbloom waited patiently. "Would you have any objections," earnestly, "to my making a little addenda to the sign on the chariot of cadence? What's the Matter with Mother? 'The touching lyric, as interpreted by Horatio Heatherbloom, the ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... crowd gathered. He asked for a doctor. A dozen students ran in a dozen different directions. The tired horse stamped its feet impatiently, and once it whinnied. The coachman lighted his pipe and watched his dying fare. Some wag sang a drunken lyric, and ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... into lyric shape, try as I will," said Septimus mournfully. "You see, one has to work in a lot of sentimental, sugary compliment with a catchy rhyme, and a certain amount of personal biography or prophecy. They've all of them got to have a long string of past successes recorded about ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... aim of the book to prefer the more beautiful to the better attested reading. I have often excised weak or superfluous stanzas when sure that excision would improve; and have not hesitated to extract a few stanzas from a long poem when persuaded that they could stand alone as a lyric. The apology for such experiments can only lie in their success: but the risk is one which, in my judgement, the anthologist ought to take. A few small corrections have been made, but only ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... came a lyric, having for its theme the pangs of despised love and the faithlessness of ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... reverent delight, for he thought he was praying. But he was only blessed. So easily can God make a man happy! The past had dropped from him like a wild but weary and sordid dream. He was reborn, a new child, in a new bright world, with a glowing summer to revel in. One of God's lyric prophets, the larks, was within earshot, pouring down a vocal summer of jubilant melody. The lark thought nobody was listening but his wife; but God heard in heaven, and the young prodigal heard on the earth. He would be a good child ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... immolated to the science of music. The eunuchs reached the height of their renown in music, as well as what might be termed their golden era, with the establishment of the Italian opera, in the seventeenth century. At this period all the stages of Italy were the scenes of the lyric triumphs of this otherwise unfortunate class, some of whom accumulated vast fortunes. In the following century, as has been seen, Clement XVI abolished the practice as far as the church was concerned, and in the present ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... matter of some seventy-nine verses. Seventy-eight were quite unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cowpunchers monstrously. They, knowing him to be a singular man, forebore ever to press him, and awaited his own humor, lest he should weary of the lyric; and when after a day of silence apparently saturnine, he would lift his ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... was the natural course in the infancy of the study. All science begins with classification; and all classification with the external and the obvious. The Greek critics could take no step forward until they had classified all poems as either lyric, epic, or dramatic. And how necessary that division was may be seen from the length at which Plato discusses the nature of the distinction in the second book of the Republic. Even Aristotle, in this ...
— English literary criticism • Various |
