"Lyrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the same style. Didactic poetry includes historical works such as the poem of the Albigeois crusade, ethical or moralising ensenhamens and religious poetry. But the dominating element in Provencal literature is lyrical, and during the short classical age of this literature lyric poetry was supreme. Nearly five hundred different troubadours are known to us at least by name and almost a thousand different stanza forms have been enumerated. While examples ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... States, just prior to the breaking out of the war, and presenting a startling and truthful picture of the real condition of that region. No pains will be spared to render the literary attractions of the CONTINENTAL both brilliant and substantial. The lyrical or descriptive talents of the most eminent literati have been promised to its pages; and nothing will be admitted which will not be distinguished by marked energy, originality, and solid strength. Avoiding every ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... Henry Hase succeeded Abraham Newland, as cashier at the Bank of England. Newland is buried in St. Saviour's Church, Southwark. The lyrical celebrity of Abraham Newland will not be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... connected with eastern India as the Vallabhis are with the west. Bengal is perhaps the native land of the worship of Krishna as the god of love. It was there that Jayadeva flourished in the last days of the Sena dynasty and the lyrical poet Chandidas at the end of the fourteenth century. About the same time the still greater poet Vidyapati was singing in Durbhanga. For these writers, as for Caitanya, religion is the bond of love which unites the soul and God, as typified by the passion[633] that ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... more thing to say in closing this chapter. Browning, unlike Tennyson, did not invent his landscapes. He drew directly from nature. The landscapes in Pauline and Sordello, and in the lyrical poems are plainly recollections of what he has seen and noted in his memory, from the sweep of the mountainous or oceanic horizon to the lichen on the rock and the painted shell on the seashore. Even the imaginative landscape of Childe Roland is a memory, not an ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Rora, the Search after Proserpine, and other Poems, Meditative and Lyrical. Fcp. 8vo. ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... of the ballads in the first section are Scottish can hardly cause surprise. Superstition lurks amongst the mountains and in the corners of the earth. And, with one remarkable exception, all the best lyrical work in these ballads of the supernatural is to be found in the Scots. Thomas Rymer, Tam Lin, The Wife of Usher's Well, Clerk Sanders, and The Daemon Lover, are perhaps the most notable examples amongst the ballads proper, and Fair Helen of Kirconnell, The Twa Corbies, and Bonnie ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Scipio,[189] and all other such noble and famous women, these one may array oneself in without money and without price, and so adorned lead a happy and famous life. For if Sappho plumed herself so much on the beauty of her lyrical poetry as to write to a certain rich woman, "You shall lie down in your tomb, nor shall there be any remembrance of you, for you have no part in the roses of Pieria," how shall you not have a greater right to plume yourself on having ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... ever be made popular here, it must be in the manner generally adopted by Mr. Mac-Carthy in the specimens, six in number, which are here translated, preserving, namely, the metrical form, which is one of the characteristics of the old Spanish drama. This medium, through which it partakes of the lyrical character, is no accident of style, but an essential property of that remarkable creation of a poetic age—remarkable, because while the drama so adorned was entirely the offspring of popular impulse, in opposition ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... speak, and a poetical conception of character to render; and her acting in it is more beautiful and more poetical than it was possible for it to be in "Magda," or in "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray." But the play is not a good play; at its best it is lyrical rather than dramatic, and at its worst it is horrible with a vulgar material horror. The end of "Titus Andronicus" is not so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda." D'Annunzio has put as a motto on his title-page the ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... exaggerations with which the performances teemed. Those composers, moreover, who aimed at achieving success by adopting the style which was then in vogue, could not help, either, incurring my sarcastic criticism. The last shred of esteem which I still tried to retain for the 'first lyrical theatre in the world' was at last rudely destroyed when I saw how such an empty, altogether un-French work as Donizetti's Favorita could secure so long and important ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... of lyrical passages describing scenes or persons presented to view, or containing reflections suggested by the incidents that occur. They usually consist of four-line stanzas. The prose of the dialogue in the plays is often very commonplace, serving only as an introduction ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... his preface, was very eulogistic. "We have the pleasure," he said, "of seeing united in one collection the sweet Romanic tongue which the South of France has adopted, like the privileged children of her lovely sky and voluptuous climate; and her lyrical songs, whose masculine vigour and energetic sentiments have more than once excited patriotic transports and awakened popular enthusiasm. For Jasmin is above all a poet of the people. He is not ashamed of his origin. He was born in the midst of them, and though a poet, still belongs to them. ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... on the lyrical lips is sadder than laughter of ghosts Chained back in the pits of ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... Lyrical emotion makes the prophet's language obscure by reason of its swift transitions from one mood of feeling to another. But the main drift here is discernible. God is guarding Israel, His vineyard, and before Him its ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... would of a Frenchman or a Moldavian Jew, and we do not carry him before us in the smoke of battle. But the sea is our approach and bulwark; it has been the scene of our greatest triumphs and dangers; and we are accustomed in lyrical strains to claim it as our own. The prostrating experiences of foreigners between Calais and Dover have always an agreeable side to English prepossessions. A man from Bedfordshire, who does not know one end of the ship from the ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... winding to the south with a movement almost lyrical; but no man seemed to be doing anything that could be called fighting. I decided that nothing more was to be seen on the south, and started to cross northward between the positions. My path was in what ought ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... France, with a view to a dramatic effort of his own. If he had attempted it in pure English, we may venture to predict that he would have failed. But had he allowed himself that free use of the Scottish dialect of which he was the supreme master, especially if he had shaped the subject into a lyrical drama, no one can say what he might not have achieved. Many of his smaller poems show that he possessed the genuine dramatic vein. The Jolly Beggars, unpleasant as from its grossness it is, shows the presence of this vein in a very high degree, seeing that from materials so unpromising ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... sounding-board. Indeed, his song is very strong for so small a bird, and unites in a remarkable degree brilliancy and plaintiveness. I think of a tremulous vibrating tongue of silver. You may know it is the song of a wren, from its gushing lyrical character; but you must needs look sharp to see the little minstrel, especially while in the act of singing. He is nearly the color of the ground and the leaves; he never ascends the tall trees, but keeps low, flitting ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... methought poor Clive Newcome hung down his head, and blushed as red as a peony. I felt for the young lad, and thought what my own sensations would have been if, in that place, my own uncle, Major Pendennis, had suddenly proposed to exert his lyrical powers. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... worked it out badly, dealing irreverently with Plato as well as Homer and Pindar, and exalting among the moderns not only Moliere and Corneille, but also Chapelain, Scuderi, and Quinault, whom he called the greatest lyrical and dramatic poet that France ever had. The battle had begun with a debate in the Academy: Racine having ironically complimented Perrault on the ingenuity with which he had elevated little men above the ancients in his poem (published 1687), le Siecle ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... just begun to rise with irresistible impulsion. Lepsius's birth was in 1813, and that of the great Flemish novelist, Henri Conscience, in 1812: about the same period were the births of Freiligrath, Gutzkow, and Auerbach, respectively one of the most lyrical poets, the most potent dramatist, the most charming romancer of Germany: and, also, in France, of Theophile Gautier and Alfred de Musset. Among representatives of the other arts—with two of which Browning must ever be closely associated—Mendelssohn and Chopin were born in 1809, and Schumann, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... of all academic opinion, those who understand Shakespeare best tease themselves least over his dramatic lapses. For let it be whispered at once, without further scruple. As far as the art of the drama is concerned, Shakespeare is shameless. The poetic instinct—one might call it "epical" or "lyrical," for it is both these—is far more dominant in our "greatest dramatist" than any dramatic conscience. That is precisely why those among us who love "poetry," but find "drama," especially "drama since ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... delightful prospect for the sport's sake: she felt herself beforehand moving about like a wood-nymph under the beeches (in appreciative company), and the imagined scene lent a charm to further advances on the part of Grandcourt—not an impassioned lyrical Daphnis for the wood-nymph, certainly: but so much the better. To-day Gwendolen foresaw him making slow conversational approaches to a declaration, and foresaw herself awaiting and encouraging it according to the rational conclusion which she had ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Homer," "Last Words on Translating Homer," "Celtic Poetry," "Introduction to the Poetry of Wordsworth," and the "Introduction to Humphry Ward's English Poets"; Emerson's Essays: "The Poet" and "Poetry and Imagination"; Wordsworth's Introduction to the "Lyrical Ballads"; Poe's striking little essays on the art of poetry; Aristotle's "Rhetoric"; Macaulay's "Essay on Milton"; Lowell's "Essay on Dryden"; and many a passage of illuminative comment from Milton, from Pope, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... on January 14, 1832, Mendelssohn says of the "so-called romantic school" that it has infected all the Parisians, and that on the stage they think of nothing but the plague, the gallows, the devil, childbeds, and the like. Nor were the romances less extravagant than the dramas. The lyrical poetry, too, had its defects and blemishes. But if it had laid itself open to the blame of being "very unequal and very mixed," it also called for the praise of being "rich, richer than any lyrical poetry France had known up to that time." And if the romanticists, as one of them, Sainte-Beuve, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... account of the "Minnegrotte" in the twenty-seventh song, with the many other things of the kind in French, English, and German of the time. Also he has constant little bursts, little spurts, of half-lyrical cry, which lighten ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... was a salve for all external ills that flesh is heir to. It spared humanity its heritage of epidermatous suffering. It could not fail. He reeled off the string of hideous diseases with a lyrical lilt. It was his own discovery. An obscure chemist's assistant in Bury St. Edmunds, he had, by dint of experiments, ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... tragedy had been essentially lyrical. It arose from the dithyrambic chorus that was sung at the festivals of Dionysus. Thespis had introduced the first actor, who, in the pauses of the choral song, related in monologue the adventures of the god or engaged in dialogue with the leader of the chorus. To Aeschylus is due the invention ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... which marks the productions of each. In modern literature we find, at one and the same time, different styles of prose and poetry cultivated by one and the same author. A Goethe writes tragedy, comedy, satire, lyrical poetry, and scientific prose; but we find nothing like this in primitive literature. The individual is there much less prominent, and the poet's character disappears in the general character of the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... at the Farm of Dikanka (1831) was more successful. It was a series of gay and colourful pictures of Ukraine, the land he knew and loved, and if he is occasionally a little over romantic here and there, he also achieves some beautifully lyrical passages. Then came another even finer series called Mirgorod, which won the admiration of Pushkin. Next he planned a "History of Little Russia" and a "History of the Middle Ages," this last work to be in eight or nine volumes. The result of all this study was a beautiful and short ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... those of my father," she said. "He is very catholic in his tastes; my father's were more poems of reflection—they were full of the sentiment of his day. He was much influenced by Mathew Arnold and his school. My brother's are much more lyrical. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... passion, had sought to reproduce in their noblest work—the Gothic cathedral and church, its dim interior lit by many-coloured stained glass. The only choristers in these natural fanes were the robins and the small lyrical wren; but on passing through the rustic village of Wolverton I stopped for a couple of minutes to listen to the lively strains of a cirl-bunting ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... hundred feet beneath the profane public," and chides them for "their incurable lack of artistic sense," who speaks of "the frightful appetite for the hideous which disgraces the Church of our day," who himself in many ways, in a hundred passages of sublime thought, of tender piety, of lyrical poesy, has proved beyond all cavil his delicacy of sentiment, his exquisite niceness in matters of taste, his reverence for what is chaste and beautiful, should at times be so deplorably unfaithful to his better instincts, so forgetful of the close and inseparable alliance between ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... insignificant words; a foreigner especially might find it all dry bones, but his judgement would be wrong. Charles of Orleans has a note quite new and one that after him never failed, but grew in volume and in majesty until it filled the great chorus of the Pleiade—the Lyrical note of direct personal expression. Perhaps the wars produced it in him; the lilt of the marching ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... beauty in the works of the Schlegels, their fame, upon the whole, rests on a different basis. The lovely dreamy mind of Novalis was cut off in the full promise of its spring; it only just awoke from the blissful visions of its childhood, to breathe forth a few lyrical murmurs about the mysteries it had been brooding over, and then fell asleep again. Upon Tieck, therefore, the character of German poetry in the age following those of Goethe and Schiller will mainly depend: and never did Norwegian or Icelandic spring burst forth more suddenly than the ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... In his lyrical pieces, if we seek in vain for the variety and music of Dryden, the tender and moral sublime of Gray, or the enthusiasm of Collins, yet we recognize an attention ever awake to the appearances of nature, and a mind stored ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... works, German biography and history as well as German poetry. From the list of translations reprinted here, however, have been excluded all translations of dramas except certain selections, such as songs or short scenes approaching the lyrical mood. In most of the portions of dramas reproduced the passages are too long for republication or the interest is wholly dramatic and not lyric. The subject of the present study is, then, specifically—the ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... does him offence."—His versification is no less powerful, sweet, and varied. It has every occasional excellence, of sullen intricacy, crabbed and perplexed, or of the smoothest and loftiest expansion—from the ease and familiarity of measured conversation to the lyrical sounds ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... Fletcher are the most lyrical of our dramatists. I think their comedies the best part of their works, although there are scenes of very deep tragic interest in some of their plays. I particularly recommend Monsieur Thomas for ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... who could write such lyrics as Shakespeare wrote, could be as keen as Shakespeare was on business transactions in a little town in Warwickshire. The explanation is simple enough; it is that Shakespeare had a real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so got rid of the impulse and went about his business. Being an artist did not prevent him from being an ordinary man, any more than being a sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner prevented him from being an ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of the merely domestic and historical, and lifts it at once into the ideal and devotional line of art. Such a group cannot well be styled a Sacra Famiglia; it is a Sacra Conversazione treated in the pastoral and lyrical rather ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... is more ancient than the lyrical, and yet none shows so little sign of having outlived the requirements of human passion. The world may grow tired of epics and of tragedies, but each generation, as it sees the hawthorns blossom and the ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... in FitzGerald's days, 'the lyric stage', might have conveyed a hint of the truth to a man who cared for the forms of literature as well as its essence. For, in its highest development, opera is most nearly akin to lyrical utterances in poetry, and the most important musical revolution of the present century has been in the direction of increasing, not diminishing, the lyrical quality of operatic work. The Elizabethan writers—not only the dramatists, but the authors of romances—interspersed ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... my possession. FitzGerald fastened it in a copy of the 'Poems chiefly Lyrical' (1830) which he gave me bound up with the 'Poems' of 1833. He wrote underneath, 'Done in a Steamboat from Gravesend to ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... these songs, so natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed in miscellanies, such as the Passionate Pilgrim, England's Helicon, and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. Some were anonymous, or were by poets of whom little more is known than their names. Others were by ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... well enough, for, if her terpsichorean abilities still left something to be desired, the Warsaw critics, ever susceptible to feminine charms, went into positive raptures about her personal attractions. One of them, indeed, became almost lyrical on the subject: ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... unusual key of B major; and here we find a marked advance in conception and execution. It opens with an Allegro, the total effect of which, however, is not satisfactory; the principal theme has dramatic power, and what follows has lyrical charm, but the development section is disappointing. The Adagio seems like an arrangement of a lovely symphonic movement; the orchestra, and not the pianoforte, must have been in the composer's mind when he ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... window-shutters to reveal the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East; Mr. Barrie had demonstrated what could be done in a little space through the panes of his Window in Thrums. The National Observer was at the climax of its career of heroic insistence upon lyrical brevity and a vivid finish, and Mr. Frank Harris was not only printing good short stories by other people, but writing still better ones himself in the dignified pages of the Fortnightly Review. Longman's Magazine, too, represented a clientele of appreciative short-story ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... to a secular melody composed by the wife of Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan. It is joined to the tune of "Brighton" in the Unitarian books, and William Monk's "Matthias" voices the words for the Plymouth Hymnal. The verses have the true lyrical glow, and make a real song of praise as well a composition of more than ordinary ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... might adjudge, upon "any person in the Navy who shall maliciously set on fire, or otherwise destroy, any government property not then in the possession of an enemy, pirate, or rebel." The gem of oratory hereupon erected was paraphrased as follows by the culprit himself, aided and abetted in his lyrical flight by his room-mate, John S. Barnes, who, after graduating left the service, returned for the War of Secession, and subsequently resigned finally. To this survivor of the two collaborators I owe the particulars of the affair. How many more "traitors" there were I know not. Those who recall ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... latter lies in particular passages, such as the description of the guilty happiness of Isabella and Mortimer, quoted in Mr. Arthur Bullen's admirable selection. This is to say that Drayton's genius was naturally not so much epical as lyrical and descriptive. In his own proper business as a narrative poet he fails as compared with Daniel, but he enriches history with all the ornaments of poetry; and it was his especial good fortune to ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... the first place, this censure attaches not to the poetic but to the histrionic art; for gesticulation may be equally overdone in epic recitation, as by Sosi-stratus, or in lyrical competition, as by Mnasitheus the Opuntian. Next, all action is not to be condemned any more than all dancing—but only that of bad performers. Such was the fault found in Callippides, as also in others of our own day, who are censured for representing degraded women. Again, Tragedy ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... grandeur of the Louvre, every fine feature of that prodigious face, struck his companion as a sign of insularity; the appreciation of such things having become with Sherringham an unconscious habit, a contented assimilation. If poor Nick, for the hour, was demonstrative and lyrical, it was because he had no other way of sounding the note of farewell to the independent life of which the term seemed now definitely in sight—the sense so pressed upon him that these were the last moments of his freedom. He would waste time till half-past seven, because half-past ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... heavy, practical, matter-of-fact sort of way, and that was just the sort of way which at the time happened to be most useful to England. Let it be said, too, in justice to Walpole, that the most poetic and lyrical nature would have found little subject for enthusiasm in the England of Walpole's earlier political career. It was not exactly the age for a Philip Sidney or for a Milton. England's home and foreign policy had for ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... after—the first editions of nineteenth-century poets. For months past David had been hoarding up a few in a corner of his little lodging, and on his opening day they decoyed him in at least five inquiring souls, all of whom stayed to talk a bit. There was a 'Queen Mab;' and a 'Lyrical Ballads;' an 'Endymion;' a few Landors thrown in, and a 'Bride of Abydos'—this last not of much account, for its author had the indiscretion, from the collector's point of view, to be famous from the beginning, and so to flood ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... him with formal precision as Grandfather Garland, never as "Grandad" or "Granpap" as we did in alluding to Hugh McClintock, and his long prayers (pieces of elaborate oratory) wearied us, while those of Grandad, which had the extravagance, the lyrical abandon of poetry, profoundly pleased us. Grandfather's church was a small white building in the edge of the village, Grandad's place of worship was a vision, a cloud-built temple, a ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... most prophetic fervor in regard to the progress of the democratic spirit. All his greatest poems are informed with this fervor, but it is especially exhibited in the 'Prometheus Unbound', which is, in the words of Todhunter, "to all other lyrical poems what the ninth symphony is to all other symphonies; and more than this, for Shelley has here outsoared himself more unquestionably than Beethoven in his last great orchestral work. . . . The Titan Prometheus is the incarnation of the genius ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... of Spring in nature is the counterpart of the play of Youth in our lives. It is simply from the lyrical drama of the World Poet that I have ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... for the sole possession of the throne, and of the brothers, in the Zwillingen van Klinger, and in Julius von Tarent, impelled to fratricide by rivalry in love. In the introduction of the choruses also, though they possess much lyrical sublimity and many beauties, the spirit of the ancients has been totally mistaken; as each of the hostile brothers has a chorus attached to his, the one contending against the other, they both cease to be a true chorus; that is, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... a cottage and with you!" he exclaimed. "But, forgive me, I am becoming lyrical." He turned, summoned the waiter, paid for the water, paid for the service and took ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... taught, but one who had come to take up his share of the inheritance, to sit down among the great, as in his natural place. He was not perhaps altogether unmoved by their insane advices to him, one of the greatest of lyrical poets, a singer above all—to write a tragedy, to give up the language he knew and write his poetry in the high English which, alas! he uses in his letters. Not unmoved, and seriously inclining to a more lofty measure, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Grieg's songs and invited her to the piano. He knew instantly that the Norwegian's delicate fancy and lyrical feeling had found in her no inadequate medium of expression. The peculiar emotional quality of the song "I Love Thee" seemed to fill the room as she played. When she swung round on the stool at its conclusion it was to meet a shining-eyed, ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... times destroyed and built up again, till, in 1183, it was upheaved by an earthquake and swallowed by a flood. The ruins of Vineta are believed to be visible between the coast of Pomerania and the island of Ruegen. This tradition has suggested one of Wilhelm Mueller's—my father's—lyrical songs, published in his "Stones and Shells from the Island of Ruegen," 1825, of which I am able to give a translation ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... hero of early Italian Opera, or Lyrical Drama. The Orfeo of Angelo Politiano was produced in 1475. The Orfeo of Monteverde was performed at ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... without the compass of nature and possibility. Tasso, whose design was regular, and who observed the roles of unity in time and place more closely than Virgil, yet was not so happy in his action: he confesses himself to have been too lyrical—that is, to have written beneath the dignity of heroic verse—in his episodes of Sophronia, Erminia, and Armida. His story is not so pleasing as Ariosto's; he is too flatulent sometimes, and sometimes too dry; many times unequal, and almost always ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... Collected Works I had received at my confirmation, and read again and again with such enthusiasm that I almost wore the pages out, and did not skip a line, even of the philosophical parts, which I did not understand at all. But Hertz's Lyrical Poems, which I read in a borrowed copy, gave me as much pleasure as Poul Moeller's Verses had done. And for a few years, grace and charm, and the perfect control of language and poetic form, were in my estimation ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Romantische Schule" (both written, in the first instance, in French), the book on Borne, "Atta Troll," a romantic poem, "Deutschland," an exquisitely humorous poem, describing his last visit to Germany, and containing some grand passages of serious writing; and the "Neue Gedichte," a collection of lyrical poems. Among the most interesting of his prose works are the second volume of the "Salon," which contains a survey of religion and philosophy in Germany, and the "Romantische Schule," a delightful introduction to that phase ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... probable, that "Atta Troll" will appeal to a majority of readers, not through its satire, but through its wonderful lyrical and romantic qualities—our age being inclined to look askance at satire, at least at true satire, at satire that, as the current phrase goes, "means business." Weak satire, aimless satire, humour, caricature—that is to say satire which uses blank cartridges—this age of ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... singing, which is peculiarly his own. He carries in memory all the poems in his books, and recites the program made out for him; the wonderful effect of sound produced by his lines, their relation to the idea which the author seeks to convey, and their marvelous lyrical quality are quite beyond the ordinary, and suggest new possibilities and new meanings in poetry. It is his main object to give his already established friends a deeper sense of the musical intention ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... poetry was exclusively lyrical. The average standard of versifying was higher, perhaps, than it has ever been before or since. Every man of education seems to have been able to turn a sonnet or ode. Men of religion, like St. Francis or Brother Jacopone of Todi; statesmen, like Frederick II. and ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... had well-nigh said in the world; but as soon as Mr. Nutt had read them, he entreated me to look for more. I did as I was told; old dusty sheaves were dragged to light; the work of selection and correction was begun; I burned much; I found that, after all, the lyrical instinct had slept—not died; I ventured (in brief) 'A Book of Verses.' It was received with so much interest that I took heart once more, and wrote the numbers presently reprinted from 'The National Observer' in the ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... Now lyrical sizzlers and scorchers Fail somehow to set me ablaze; No longer are exquisite tortures Provoked by these passionate lays. I've tinned—and I can't say I've missed 'em— The poems of passion and sin. Some things one gets out of one's ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... Trench has of recent years surrendered to theatrical management, but there is to his credit a substantial accomplishment of lyrical verse that George Meredith would have approved. Mr. Colum's verse I have spoken of below, incidentally, in considering his plays. A distinct talent, too, is Mr. Seumas O'Sullivan's, whose "Twilight People" (1905) indicates by its title the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... father's wrath, until the play ends with a scene in which Sveinungi is won over by Jorunn, his persuasive wife. The action is interrupted by an earthquake. The dialogue is well maintained and rises to heights of lyrical splendor. In point of dramatic effectiveness, The Hraun Farm may be regarded as only a preliminary study compared to the next play, but its picture of pastoral Iceland makes it a fitting companion-piece to the greater drama in ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... every attempt to bring down the sublime language in which they praised Jehovah and recorded his mighty works, to the more common and less hallowed purposes of fictitious narrative, or of amatory, dramatic, and lyrical composition. The Jews have no epic poem to throw a lustre on the early annals of their literature. Even the Song of Songs is allowed to have a spiritual import, pointing to much higher themes than Solomon and his ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... exclaimed Ookhtishchev. "I'll give you some good advice. A man must be himself. While you, you are an epic man, so to say, and the lyrical is not becoming to you. It isn't ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... argument, however musical or skilful, built up in "In Memoriam," and makes mock of what it conceives to be the false history and weak sentiment of the "Idylls." All this, of course, is true, and has been said a thousand times, but—and here again the broad verdict is emerging—it does not touch the lyrical fame of a supreme lyrical poet. It may be that one small volume will ultimately contain all that is really immortal in Tennyson's work. But that volume, it seems to me, will be safe among the golden books ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for the music of rhythm and ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... romanticism with lyricism. It is the "emancipation of the ego." This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo, and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetiere would surely not deny that Walter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it is lyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition of romantic which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetiere himself is respectful to the traditional meaning of the word. "Numerous definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... motive and spirit. This is true even of their historical writings. The marks of the one defining characteristic of their national life—faith in Jehovah and in his sovereign and righteous control—are everywhere seen. Hebrew poetry is mainly lyrical. Relics of old songs are scattered through the historical books. In the Psalms, an anthology of sacred lyrics, the spirit of Hebrew poesy attains to its highest flight. Examples of didactic poetry are the Book of Job, and books ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... is soft and melodious, the Danish sharp and accentuated. The former is better suited to lyrical, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... declared inscrutable. Their bland discrimination, at any rate, in favor of "Men and Women" became henceforth inapplicable, since the poet not only cast out from the division they elected to honor the little lyrical pieces that caught their eye, but also brought to the front, from his earlier neglected work of the same kind as the monologues retained, his Johannes Agricola of 1836, Pictor Ignotus of 1845, and Rudel of 1842. Later criticism, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... forms are indispensable. But, from the stand-point of English poetry, SALOME is a production of more than marked ability—it is a boldly conceived, genially executed, oftentimes a truly superb poem. The repentance of SALOME has a broad lyrical and musical sweep which seems like an opera of grand passions when the trivial associations of the opera are forgotten. In the concluding scenes we seem to feel the inspiration of GOETHE and of AESCHYLUS, for the author has combined ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... not a little of the conversation of his Long Acre friends. Johnson speaks slightingly of his lyrics; but with due deference to the great Samuel, Prior's seem to me amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems.(111) Horace is always in his mind, and his song, and his philosophy, his good sense, his happy easy turns and melody, his loves, and his Epicureanism, bear a great resemblance to that most delightful and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... found his feet intellectually through the reading of Herbert Spencer which had dispelled all "isms" from his mind and left him "the vague but omnipotent consolation of the Great Doubt." And in "Ultimate Questions," which strikes, so to say, the dominant chord of this volume, we have an almost lyrical expression of the meaning for him of the Spencerian philosophy and psychology. In it is his characteristic mingling of Buddhist and Shinto thought with English and French psychology, strains which in his ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... few years ago, when Douglas Hyde published his literal translations of Connacht Love Songs, that I realized that, while I had thought poetry was all but dead in Ireland, the people about me had been keeping up the lyrical tradition that existed in Ireland before Chaucer lived. While I had been looking in the columns of Nationalist newspapers for some word of poetic promise, they had been singing songs of love and sorrow in the language that has been pushed nearer and nearer to the western seaboard—the edge of the ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... thrust himself to a place beside her, and Nancy conversed with him unrestrainedly, as though it were a matter of course. The young man, scrutinising her with much freedom, shaped clerkly compliments, and, in his fashion, grew lyrical; until, at a certain remark which he permitted himself, Nancy felt it time to shake him off. Her next encounter was more noteworthy. Of a sudden she felt an arm round her waist, and a man, whose breath declared the source of his inspiration, began ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... the Comedy of Errors would suffice to show that rhyme, however inadequate for tragic use, is by no means a bad instrument for romantic comedy. In another of Shakespeare's earliest works, which might almost be described as a lyrical farce, rhyme plays also a great part; but the finest passage, the real crown and flower of Love's Labour's Lost, is the praise or apology of love spoken by Biron in blank verse. This is worthy of Marlowe for dignity ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Rokeach, etc., filled with pietistic reflections on the other world, in which the earth figures as a "vale of tears." Poetry likewise took on the dismal hue of its environment. Instead of the varied lyrical notes of Gabirol and Halevi, who sang the weal and woe, not only of the nation, but also of the individual, and lost themselves in psychologic analysis, there now fall upon our ear the melancholy, heartrending strains of synagogue poetry, the harrowing outcries ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... that so well characterizes French literature considered in its main current, for Mistral always sings to his fellow-men to move them, to persuade them, to stir their hearts. Almost all of his poems in the lyrical form show him as the spokesman of his fellows or as the leader urging them to action. He is therefore not of the school of "Art for Art's sake," but his art is consecrated to ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... contemporaries and of posterity has placed it next in point of merit to the Gerusalemme; and by Italians it is especially admired for its graceful elegance of diction. Leigh Hunt executed a very good translation of it, which he dedicated to Keats. Its choruses, which are so many "lyrical voices floating in the air," are very beautiful. It was designed for the theatre, and was acted with great splendour at the court of Ferrara, and a few years later at Mantua, when the well-known artist and architect Buontalenti ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... which found its way most readily of all to the hearts of children themselves. The religious poetry of those Hebrew psalms—Benedixisti Domine terram tuam: Dixit Dominus Domino meo, sede a dextris meis—was certainly in marvellous accord with the lyrical instinct of his own character. Those august hymns, he thought, must thereafter ever remain by him as among the well-tested powers in things to soothe and fortify the soul. One could ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... Unbound, a Lyrical Drama, and other Poems. The Prometheus ranks as at once the greatest and the most thoroughly characteristic ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... short-lived enthusiasms. A soft, southern air blows about the heights of Styria as well as over Vienna and its environs, and in the works of the writers of these regions (Wilhelm Fischer-Graz, Rudolf Hans Bartsch) everything is resolved into a lyrical mood and a melody of words. Similarly in the case of writers of southern Tirol (Hans von Hoffensthal, Richard Huldschiner), whereas on the northern slope of the Alps a race of men made of sterner stuff is reared (Rudolf Greinz, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... reviewer and translator; and explained the reason for the verses giving pleasure in an English dress, to be the superior simplicity of the English language over modern French, for which he has a great contempt, as unfitted for lyrical composition. He inquired of me respecting Burns, to whom he had been likened; and begged me to tell him something of Moore. The delight of himself and his wife was amusing, at having discovered a secret which ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Engel was more comprehensible to him and seemed more "modern" than that of Goethe. As a matter of fact, the narrator Goethe, in the enchanting youthful composition of Werther, did venture very close to the lyrical, but in his later novels his style at times dangerously approached a dry statement of facts, or a rhetorically inflated declamation; and even in The Elective Affinities, which stands stylistically higher ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... ordinary standard with respect to height and bulk. The Greek imagination was extravagantly mastered by physical excellence; this is proved by the almost inconceivable value attached to gymnastic merit. Nowhere, except in Greece, could a lyrical enthusiasm have been made available in such a service. But amongst physical qualities they did not adequately value that of lofty stature. At all events, the rule of portraiture—the whole portrait and nothing but the portrait—which we have ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... of Oppression strikes a high level of artistic expression and makes a quite extraordinary appeal. It is intense poetry, lyrical and meditative. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... Aeschylus in the development of the drama is immense. Before him tragedy had consisted of the chorus and one actor; and by introducing a second actor, expanding the dramatic dialogue thus made possible, and reducing the lyrical parts, he practically created Greek tragedy as we understand it. Like other writers of his time, he acted in his own plays, and trained the chorus in their dances and songs; and he did much to give impressiveness ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... high-strung poets and singers departed, Mother of all the grass that weaves over their graves the glory of the field, Mother of all the manifold forms of life, deep-bosomed, patient, impassive, Silent brooder and nurse of lyrical joys and sorrows! Out of thee, yea, surely out of the fertile depth below thy breast, Issued in some strange way, thou lying motionless, voiceless, All these songs of nature, rhythmical, passionate, yearning. Coming in music from earth, but not unto ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... rhetoric, moving to the music not of individual emotion, but of a generalized feeling for the beauty and grandeur of high thoughts. He was essentially an oratorical poet; but unfortunately the only forms of verse ready to his hand were lyrical forms; so that his genius never found a full scope for its powers. Thus his precept outweighs his example. His poetical theories found their full justification only in the work of his greater and more fortunate successors; and the masters of the age of Louis XIV looked back to Malherbe as ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... that such illicit love was merely sensual, and owed its principal attractions to the scope it afforded for whimsical adventures. Yet Bembo's Asolani, Castiglione's panegyric of Platonic Love, and much of the lyrical poetry in vogue warn us to be cautious. The old romantic sentiment expressed by the Florentines of the thirteenth century still survived to some extent, adding a sort of dignity in form at least ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... is dedicated mainly to love and wine, to flowers and birds and dreams, to the hackneyed and never-to-be-exhausted repertory of the old singers. His instincts are strongly conservative; his confessed aim is to belong to 'that old school of English Lyrical Poetry, of which gentleness is the soul, and simplicity the ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... production of splendid phrases. Each and all of them were brilliant men of letters. Crabbe was not a brilliant man of letters, but he was a fine and a genuine poet. You will look in vain in his truest work for the lyrical and musical gift that we associate with poets who came after:—Shelley, Keats, Tennyson—poets who made Crabbe's work quite distasteful for some three generations. Crabbe it has been claimed had that gift also, to be found in "Sir Eustace ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. Selected and Arranged by ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... to their professor unless he has his plant; you cannot play the flute if you have not one to play; lyrical music requires a lyre, horsemanship a horse. But of ours one of the excellences and conveniences is that no instrument is required ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... gallant gentleman, will not see through what is transparent. These are harmless jests at the ironies of life. Browning's best gifts in this volume, that looks pale beside its predecessors, are one or two short lyrics of love, which continue the series of his latest lyrical poems, begun in the exquisite prologue to La Saisiaz and the graceful epilogue to The Two Poets of Croisic, and continued in the songs of Ferishtah's Fancies and Asolando—not the least valuable part of ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... son of a miner was compelled to follow the father's occupation.[8] Slavery fixed a brutalising mark on generation after generation that is not yet entirely erased. In the first half of the nineteenth century the knights of the shuttle—intellectual, disputatious, and lyrical—looked down with infinite contempt on the ignorant and boorish slaves of the pick. Poetry has, in consequence, little to say about the digger for coal. The song of "The Collier Laddie," attributed to Burns, is one ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... beautiful, too, and the orchard slopes, and the Anio Falling, falling yet, to the ancient lyrical cadence; Tibur and Anio's tide; and cool from Lucretilis ever, With the Digentian stream, and with the Bandusian fountain, Folded in Sabine recesses, the valley and villa of Horace:— So not seeing I sung; so seeing and listening say I, Here as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... me, with the light of a sinumbra, in a little apartment made snug against the winter; and am happiest when all men leave me alone, or nearly all,—though many men love me rather, ungrateful that I am. My present book is Horace Walpole; I get endless stuff out of it; epic, tragic, lyrical, didactic: all inarticulate indeed. An old blind Schoolmaster in Annan used to ask with endless anxiety when a new scholar was offered him, "But are ye sure he's not a Dunce?" It is really the one thing needful in a man; for indeed (if we will candidly understand it) all else is ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... interested in the letters, some of which, as a statement of the matter in question, are admirable. It is perhaps not surprising that the best of them come from women—for (genius apart) woman is usually more touchingly lyrical than man in the yearning for the ideal. The most enthusiastic of all the letters I have received, however, is from a gentleman whose notion is that we should be hypnotised into mental efficiency. After advocating the establishment ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... to many of our dreams is a subjective emotional unity. This is the basis of harmony in lyrical poetry, where the succession of images turns mainly on their emotional colouring. Thus, the images that float before the mind of the Poet Laureate, in his In Memoriam, clearly have their link of connection in their common emotional tone, rather than in any logical continuity. ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... signified "inventor" or "finder"; and in his title, as well as in his functions, the minstrel-poet may remind us of the Norman trouvere. Garcilasso has translated one of the little lyrical pieces of his countrymen. It is light and lively; but one short specimen affords no basis ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... that this state of things had to be entirely reversed. It is true that the peculiar talent of Sully-Prudhomme, being almost exclusively lyrical, scarcely survived his youth, and that he cumbered his moon of sands with two huge and clumsy wrecks, La Justice (1878) and Le Bonheur (1898), round which the feet of the fairies could hardly be expected to trip. One must ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... and ripeness of dramatic imagination, of character portrayal, representation as distinct from analysis, of vigorous scenes that sweep through the excited brain of the reader with the rush of the hurricane, and owe nothing to metrical sweetness, to lyrical melody—that has never come ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... itself that this volume is concerned. It is personal and friendly, and on that account craves indulgence. Here are the songs and sighs of the wanderer, many lyrical pages, and the very minimum of scientific and topographical matter. It is all written spontaneously and without study, and as such goes forth—all that a seeker could put down of his visions, or could tell ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... going, you have charg'd me with new Obligations, both for a very kinde Letter from you dated the sixth of this Month, and for a dainty peece of entertainment which came therwith. Wherin I should much commend the Tragical part, if the Lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your Songs and Odes, wherunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our Language: Ipsa mollities. But I must not omit to tell you, that I now onely owe you thanks for intimating unto me (how modestly ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Williams had represented Monmouth in Parliament, but in 1744 was sent as ambassador to Berlin, and from thence to St. Petersburg. He was more celebrated in the fashionable world as the author of lyrical odes of a ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... terra-cotta panels. A tall archway is flanked by two wings having each two smaller arches, the entablatures of which are enriched, if we must so term it, with gaudy mosaic figures, portraits and heraldic bearings, while the spans of the arches surmount pyramidal groups of emblems, scientific, medical, lyrical and so forth. Red curtains with heavy gilt cords and tassels behind the arches throw the columns with composition (not Composite) capitals and the emblems into high relief. Beneath the centre arch is the armorial bearing of the country. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... national airs, and more especially from our church-tunes, had no other instrumental accompaniment than a single flute, which was such as not in the slightest degree to impair the distinctness of the words. Otherwise it must hare increased the difficulty of the choruses and lyrical songs, which, in general, are the part which we find it the hardest to understand of the ancient tragedy, and as it must also have been for contemporary auditors. They abound in the most involved ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... gauntlet of criticism in the Thalia.[13] With this for his chief occupation, Gohlis or Leipzig for his residence, and a circle of chosen friends for his entertainment, Schiller's days went happily along. His Lied an die Freude (Song to Joy), one of his most spirited and beautiful lyrical productions, was composed here: it bespeaks a mind impetuous even in its gladness, and overflowing with ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Skylark and The West Wind, no less than in The Mask of Anarchy. His idea of the State as well as his idea of sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberant imagination of a lover. The whole body of his work, whether lyrical in the strictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... possessed a romantic and a poetical soul, and there were rare occasions when he would offer a lyrical account of his adventures containing more color and detail. As, for example, his account of his fight ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... "The Old English lyrical feeling," says Ten Brink, citing the lines that immediately follow sw n, "is fond of the image of physical destruction"; but I do not think these lines have a merely figurative import. The reference is to a period of real devastation, antedating the Danish ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... unknown river, by the current of action, by the sinuosities of the conversation inwardly and unconsciously developed, aroused by the flow of ideas and the leap of the moment to the most unexpected imagery, extreme in burlesque or extreme in magnificence, now lyrical even to providing Musset with an entire stanza,[4133] now comic and droll with outbursts unheard of since the days of Rabelais, always in good faith, always at the mercy of his subject, of his inventions, of his emotions; the most natural of writers in an age of artificial literature, resembling ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... favourite round of pieces, and had not attracted the public. Herr Garbage's lions and tigers had drawn for a little time, until one of the animals had bitten a piece out of the Herr's shoulder; when the Lord Chamberlain interfered, and put a stop to this species of performance: and the grand Lyrical Drama, though brought out with unexampled splendour and success, with Monsieur Poumons as first tenor, and an enormous orchestra, had almost crushed poor Dolphin in its triumphant progress: so that great as his genius and resources were, they seemed to be at an end. He was dragging ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... again, both in prose and verse, turned to these two names with a kind of fetich worship, that it is difficult to understand. He must have known that, as a poet, he was immeasurably superior to both. It may have been that their writings first opened his eyes to the possibilities of the Scots tongue in lyrical and descriptive poetry; and there was something also which appealed to him in the wretched life ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... of the finest prose writers now writing in English. His name is on the title-pages of several books, but no book of his will yet bear out my statement. The proof of it lies in weekly papers. No living Englishman can do "the grand manner"—combining majestic dignity with a genuine lyrical inspiration—better than Mr. Whitten. These are proud words of mine, but I am not going to disguise my conviction that I know what I am talking about. Some day some publisher will wake up out of the coma in which publishers exist, and ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett |
