"Poet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the two elements of the proposition stand aghast and defiant; but only for a moment. The poet, who from the top looks down upon the whole horizon of things can never use the tone of authority if his gaze be a surface one. He must know things in their depth in order that ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... put me up to sending you one of mine—neither Prince, Poet, or Man of Letters, but Captain of a Lowestoft Lugger, and endowed with all the Qualities of Soul and Body to make him Leader of many more men than he has under him. Being unused to sitting for his portrait, he looks a little sheepish—and the Man is a Lamb with Wife, Children, and dumber Animals. ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... Leonardo to the reader as a poet is the fact that the maxims and morals in verse which have been ascribed to him, are not to be found in the manuscripts, and Prof. Uzielli has already proved that they cannot be by him. Hence it would seem that only a few short verses can be ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by romping children. It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself clear to the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem to nothing in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... will serve his purpose much better, no matter how bad his moral character may be. As for his qualifications, he is full well provided if he can manage the hounds aright and knows how to hunt with the falcon. "Cease," cries the church through the poet to the French princes, "cease to load me down with gewgaws, with chalices, crosses, and sumptuous ornaments. Furnish me instead with virtuous ministers. The exquisite beauty of abbeys or of silver images is less pleasing in God's sight than the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... of thunderous battles by sea and land died away, this particular offshoot of modern romance ceased to flourish, and has never had any considerable revival. The tale-teller of adventure, like his ancestor the epic poet, requires a certain haziness of atmosphere; he must have elbow room for his inventive faculty; and he is liable to be stifled in the flood of lucid narrative and inflexible facts let loose upon recent events in our day by complete ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... burnt,"—this honest manufacturer talks slang. A certain school of criticism twenty years ago, which used to say: "Half of the works of Shakespeare consists of plays upon words and puns,"—talked slang. The poet, and the artist who, with profound understanding, would designate M. de Montmorency as "a bourgeois," if he were not a judge of verses and statues, speak slang. The classic Academician who calls flowers "Flora," fruits, "Pomona," the sea, "Neptune," love, "fires," beauty, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... The double fear had come upon her—first, that the tide might rise higher than usual and cut off their retreat. Secondly, that Frank—he was a poet—might insist on remaining there and being drowned. Getting up, she said: "I do not know what father will say when I get home, really it is quite ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... ly plese aider &c.... e sur ceo transmettr', sa lettre al vesconte de Lanark. E une autre, si ly plest, a ses Forresters de Geddeworth de autant de Merin [meremium, meheremium, wood for building] pour fere une receite a Allyncrom (Ancrum) desur la marche, ou il poet aver recett e entendre a ses ministres qut il le ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 28. Saturday, May 11, 1850 • Various
... a churchyard rise two honored urns O'er graves not far removed. The one records The 'genius of a Poet,' whose fitter fame Lies in the volumes which his facile pen Filled with the measure of redundant verse: Before this urn the oft frequented sod Is flattened with the tread of pensive feet. The other simply bears the name and age Of one who was 'a Merchant,' and bequeathed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sung from Dan to Beer-sheba. Jerusalem would have been illuminated in honor of him, and banners would have waved in praise of him. But how different from all this were the surroundings of his coming! Born in a stable—and if a certain poet has beautifully ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... is generally supposed, however, that there was a complete separation between mother and child—a tradition which was accepted by Wordsworth, with whom the story of the shepherd boy was an especial favourite. In his "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," the poet thus prettily describes the shepherd ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... as a woman, than admirable for her mental endowments. The affections are to the intellect, what the forge is to the metal; it is they which temper and shape it to all good purposes, and soften, strengthen, and purify it. What an exquisite stroke of judgment in the poet, to make the mutual passion of Portia and Bassanio, though unacknowledged to each other, anterior to the opening of the play! Bassanio's ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... and pleasure that she never could be tired of studying it. Many of these things were not strange to Tony, because, born among plants, he had grown up with them as if they were brothers and sisters, and the sturdy, brown-faced boy had learned many lessons which no poet or philosopher could have taught him, unless he had become as childlike as himself, and studied from the same ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... indeed," said another, but in a calmer and smoother tone, "that the success of a great expedition like this, which has for its object the recovery of the holy sepulchre from the infidels, should be wrecked by the headstrong fancies of one man. It is even, as is told by the old Grecian poet, as when Helen caused a great war ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... and also from III. xxviii. it follows that everyone endeavours, as far as possible, to cause others to love what he himself loves, and to hate what he himself hates: as the poet* says: "As lover let us share every hope and every fear: ironhearted were he who should love what the other leaves."** [* Ovid, "Amores," II. xix. 4,5] [** Spinoza transposes the verses: "Speremus pariter, pariter metuamus amantes; Ferreus est, si ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... added, "I would rather have written that poem than take Quebec." Wolfe, in fact, was half poet, half soldier. Suddenly from the great wall of rock and forest to their left broke the challenge of a French sentinel—"Qui vive?" A Highland officer of Fraser's regiment, who spoke French fluently, answered the challenge. ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... original sin, meaning that the same reasoning powers Adam had after the fall are found in man today—the same debates concerning morals, vices, virtues, the nurture of the body and the transaction of business? As the comic poet has it, speaking of another matter, "Nothing is said that has not been said before." Really, within the sphere of man's activity and effort there is nothing new; the same words, thoughts, designs, the same emotions, griefs, affections and incidents exist now which always ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... of this book is to deal with Browning, not simply as a poet, but rather as the exponent of a system of ideas on moral and religious subjects, which may fairly be called a philosophy. I am conscious that it is a wrong to a poet to neglect, or even to subordinate, the artistic aspect of his work. At least, it would be ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... rapturously of Poe as a poet—"The Raven," as a matter of course, receiving high praise: Of that unique and really grand poem, he said that he thought it the best in ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... day," like that of the 19th of May, 1780, which overspread New England, and was most marked in Massachusetts. The Connecticut Legislature was in session, and the belief was so universal that the last awful day had come that the motion was made to adjourn. Then, as the graphic Quaker poet says: ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... Moss—every one knows that the iron sinks immediately on its being put upon the surface. I have heard of culverts, which have been put upon the Moss, which, after having been surveyed the day before, have the next morning disappeared; and that a house (a poet's house, who may be supposed in the habit of building castles even in the air), story after story, as fast as one is added, the lower one sinks! There is nothing, it appears, except long sedgy grass, and a little soil to prevent its sinking into the shades of ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... his goodness and power, and the mercies he hath shown me, so that I can declare no extraordinary accident ever befell me, whether fortunate or otherwise, but I received some warning of it, either by dream or in some other way, so that I may say with the poet ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... my life to go to Rome," Noel said. Noel is our poet brother. "Just think of what the man says in the 'Roman Road.' I wish they'd ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... accompany it with a phrase lacking rhythm, and difficult to rhyme. You will at once see, by running through the alphabet, that "roam" is the only serviceable rhyme for "home," but the union of the two suggests jingle or doggerel. I defy any minor poet when furnished with such a phrase, to refrain ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... fact, a fragment of a book which will now never come into existence. This particular chapter has been snatched from the burning by an accident. The name of Luis de Leon deservedly ranks as high as that of any poet in the history of Spanish literature; but his reputation as a poet is mostly local, while he is known all the world over as the subject of a dubious anecdote. The attempt is now made to render him more familiar ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... conception which mankind in general have of her. The lover of real poetry regards this romanticist's terrible drama of Lucretia Borgia as a grotesque manifestation of the art, while the historian laughs at it; the poet, however, may excuse himself on the ground of his ignorance, and of his belief in a myth which had been current since the publication ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... mild praise, and a good deal of equally mild criticism, of the Scotch poet, the editor goes ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... produce, after fagging at the simplest thing possible, and I believe that if nature does not give you a turn for it, all the trying possible would never make a painter, and that what the old Roman proverb said of the poet, "Non fit sed nascitur poeta," is equally applicable to the painter. I tried it for a short time, at Hanover, but my master told me I was the most awkward and stupid pupil he ever had, and advised me to cut the concern, ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... poet souls and people yet unborn Shall lay their speechless homage at thy feet, And still thy life be in its rosy dawn, Whose eve eternity alone shall greet. While I, to whom thy changeless smile were sweet As heaven, long mingled with earth's vilest mould, Shall be ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... this hall. Will he tell you that slavery has nothing to do with it, and that the slaveholders of the South will liberate the negroes sooner than the North through the instrumentality of the war? Ask Victor Hugo, the poet of freedom,—the exponent, may I not call him, of the yearnings of all mankind for a better time? Ask any man in Europe who opens his lips for freedom,—who dips his pen in ink that he may indite a sentence for freedom,—whoever has a sympathy for freedom warm in ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... point of view the character of Eugene Field is seen, genius—rare and quaint presents itself is childlike simplicity. That he was a poet of keen perception, of rare discrimination, all will admit. He was a humorist as delicate and fanciful as Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, Bill Nye, James Whitcomb Riley, Opie Read, or Bret Harte in their happiest moods. Within him ran a poetic vein, capable of being worked in any direction, and from which ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... life, lying ready, largely stolen from the poets and novelists and adapted to all sorts of needs and uses. I, for instance, was triumphant over everyone; everyone, of course, was in dust and ashes, and was forced spontaneously to recognise my superiority, and I forgave them all. I was a poet and a grand gentleman, I fell in love; I came in for countless millions and immediately devoted them to humanity, and at the same time I confessed before all the people my shameful deeds, which, of course, were not merely shameful, but had in them much that was "sublime and beautiful" something ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... society, nor yet a penny reading." Shorty snorted with rage. "Go over to that saphead there—d'you see it—an' see what thinking does." His hand pointed to a low hummock of chalk behind a crater. "Go an' look in, I tell you; an' if ever you sit out here again dreaming like a love-sick poet, I hope to God it happens to you. You'll ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... breath. "I'll eat my words," he agreed. "Even if you inscribe them in deathless bronze, as the poet says. How about that, Dad? Dr. Miller isn't the excitable type, but he was pretty strong ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... Wagstaffe to Bobby Little, upon the right of the Battalion line. "The Bosche has 'bethought himself and went,' as the poet says. Now he knows we are here, and have brought our arquebuses with us. He will try something more ikey next time. Talking of time, what about breakfast? When ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... his heart was too full of despondency and grief to find relief by re-awakening even the brightest memories of the past: he could not gaze upon the days gone by, like the painter or the poet looking upon some beautiful landscape, for his situation he felt to be that rather of some unhappy exile looking back upon a bright land that he loved, when quitting it, perhaps never to return. Neither could books afford him relief; for his own sorrowful feelings were now too actively ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... [2] The poet-clergyman, John Donne, who lived in the time of James I, has given a beautifully honest picture of the doings of a saint's mind: "I throw myself down in my chamber and call in and invite God and His angels thither, and when they are there I neglect God and ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... from the pen of Coleridge. But Fox added an ungenerous and malicious hint that the writer was at Rome, within the reach of Bonaparte. The information reached the ears for which it was uttered, and an order was sent from Paris to compass the arrest of Coleridge. It was in the year 1806, when the poet was making a tour in Italy. The news reached him at Naples, through a brother of the illustrious Humboldt, as Mr. Gillman says—or in a friendly warning from Prince Jerome Bonaparte, as we have it on the authority of Mr. Cottle—and the Pope appears to have been ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... drawingroom window. The voices of Miss Lentaigne and his uncle reached him, the one high-pitched and firm, the other, as he imagined, apologetic and deprecatory. The sound of them, the words being indistinguishable, was somewhat soothing. Frank felt as the poet Lucretius did when from the security of a sheltered nook on the side of a cliff he watched boats tossing on the sea. The sense of neighbouring strain and struggle added to the completeness of his own repose. A bed of mignonette ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... Mother," said Harry, "it should rain, and hail, and snow to-morrow, for it looks like it now, and then you know we cannot go into the woods and gather flowers; and all our plans will be spoiled." "Why, then, my dear, we must enjoy May morning as the great poet did, after he lost his sight, with our mind's eye; and you must bear your disappointment patiently." "Easier said than done, Mother," said Harry. "Why, only think of all our preparations, and the beautiful ...
— Two Festivals • Eliza Lee Follen
... to preside over the agreeable arts of life; and I suppose it falls to 'us girls.' That's the way I comfort myself, at all events. Then I must confess that I do like dress; I'm not cultivated enough to be a painter or a poet, and I have all my artistic nature, such as it is, in dress. I love harmonies of color, exact shades and matches; I love to see a uniform idea carried all through a woman's toilet,—her dress, her bonnet, her gloves, her shoes, her pocket-handkerchief ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... their eccentricities. Not a man of all his race but had possessed some marked peculiarity. His father, bibliomaniac though he was, would never treat a man or a woman with decency, who mentioned Shakspeare to him, nor would he acknowledge to his dying day any excellence in that divine poet beyond a happy way of putting words together. Mr. Blake's uncle hated all members of the legal profession, and as for his grandfather—but you have heard what a mania of dislike he had against that ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... acclaimed him begins to pass away. Then it is not what he did that attracts the notice of the younger sort, but what he left undone. Tennyson is discovered to be no great thinker. Pope, who, when his star was in the ascendant, was "Mr. Pope, the new Poet," has to submit to examination by the Headmaster of Winchester, who decides that he is not a poet, except in an inferior sense. Shakespeare is dragged to the bar by Thomas Rymer, who demonstrates, with what degree of critical ability is still disputed, but certainly in clear and vigorous ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... relapse into rowdiness there is a sort of relapse into comfort. There is also what is so large a part of comfort; carelessness. The undergraduate breaks windows because he does not care about windows, not because he does care about more fresh air like a hygienist, or about more light like a German poet. Still less does he heroically smash a hundred windows because they come between him and the voice of Mrs. Asquith. But least of all does he do it because he seriously prides himself on the energy apart from its aim, and on the will-power that carries it through. He is not 'bound' ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... his letters, the poet Cowper says: 'The ballad is a species of poetry, I believe, peculiar to this country.... Simplicity and ease are its proper characteristics.' Here we have one of the earliest attempts to define the modern ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... L'Homme-Dieu before his sorrow came to him; a life spent in cities, among libraries and learned, brilliant people, men and women. I thought of a musician's life, and dreamed of the concerts and operas that I had never heard. The poet Wordsworth, my dear, has written immortal words about the dreams of a boy, and my dreams were fair enough. It seemed as if all the world outside were clouded in a golden glory, if I may put it so, and as if I had only to run forth and put aside this shining veil, ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... innocent braggart tells of his personal prowess that day. A little group is guying the new recruit. A wag shaves a bearded comrade on one side of his face, pockets his razor and refuses to shave the other side. A poet, with a bandaged eye, and hair like a windblown hay-stack, recites "I am dying, Egypt—dying," and then a pure, clear, tenor voice starts through the forest-aisles, and there is sudden silence. Every man knows that voice, and loves the boy who owns it—little Tom Morgan, Dan's ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... a winged and wounding pen, In vigour dipped, to pierce the age When girls are athletes, not the men, And toughness dwindles from the stage!— When purblind poet cannot see That in the games he wishes barred, Eager, and hungry to be free As when it triumphed on the sea, The Viking spirit battles hard, ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... "Well," he added more tolerantly, a moment later, "I was a poet, too, for six months in my life when I ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... high opinion of the intelligence of the bee; he thought the dog, the monkey, and the majority of other animals possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed, of free intelligence the bee possesses very little. The slave of an overmastering instinct, as our new nature poet, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... the Warwickshire poet, who touched upon almost everything, has not omitted to describe the Marshes in a somewhat similar locality, for in the Polyolbion (Song XVIII.) he gracefully compares them to a female enamoured of the beauties of the River ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... you're coming out into it, eh Castel?" he said as he put one foot on the floor. "You're a poet, I see. You don't look it, but being French, as you Lorrainers are, it makes you fond ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... she, "not to be of service to you in something; consider, it is in my power to bestow on you long life, kingdoms, riches: to give you mines of diamonds, and houses full of gold; I can make you an excellent orator, poet, musician, and painter; or, if you desire it, a spirit of the air, the water, ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... circumstances, then, the artist soon drifted into journalism, and, inducing his brothers to join him in his new venture, thenceforth took up the pen and abandoned the brush. Each member of the family became a well-known figure in Parliamentary life. Mr. T. D. Sullivan, the poet of the Irish Party, is still a well-known figure in the world of politics; but my friend Mr. A. M. Sullivan, who died some years ago, belonged rather to the more moderate regime which prevailed in the Irish Party during ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... "Our poet!" she said. "Oh Mickey, hurry! I'm so eager to hear the ones in the book Douglas tells me you are making! Won't you please read them ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... and Venetia. How often one has gazed at it in sheer delight over its bewildering wealth of contrasting color and fantastic form, its effect of light and shade and measureless space! But now, for these many months past, keen eyes have been bent upon it; eyes, not of the artist or the poet, but those ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... aside, the ploughman leaves his team, the coachman his stables, the gardener his greenhouses, books are closed, and every one rushes away to see the sport. The squire, the farmers, and every one who by hook or by crook can procure a mount, join in the merry chase, for as an old poet sings— ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... stir, by these to brighten, By these to lift the soul from earth, The Poet dares our joys to frighten, And thrills ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... to the Ceres of the Southern mythology. (See Grimm, p. 309.) The story of Loki and the Dwarfs is derived from the Younger Edda. It has been beautifully rendered by the German poet Oelenschlager, a translation of whose poem on this subject may be found in Longfellow's ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... the Jews, where once God delighted to put His Name, and to receive worship. And again, the world is full of the monuments of the great, the gifted, and the good. We need not go farther than our own chief city, and its Churches. There we see carved in stone and marble the glories of Poet and Painter, King and Priest, Statesman and Warrior. But after all, my brothers, these are not the true monuments of these men. The stately Abbey may one day fall to ruin, the hand of violence may break and scatter those costly tombs, but the memory of those who sleep there cannot ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... definitely upon the shelf through lack of readers. Every fiction should have a moral; and, what is more to the purpose, the critics have discovered that every fiction has. Philip Melanchthon, some time ago, wrote a commentary upon the "Batrachomyomachia," and proved that the poet's object was to excite a distaste for sedition. Pierre la Seine, going a step farther, shows that the intention was to recommend to young men temperance in eating and drinking. Just so, too, Jacobus Hugo has satisfied ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and that inward prayer, Cola di Rienzi rose a new being. With his young brother died his own youth. But for that event, the future liberator of Rome might have been but a dreamer, a scholar, a poet; the peaceful rival of Petrarch; a man of thoughts, not deeds. But from that time, all his faculties, energies, fancies, genius, became concentrated into a single point; and patriotism, before a vision, leapt into the life and vigour of a passion, lastingly ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... voice was as balm to this man of many impulses, repeated to him, softly in the midnight silence, those noble lines in which Wordsworth has expressed, with the reserve and yet the strength of the great poet, the loftiest yearning ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... life the ward Of spirits more divinely wrought? 'Tis sweet to believe 'tis God's, and hard To think 'tis but a poet's thought. ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... "this ain't an ordinary case. This chap's going to be the future Poet Laureate. Now, when the Prince of Wales invites him to dine at Marlborough 'ouse, 'e don't want to go there tacked on to a girl that carries aitches with her in a bag, and don't know which end of the spoon out of which to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... them. When Tennyson was once a passenger on a steamer crossing the English Channel, some people who had been assigned to seats opposite him in the dining saloon learned that their neighbor at table was the great poet. In a flutter of interest they listened for the wisdom which would drop from the distinguished man's mouth and heard the hearty words, "What fine potatoes these are!" This particular point requires nice discernment on the part of host and hostess; they should know when they may safely impress ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... speaks of "true love," he usually means something that has no passion at all; he means a perfect friendship which grows up between man and wife and which has nothing to do with the passion which brought the pair together. But when the English poet speaks of love, he generally means passion, not friendship. I am only stating very general rules. You see how confusing the subject is, how difficult to define the matter. Let us leave the definition alone for a moment, and ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... Number", containing the work of none but titled authors. Rheinhart Kleiner contributes the single piece of verse, a smooth and pleasing lyric entitled "Love Again", which is not unlike his previous poem, "Love, Come Again". As an amatory poet, Mr. Kleiner shows much delicacy of sentiment, refinement of language, and appreciation of metrical values; his efforts in this direction entitle him to a high place among ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... The Polish poet was probably at that time in the hands of a man who had meditated the history of the Latin ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... the dull Crowd, unskilled in these Affairs, To day wou'd laugh with us, to morrow with the Bears: Careless which Pastime did most Witty prove, Or who pleas'd best, Tom Poet, or Tom Dove. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... Vicente (1470?-1540?), a Portuguese poet who wrote dramas in both Portuguese and Castilian. A strong creative artist and thinker, Vicente is the greatest dramatist of Portugal and one of the great literary figures of the Peninsula. This Cancion to the Madonna occurs in El auto de la Sibila Casandra, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... all the Arts, and, what was more, Lord of the limelight-blaze that let us know it— You seemed a gift designed on purpose for The flippant poet. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... stroke of diabolical genius. Paisley is an ancient town inhabited by a virtuous and industrious people, who used to make shawls and now spin thread, and the atmosphere is so literary that it is believed every tenth man is a poet. Yet people do not boast of having been born there, and natives will pretend they came from Greenock. No one can mention Paisley without a smile, and yet no one can say what amused him. Certain names are the source ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... emphatic notes, striving to make the sound a faithful and intensifying medium whereby to convey the sense. His work is then done, as the same melody is to be repeated to every verse, and the end sought will have been attained if the poet have carefully fulfilled his part. But if he have introduced inequalities into his rhythm, or have given unimportant words the places occupied by important ones in the first verse, so that an emphatic note will fall upon an 'in,' or a 'the,' or some similar particle, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... it; the long and deep range of fern running up from it to that beech-grove on the upland, the lights and shadows on the projections and recesses of the wood, and the blaze of foxglove in its foreground. It is a place in which a poet might look for ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... wickedness; who had vainly attempted to stifle the workings of their own coward consciences by ejaculating through white lips and chattering teeth, "Thou canst not say I did it!" I have misread the great poet if those who had no way partaken in the deed of the death, either found that they were, or feared that they should be, pushed from their stools by the ghost of the slain, or exclaimed to a spectre created ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... upper part of the mountain wall is here referred to, upon which the heaven is supported. There was a narrow space between the escarpment and the place upon which the vault of the firmament rested: the Babylonian poet represented the gods as crowded like a pack of hounds upon this parapet, and beholding from it the outburst of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... serious by coincident atmospheric or other disturbances. And the memory of the general features of any exceptionally severe and devastating flood, would be preserved by popular tradition for long ages. What, then, could be more natural than that a Chaldaean poet should seek for the incidents of a great catastrophe among such phenomena? In what other way than by such an appeal to their experience could he so surely awaken in his audience the tragic pity and terror? What possible ground is there for insisting that he must have had some individual ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... which, Will-o'-the-wisp-like, recedes as he advances, until it lures him on to his destruction. Love is, however, the most powerful engine which the cat, the fox, and the badger alike put forth for the ruin of man. No German poet ever imagined a more captivating water-nymph than the fair virgins by whom the knight of Japanese romance is assailed: the true hero recognizes and slays the beast; the ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... times when he plighted the most eloquent of vows, and procured from me a small pecuniary accommodation; and yet I would see him - see him did I say - HIM - alas! such is woman's nature. For as the poet beautifully says - but you will already have anticipated the sentiment. Is it not sweet? ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... regretting his impulse, raised his own slightly in response, with a downward look at the young man's companion, who had a purple tie, dreadful little sluglike whiskers, and a scornful look—as if he were a poet! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the celebrated Nicolo Tommaseo, to whom a statue has been erected in the public garden below the piazza, where Sanmichele's gate stands. He was born in 1802, and was philologist, philosopher, historian, poet, novelist, critic, psychologist, statist, politician, and orator, leaving behind him, when he died in 1874, some two hundred works. In its time of prosperity the city owned several islands, of which Zlarin is the most ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... you're by, or I should have had a blush from the ladies. I hope not, Sir Simon, said Lady Jones; for a gentleman of your politeness would not say any thing that would make ladies blush.—No, no, said he, for the world: but if I had, it would have been, as the poet says, ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... the 'Ancient Mariner.' The first is gross enough to fancy all the imagery of the mariner's visions delivered by the poet for actual facts of experience; which being impossible, the whole pulverizes, for that reader, into a baseless fairy tale. The second reader is wiser than that; he knows that the imagery is not baseless; it is the imagery of febrile delirium; ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... summer the bobolinks respond to every poet's effort to imitate their notes. "Dignified 'Robert of Lincoln' is telling his name," says one; "Spink, spank, spink," another hears him say. But best of all ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... old fellow. You're not a poet, you know—you're a happy dabbler in prose; but you've got to wake up—you've got to have some vital experience before you can hope to reach the top. This vicarious loving isn't worth a tin whistle. You're like a soldier in the barracks compared to one who's in the thick of the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... say many persons have thought with me, that a poet's promise of a "belt of straw" to his love, was not a very complimentary one; one possible meaning never struck me till this moment: it may be a compliment unconsciously drawn from a heathen source, and perpetuated, like so many of our old-world customs, among ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... of a language and are able to read what others have written, yet are unable to put their own simple thoughts and impressions into words. The analogy here is the simplest use of everyday language; from this to the art of the essayist or poet is far; so in music—one who has mastered notes, chords and rhythms can give musical expression to simple thoughts and feelings, while to become a composer he must traverse a road that only natural ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... themselves, and Greek statues and writings had therefore become the fashion throughout the Roman Empire. Indeed, many of the Greek sculptors and authors are remembered and admired to this day. Homer, the greatest Greek poet, who lived about a thousand years B.C., is ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... and pitched to a rollicksome key. Congenial newcomers arrived, pelting down from upstairs whence they had been drawn by the happy rocketing clamour; and they caught spirit and step and tune with the rest and helped manfully to sing it. As one poet hath said, "And now reigned high carnival." And as another has so aptly phrased it, "There was sound of revelry by night." And, as the second poet once put it, or might have put it so if so be he didn't, "And all ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... concordance to all literature; not of words, but of phrases. A student meeting with an unfamiliar combination of characters can turn to its pages and find every passage given, in sufficient fullness, where the phrase in question has been used by poet, historian, or essayist. ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... oh master of the well-tilled field, This earth is only thine; for after thee, When all is sown and gathered and put by, Comes the grave poet with creative eye, And from these silent acres and clean plots, Bids with his wand the fancied after-yield, A second tilth and second harvest, be, The crop of images and ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... June (1580); note - also called Camoes Day, the day that revered national poet Luis de ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... prospector. On the contrary, many old-timers from Colorado and California declared that Ramsey had never reached the Dike—that is, not since the boom. In a walled tent on a shimmering sand-bar at the mouth of the crystal Klondike, Captain Jack Crawford, the "Poet Scout," severely sober in that land of large thirsts, wearing his old-time halo of lady-like behavior and hair, was conducting an "Ice Cream Emporium and ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... cold. The teeth and skin being more sensible to cold than the more internal parts, and more exposed to it, is the reason that the muscles, which serve them, are thrown into exertion from the pain of cold rather than those of respiration, as in screaming from more acute pain. Thus the poet, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... lest the beauty return no more. His religion, when he emerged from the night of animalism, was a worship of the Light—his temple hung with stars, his altar a glowing flame, his ritual a woven hymn of night and day. No poet of our day, not even Shelley, has written lovelier lyrics in praise of the Light than those hymns of Ikhnaton in the morning of the world.[9] Memories of this religion of the dawn linger with us today in the faith that follows the Day-Star from on high, and the ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... inclinations and virtues; an amity like that of St. Chrysostom's to his dear and virtuous Olympias; whom, in his letters, he calls his Saint: or an amity, indeed, more like that of St. Hierome to his Paula; whose affection to her was such, that he turned poet in his old age, and then made her epitaph: wishing all his body were turned into tongues, that he might declare her just praises to posterity. And this amity betwixt her and Mr. Donne was begun in a happy time for ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... Raggles was a poet. He was called a tramp; but that was only an elliptical way of saying that he was a philosopher, an artist, a traveller, a naturalist and a discoverer. But most of all he was a poet. In all his life he never wrote a line ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... Russell Lowell last year showed that he has become more esteemed as a critic and essayist than as a poet. Lowell himself felt that his true calling was in critical work rather than in poetry, and he wrote very little verse in the latter part of his life. He was somewhat chagrined that the poetic flame of his youth did not continue to glow, but he resigned himself ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... poet reads me his verses, I can interest myself enough in him to enter into his thought, put myself into his feelings, live over again the simple state he has broken into phrases and words. I sympathize then with his ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... well! If you're going to let uncleanly scruples like that stand in your way, you'd better retire to the poet's corner, and stay there. You can fill that much space, any way; but you are not built for a reporter. When ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... admirable movements of the lower creatures, and therefore seems to have something of the lower or animal character. A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend. A poet, like the goose, sails without visible landmarks to unexplored regions of truth, which philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas. The philosopher gets his track by observation; the poet trusts to his inner sense, and makes the straighter ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... tower extending, throughout its whole length. There was at the end of the room a bed with grey curtains for the lady, and a folding-bed for the custodian. It is said to have been the same room where the poet Theophile was once shut up, and near the door there were still verses in his well-known style written ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... him credit for much more than that," said Bruce. He was envying Piney, seeing that the tramp-boy's intuitive appreciations matched his vigorous young beauty, that he was far more poet than vagabond, that he, Bruce, had attempted to play clownishly upon what was a worthy and lovely idyl in the boy's heart. As though she, too, had some faint, perturbing consciousness of Piney, the girl flushed a little, laughed a little, and turned ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... relations a man might not marry; and expounded the ties between me and Joe. Having his hand in, Mr. Wopsle finished off with a most terrifically snarling passage from Richard the Third, and seemed to think he had done quite enough to account for it when he added, "—as the poet says." ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... is never to be reasoned upon, although we may exercise that prerogative on all other subjects. Hence, according to the Roman mythology, Amor, the God of love, is represented as blind-folded. His arrows inflict wounds, it is said, of which the sight can take no cognizance. The language of the poet records the bitter experience of woman, often ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... produced in him by Shakspeare he described long afterwards: it throws light on the general state of his temper and tastes. 'When I first, at a very early age,' he says, 'became acquainted with this poet, I felt indignant at his coldness, his hardness of heart, which permitted him in the most melting pathos to utter jests,—to mar, by the introduction of a fool, the soul-searching scenes of Hamlet, Lear, and other pieces; which now kept him still where my sensibilities hastened forward, now drove ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... about 200 years before Christianity, when barbarians, clothed in skins, peopled the shores of the Baltic. The poet, however, has so far modernised the subject as to make Hamlet a Christian, and England tributary to the "sovereign majesty of Denmark." A date can therefore be easily fixed, and the costume of the tenth and eleventh centuries may be selected for the purpose. There are but few authentic records in ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... active Whig writers as Thomas Burnet and George Duckett; and even Oldmixon cannot be ruled out. Doubtless Mainwaring was the inspiring spirit—of this as well as other attacks on the group surrounding Harley. Poet, ardent Jacobite convert to Whiggism, member of the Kit Kat Club, member of Parliament, and Auditor of the Imprest, Mainwaring had a brief but full career. It included a part in the Whig Examiner and chief responsibility for the Medley. In the course of his political ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... waters they shall glide we know not, but can only trust that in that great day of gatherings, all our craft may be moored in the harbor of peace! These thoughts bring to our minds the well known words of our beloved poet Longfellow: ...
— Silver Links • Various
... surgery, half study, I was shown to await his coming, and I found it, by a series of elaborate accidents, bestrewn with testimonies to Joe. Portrait of Mr. Specks, bust of Mr. Specks, silver cup from grateful patient to Mr. Specks, presentation sermon from local clergyman, dedication poem from local poet, dinner-card from local nobleman, tract on balance of power from local refugee, inscribed Hommage ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... the lines musingly, watching meanwhile their effect on Aunt Jane. Her eyes sparkled as her quick brain took in the meaning of the poet's words. ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... claims for Chretien's art have been made in some quarters that one feels disinclined to give them even an echo here. The modem reader may form his own estimate of the poet's art, and that estimate will probably not be high. Monotony, lack of proportion, vain repetitions, insufficient motivation, wearisome subtleties, and threatened, if not actual, indelicacy are among the ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... you have suggested, and are growing as fast as they can till you come to walk under their shade," or in the library at evening, when the place beside him seems so void where she should be. Then there were other letters, speaking of —— ——, the poet, who was coming down to spend a few weeks with him, and write verses under his elms at Aylesford Grange; but in one and all Lina was the central idea round which all other interests merely turned, and the source from which all else ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... beauty,—pulverized horse-radish,—why, it would make a nose of the coldest constitution imaginable sneeze like a washed school-boy on a Saturday night.—Ah, this is better, my princess: there is some courtesy in this snuff; it flatters the brain like a poet's dedication. Right, Devereux, right, there is something infectious in the atmosphere; one catches good humour as easily as if it were cold. Shall we stroll on?—my Clelia is on the other side ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for the purpose, "sicut lauris, hederae, et alia in hunc usum nota pastoribus." This is noticed by Mr Jones, who gives it as his opinion that the lauris, here spoken of, is the bay-tree, which, according to the poet Lucretius, is remarkable for its inflammability. The reader may desire to see the opinion of Mr Jones as to the origin of man's acquaintance with fire.—It is certainly worthy of consideration, and supposing it restricted to the parent of our race, and his immediate ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... Neapolitan poet and epigrammatist, who could not—his times being what they were—be expected to overlook the fact that in these slanderous rumours of incest was excellent matter for epigrammatical verse. Therefore, he crystallized them into lines which, whilst doing ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... assembling-place, and the ideal beauty of the Greeks found a new shrine in the groves of Florence. These became a true academia, where genius studied and taught, and where the presiding spirit of the place was Michael Angelo Buonarotti,[A] the sculptor—painter—architect—poet, whose universal mind appeared to fit him, not so much to shine in any one department—although shine he did in all—as to give an impetus to the whole Revival. But Michael Angelo, as a painter, excelled chiefly in design; while one who was his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... after months of unusual abstraction and irritability, my father produced a poem. For the first time, my grandfather was seriously alarmed. The loss of one of his argosies, uninsured, could not have filled him with more blank dismay. His idea of a poet was formed from one of the prints of Hogarth hanging in his room, where an unfortunate wight in a garret was inditing an ode to riches, while dunned for his milk-score. Decisive measures were required to eradicate this evil, and to prevent ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... whom, on this account, as much as any, he was inclined to play the part of the "sedulous ape," as he had acknowledged doing to many others—a later exercise, perhaps in some ways as fruitful as any that had gone before. A recent poet, having had some seeds of plants sent to him from Northern Scotland to the South, celebrated his setting of them beside those native to the Surrey slope on which he ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... presided over his narrative, and demanded that everything else should be scrupulously sacrificed to veracity. But, more than this, God made him, in a sense, a man without imagination—comparatively free from the temptations of an enthusiastic temperament. He was a mathematician rather than a poet, an artisan rather than an artist, and he did not see things invested with a false halo. He was deliberate, not impulsive; calm and not excitable. He naturally weighed every word before he spoke, and scrutinized every statement before he gave it form with pen or tongue. And therefore ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... manner, even in the present wreck of his former self, when the cheeks showed furrows worn by care and suffering, and the once flexible and resolute mouth had fallen in from loss of teeth. For this was the scholar, soldier, poet, gentleman, letter-writer, statesman, Sidonius Apollinaris, who had stood on the steps of the Imperial throne of the West, had been crowned as an orator in the Capitol, and then had been called by the exigences of his ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... diet is fit for a weak person. Such a person peculiarly requires solid food. It is also a common mistake to suppose that, because no absolute illness is caused by daily errors of diet, these errors are practically cancelled. Cowper the poet delivers the very just opinion—that all disorders of a function (as, suppose, the secretion of bile,) sooner or later, if not corrected, cease to be functional disorders, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... and tyrant, His wishes still are weaker than his fears, Or he would sell what faith may yet remain From the oaths broke in Genoa and in Norway; 560 And if you buy him not, your treasury Is empty even of promises—his own coin. The freedman of a western poet-chief Holds Attica with seven thousand rebels, And has beat back the Pacha of Negropont: 565 The aged Ali sits in Yanina A crownless metaphor of empire: His name, that shadow of his withered might, Holds our besieging army like a spell In prey to famine, pest, and mutiny; 570 He, bastioned in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... your Imperial Majesty's private guard, a little of a philosopher, and a fair poet in my own language, not in Greek. Also, ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... untrammelled. Patricia sighed and then laughed at herself, for it was good, even here in the narrow orchard, life with its coming possibilities, its increasing riches. She was glad to be alone at that moment if only to share a thought with the poet who at this period held sway ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... rebel against government and against God,—a type of Jacobinism, a type of Infidelity, and, with what seemed to them, no doubt, a beautiful consistency, a type of all that was abandoned and vile. Thomas Paine, a Massachusetts poet of ci-devant celebrity, petitioned the General Court for permission to call himself Robert Treat Paine, on the ground that he had no Christian name. In New England, Christianity and Federalism were looked upon as intimately connected, and Democracy as a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... any indications of becoming a poet, or such a poet as he was, or even a superior writer, in his youth. He was always, however bright and lively in conversation, abounding in wit, self-possessed, and never laughing at his own jokes, showing, too, some of that exhaustless fountain of humor in which he afterward ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... and die for its salvation, and for the Prince the hatred of the subjects is never good, but their love, and the best way to gain it is by 'not interrupting the subject in the quiet enjoyment of his estate.' Even so bland and gentle a spirit as the poet Gray cannot but comment, 'I rejoice when I see Machiavelli defended or illustrated, who to me appears one of the wisest men that any nation in any ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... said the abbe, with a bitter smile, "that makes eighteen months in all. What more could the most devoted lover desire?" Then he murmured the words of the English poet, "'Frailty, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... on the Green" may also be ascribed. The native minstrelsy was fostered and promoted by many of his royal successors. James III., a lover of the arts and sciences, delighted in the society of Roger, a musician; James IV. gave frequent grants to Henry the Minstrel, cherished the poet Dunbar, and himself wrote verses; James V. composed "The Gaberlunzie Man" and "The Jollie Beggar," ballads which are still sung; Queen Mary loved music, and wrote verses in French; and James VI., the last occupant of the Scottish throne, sought reputation as a writer both of Latin ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... boys and girls. Most of Browning's best poetry is within the ken of any reader of imagination and diligence. To the reader who lacks these, not only Browning, but the great world of literature, remains closed: Browning is not the only poet who requires close study. The difficulties he offers are, in his best poems, not more repellent to the thoughtful reader than the nut that protects and contains the kernel. To a boy or girl of active mind, the difficulty need rarely ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... place the real romance of these things upon canvas, as Venice has been placed? Never twice alike, the changing atmosphere is reflected in the hue of the varnished masts, now gleaming, now dull, now dark. Till it has been painted, and sung by poet, and described by writers, nothing is human. Venice has been made human by poet, painter, and dramatist, yet what was Venice to this—this the Fact of our own day? Two of the caravels of the Doge's fleet, two of Othello's strongest war-ships, could scarcely carry the mast of my Australian ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... and poet who wrote the book of Job, brooding on the strange problem of life and death, murmured, "Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" With each successive generation, for many ages, countless millions ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... age," said the father of Juliana, "great men treated actors like servants, and, if they offended, their ears were cut off. Are we, in brave America, returning to the days when they tossed an actor in a blanket or gave a poet a hiding? Shall we stifle an art which is the purest inspiration of Athenian genius? The law prohibits our performing and charging admission, but it does not debar us from taking a collection, if"—with a bow in which dignity and humility were admirably mingled—"you ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... A poet has said that life is the dream of a shadow: he would better have compared it to a night of fever! What alternate fits of restlessness and sleep! what discomfort! what sudden starts! what ever-returning thirst! what a chaos of mournful and confused fancies! We can neither sleep ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... public adoration—the whole Convention are at times incensed in a style truly oriental; and if this be sometimes done with more zeal than judgment, it does not appear to be less acceptable on that account. A petition from an incarcerated poet assimilates the mountain of the Jacobins to that of Parnassus—a state-creditor importunes for a small payment from the Gods of Olympus—and congratulations on the abolition of Christianity are offered to the legislators ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... developed in the time of its transition from coarseness to refinement. It may also be true that its period of greatest harmfulness is when, from a fictitious refinement, it is dragged down again by the natural brutality of its nature; when the ideal has ceased to correspond with the real; when the poet has lost his hold upon the hearts of the people; when poetry itself is no longer the strong fire bursting through the thick, foul crust of the earth, but is only the faint and shadowy smoke of the fire, wreathed for a moment into ethereal shapes of fleeting grace ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... and that their rank would also vary with the power and specific character of the mind engaged upon them. I once heard a very profound mathematician remonstrate against the impropriety of Wordsworth's receiving a pension from government, on the ground that he was "only a poet." If the study of mathematics had always this narrowing effect upon the sympathies, the science itself would need to be deprived of the rank usually assigned to it; and there could be no doubt that, in the effect it had on the mind of this man, and of such ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Italian musique: and here we met Tom Killigrew, Sir Robert Murray, and the Italian Signor Baptista, who hath composed a play in Italian for the Opera, which T. Killigrew do intend to have up; and here he did sing one of the acts. He himself is the poet as well as the musician; which is very much, and did sing the whole from the words without any musique prickt, and played all along upon a harpsicon most admirably, and the composition most excellent. The words I did not understand, and so know not how they are fitted, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... matters of trade, talk of travels, of seaside holidays and so on. Once I remember 'My wife's sailor-brother Captain Anthony' being produced in connection with nothing less recondite than a sunset. And little Fyne never failed to add: 'The son of Carleon Anthony, the poet—you know.' He used to lower his voice for that statement, and people were impressed or pretended ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... declared to her that it was not so much the place, as it was the heart, which made worship what it should be. Read the answer of Jesus as the New Testament gives it, and then see if the Quaker poet, Barton, has not beautifully ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... is for me a freshness and an enthusiasm: I catch in the turn of your body hints of adventurous Columbuses, Drakes, nimble Achilles; and sibylline meanings in some glance of yours infect my fancy with images of Moses, blind old Homers—prophet, lawgiver, poet—" ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... what is unknown any more than we can build without materials. Our mental atmosphere surrounds and shuts us in like our own skins; no one can boast that he has broken out of that prison. The vast, unbounded prospect lies before us, but, as the poet mournfully adds, "clouds and darkness rest upon it." Nevertheless we cannot suppress all curiosity, or help asking one another, What is your dream—your ideal? What is your News from Nowhere, or, rather, what is the result of the little shake your hand has given to the old pasteboard ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... of a statesman in time of peace. Cushman K. Davis was both. He did a man's full duty in both. No man values more than I do the function of the man of letters. No man reveres more than I do the man of genius who in a loving and reverent way writes the history of a great people, or the poet from whose lyre comes the inspiration which induces heroic action in war and peace. But I do not admit that the title of the historian or that of the poet to the gratitude and affection of mankind is greater than that of the soldier who saves nations, or that ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... table, and seized the sword. "Ah, the sword of Frederick II.," he exclaimed, with sparkling eyes. "He often wielded it with a victorious hand, and that hat covered a head adorned with the laurel-wreath of the poet and the great general! These are trophies that I prefer to all the treasures of Prussia. What a capital present for the Invalides, especially for those who formed part of the army of Hanover! They will be delighted, no doubt, when ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... than the lioness who has licked her murdered cubs. No Pythoness at the dizziest height of the sacred frenzy, no Demeter wrought to delirium by maternal bereavement, was ever imagined by poet or painter as half so grand, and terrible, and awe-inspiring, as this ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... had rested. Beside the extinguished lamps which the hoofs had confusedly scattered, the fire, arrested by the water course, had consumed the grasses that fed it, and there the plains stretched black and desert as the Phlegraean Field of the Poet's Hell. But the fire still raged in the forest beyond—white flames, soaring up from the trunks of the tallest trees, and forming, through the sullen dark of the smoke reck, innumerable pillars of fire, like the halls in the city ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... commenced a passage in which are inserted many translated verses of the Greek poet Aratus. Cicero when a lad had taken in hand the Phaenomena of Aratus, and here he finds a place in which can be introduced some of his lines. Aratus had devoted himself to the singing of the stars, and has produced for us many of the names with which we are still ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... scribbler? break one cobweb through, He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew: Destroy his fib or sophistry, in vain, The creature's at his dirty work again, Throned in the centre of his thin designs, Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines! Whom have I hurt? has poet yet, or peer, Lost the arched eyebrow, or Parnassian sneer? And has not Colley still his lord, and w***e? His butchers Henley, his free-masons Moore? Does not one table Bavius still admit? Still to one bishop Philips seem a wit? Still Sappho— A. Hold! for God's sake—you'll offend, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... dog still barking. The frogs begin to peep, and the turtles whistle, and the doves coo, until you are carried away from the circle, its lights and its pleasant, laughing faces into the bosom of nature. It is needless to say that all these sounds came from the throat of Christopher P. Cranch, the poet-artist, and were clever imitations which were hugely ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... of your predecessors my mother drowned herself in the Tiber, and I knew what it was to starve. And I am only one of many. At the very door of Rome, under a Christian Government, the poor are living lives of moral anaemia and physical atrophy more terrible by far than those which made the pagan poet say two thousand years ago—Paucis vivit humanum genus—the human race exists for ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... the spreading oak or chestnut, the horses, or oxen, or mules picketed in the vistas, Indian wigwams and squaws with children watching curiously the pioneer household sitting by their fire and eating their evening meal; this is the picture framed by the imagination of a poet or artist, but this is but a superficial sketch,—a mere glimpse of one of the many thousand phases of the long and weary journey. The reality ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... on the Road, the poet, speaking of Alpine scenery, alludes to the story of Atalanta ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... acquainted with the writing of Dante, sympathises with him. In the centre and just before the feet of Dante, is a beautiful child, brilliantly dressed and crowned with flowers, and dragging along the floor a garland of bay leaves and flowers, while looking earnestly and innocently in the poet's face. Next come a pair of lovers, the lady looking at Dante with attention, the man heedless. The last wears a vest embroidered with eyes like those in a peacock's tail. A priest and a noble descend the stairs behind, jeering ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys |
