"Poetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Poetic and artistic license allows a few slight exaggerations. Even Shakespeare took liberties with his subjects!" returned the authoress blandly. "If not exactly a yard long, your feet, not small by nature, looked absolutely enormous! It's ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... to that too select class at home who follow the Australian endeavour to utter a fresh and genuine poetic voice." ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... poetic justice that Randy, who had been the cause of this commotion, should suffer the worst for it. Hardly had he put his foot in the lower hallway of the farmhouse when a mouse, scampering from a nearby doorway, ...
— The Rover Boys at Colby Hall - or The Struggles of the Young Cadets • Arthur M. Winfield
... Sorell, described in the last chapter, was of great importance to Connie's after history. It had placed her suddenly on a footing of intimacy with a man of poetic and lofty character, and had transformed her old childish relation to him—which had alone made the scene possible—into something entirely different. It produced a singular effect upon her that such a man should care enough ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it was a most comfortable place, this, in Central Africa. One could almost wax poetic, but we will keep such ambitious ideas for a future day. Just now, however, we must have the goods stored, and the little army of carriers paid ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... madness had taken a very poetic turn. Sometimes he fancied himself to be Tasso; at another time Shakspeare or Chateaubriand. At the time of my visit to the asylum, he was deeply impressed with the delusion of imagining himself to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... his two guests did little more than nibble it; they neither ate nor talked, and yet they looked anything but unhappy. Detached from their surroundings, as they sat over their coffee, they might have been taken to be three poetic gentlemen listening ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... with his son's intellectual life. The letter written by Lanier to his father from Baltimore in 1873 may lead one to think otherwise. Mr. Lanier was opposed, as were most of the men of his section, to a young man's entering upon a musical or poetic career, but more than two hundred letters written by son to father and many from father to son prove that their relations during the entire career of the poet were unusually close and sympathetic. In the earlier ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... fixes. M. Barthelemy has written some poetry much in the same strain, which is rather pungent, but he latterly appears to have sunk into the same slumber which seems to have enveloped so many of the present literary men of France. M. Deschamps now and then produces some poetic effusions which are pleasing, and prove the author to be possessed of that ability which would induce a wish that his works were less brief and more frequently before the public. But taking all into consideration, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... left alone, without faces he likes: other Generals, estimable in their way, have a physiognomy displeasing to the sick man; and will smart for it if they enter,—"At sight of HIM every pain grows painfuler!"—the poor King being of poetic temperament, as we often say. Friends are encouraged to smoke, especially to keep up a stream of talk; if at any time he fall into a doze and they cease talking, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... it is a religion of the imagination. It has a certain beauty and a poetic charm, while the Christian religion has the reality of the principle that kindliness is the real gold of life, which I have ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... o'er Delphi's steep, Isles that crown th' Aegean deep, Fields that cool Ilissus laves, Or where Maeander's amber waves In lingering labyrinths creep, How do your tuneful echoes languish, Mute but to the voice of Anguish? Where each old poetic mountain Inspiration breathed around, Every shade and hallowed fountain Murmured deep a solemn sound; Till the sad Nine in Greece's evil hour Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains: Alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant Power, And coward Vice that revels in her ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... complied. As it turned out, however, that he only wanted me for a dramatic lay-figure, to be contradicted and embraced and wept over and bullied and clutched and stabbed and knocked about in a variety of ways, I soon declined that course of instruction; though not until Mr. Wopsle in his poetic fury had severely ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... In all my wanderings I had seen nothing so rich; yet now it seemed poverty-stricken. That it was autumn could not account for this; for I had always found that the sadness of autumn vivified the poetic sense; and that the colours of decay had a pathetic glory more beautiful than the glory of the most gorgeous summer with all its flowers. It was winter within me—that was the reason; and I could feel no autumn around me, because I saw no spring beyond ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease. But one such death remain'd to come; The last poetic voice is dumb— We ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... soul, technique the body. The soul will be unknown to the world without technique; hence the author strives in this book to teach the principles on which a sound vocal technique rests, but only that what is best in the soul be not hidden, that the one noble or poetic thought shall be multiplied a thousand times—indeed, that if it be sufficiently worthy, it shall, like Tennyson's Brook, "go on forever." To believe, on the one hand, that the highest art can be attained with a very mediocre technique, and, on the other, that a perfect technique is the ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... genius and conservatism. Large dilating nostrils are a sign of poetic temperament and a sensitive nature. A long forehead denotes liberality. Arched eyebrows, good ancestry and amiability. A bold, projecting Roman nose indicates enterprise. Delicate nose, good nature. A large nose, ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... the sustained strength and richness of the Faery Queen became possible; contemporary with it, the grandeur and force of English prose began in Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity; and then, in the splendid Elizabethan Drama, that form of art which has nowhere a rival, the highest powers of poetic imagination became wedded, as they had never been before in England or in the world, to the real facts of human life, and to its deepest ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... in lyrical and other non-dramatic poetry belongs almost wholly to the first period. It consists mainly of short pieces scattered through the idyllic tales and saga-plays that nearly make up the sum of his activity in its purely creative and poetic phase. Some of these lyrics strike the very highest and purest note of song, and have secured lasting lodgment on the lips of the people. One of them, indeed, has become pre-eminently the national song of Norway, and may be heard wherever Norsemen are gathered together upon ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Centuries." This indorsement by Whittier gave it vogue. It began to be copied by newspapers and religious Journals, and it has been traveling on the wings of public print ever since. I do not think it has any great poetic merit. The secret of its success is its serious religious strain, or what people interpret as such. It embodies a very comfortable optimistic philosophy which it chants in a solemn, psalm-like voice. Its sincerity carries conviction. It voices absolute ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... she continued. She held the pencil suspended in the air. Her brow was puckered with thought. "Of course, it isn't supposed to read as sensibly as prose. That is one of the greatest differences between them. In poetry one must use imagination and poetic license." Then she fell to work upon the paper and wrote steadily and laboriously for some minutes. Her eye flashed with triumph. "Listen. Of course this is mere rough work. I'll polish up what I write ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... rebellion of manhood, and the disappointment of age, divulged in the storied lives of the few hundred names admitted to be British poets; and the reading of whose works is, as a rule, a task of weariness. The career of Gay is a very fair one as an average of the poetic. He mainly avoided the enumerated ills—enumerated by ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... qua'led ad the Chawleston convention. They only pwetend to qua'l; so, by that way, to mizguide those Abolish-nists. Mistoo Itchlin, I am p'ojecting to 'ite some obitua' 'emawks about that Lady By'on, but I scass know w'etheh to 'ite them in the poetic style aw in the p'osaic. Which would you ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... because so many Victorian poets are, or have been, prose-writers as well. Now, according to our theory, the practice of prose should maintain fresh and comprehensive a poet's diction, should save him from falling into the hands of an exclusive coterie of poetic words. It should react upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial expansion, by taking him outside his aristocratic circle of language, and keeping him in touch with the great commonalty, the proletariat of speech. For it is with words as with men: constant ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... sailing expedition with the strangers. Therein they explored much of the Evenlode, the hay-harvest breeze favoring them. Another day she went with them afoot to the Hinkseys. Certain moot points of poetic identification were hardly settled by that trip, so another followed. They came ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... miles of Corvan, set like a stone in a smooth green surface, before he came down and lifted his shoulders into his gait. With the first rock and swing of the singlefoot, Tharon smiled and settled herself more comfortably in the saddle. This was joy to her, this beautiful syncopation, this poetic marked time that reeled off the miles beneath her and would scarcely have shaken a pebble from ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as all the mules in Persia." This poet of warm affections felt so irritably the perverse criticisms of his learned friends, that they were to share alike a poetic Hell—probably a sort of Dunciad, or lampoons. One of these "blasts" broke out in a vindictive epigram on Mitchell, whom he describes with a "blasted eye;" but this critic literally having one, the poet, to avoid a personal reflection, could ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... the world's greatest lyric genius, was born August 28, 1749, in Frankfurt am Main. In his being there were happily blended his mother's joyous fancy and the sterner traits of his father. Thus a rich imagination, a wealth of feeling, and the power of poetic expression went hand in hand with an indomitable will. In the spring of 1770 the young poet went to Strassburg to complete his law course. There Herder happened to be, even then a famed critic and scholar, and he aroused in Goethe a love and ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... dropped; but it was renewed again on the 20th of February by Lord Brougham, who urged upon the house the propriety of immediately emancipating the negro apprentices. His speech on this occasion gained for him the golden opinions of the good and the wise. He commenced by painting in poetic language the "delicate, calm, and tranquil joy" which pervaded the Antilles on the day when slavery ceased to exist. He continued to show that the predictions of those who had declared that labour would cease when slavery was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of a poetic and mobile temperament, he rushed off to Daniel's lodging. As he climbed the stairs, and thought of these friends, who refused to leave the path of honor, he felt conscious that he was less worthy of them than before. A voice spoke ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... my plain statement of the fundamental constitution of London society as an Irishman's reproach to your nation. From the day I first set foot on this foreign soil I knew the value of the prosaic qualities of which Irishmen teach Englishmen to be ashamed as well as I knew the vanity of the poetic qualities of which Englishmen teach Irishmen to be proud. For the Irishman instinctively disparages the quality which makes the Englishman dangerous to him; and the Englishman instinctively flatters the fault that makes the Irishman harmless and amusing to him. What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... Carlisle, viz., Lord Byron, because he brought real genius and power to the effort, found a vast auxiliary advantage in a peerage and a very ancient descent. On these double wings he soared into a region of public interest, far higher than ever he would have reached by poetic power alone. Not only all his rubbish—which in quantity is great—passed for jewels, but also what are incontestably jewels have been, and will be, valued at a far higher rate than if they had been raised from less aristocratic mines. So fatal for ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... applaud the fertility at the expense of the force of his mind. The truth is that will is an important element of genius, and without it the spontaneous productions of the mind must lack the highest quality of poetic art. True intellectual creation is an effort of the imagination, not its result, and without force of will to guide it, it does not obey its own laws, and gives little impression of real power. Art is not the prize of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... Alpine peasant on the scenes which mysteriously and profoundly affect the cultivated tourist, is the gaze of one who has never been taught to look. The greater sensibility of educated Europeans to influences which left even the poetic Greeks unmoved, is due to the directing vision ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... courtesy imposed no restraint. For our poet's lack of sense of proportion, and for his carelessness in the proper motivation of many episodes, no apology can be made. He is not always guilty; some episodes betoken poetic mastery. But a poet acquainted, as he was, with some first-class Latin poetry, and who had made a business of his art, ought to have handled his material more intelligently, even in the twelfth century. The emphasis is not always laid with discrimination, ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... colored girl nine years old. She is miserable, indeed, for at home she is ill treated, and the shoes she wears, and often the clothes, are supplied by the teachers or some of her classmates. There is a tender, poetic vein in her make-up, and it found vent in a composition. The teacher took a little pansy plant to school one day and told the pupils of the flower. Two days after, she asked them to write a story of it, and gave them the privilege of having the pansy talk and tell ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 6, June, 1889 • Various
... which takes place when the clock strikes twelve, is a most curious sight.... From every roof and arch and parapet-wall, mewing, hissing and screaming, the cats rush down to devour." It sounds like a wicked parody on the poetic assembling of the Venetian pigeons at the daily scattering of grain in the square ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... the primary moving power in the human spirit," Professor Gidding says; "into his ideal enter man's estimate of the past and his forecast of the future—his scientific analysis and his poetic feeling, his soberest judgment and ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... sufferings, the occasional gleams of happiness which are common to the lives of the poor with a realism as vigorous and as vivid as the prose of Charles Dickens himself could show, and he had touches here and there of exquisitely tender poetic feeling which were not unworthy of Keats or Wordsworth. Nothing was nobler in the life of Burke than his early appreciation and generous support of Crabbe. Hannah More died in 1833. The fame of this remarkable woman has somewhat faded of late ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the beautiful, thus acquired, far from making the common occupations of life distasteful, threw over them a sort of poetic interest, as a richly painted window casts its own glowing colours on mere boards and stones. The higher regions of her mind were never obscured by the clouds of daily care; but thence descended perpetual ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... most gifted literary critics a while ago pointed out the poetic charm of evanescence; pointed it out more plainly, I fancy, than it has ever been shown before. But evanescence has this poetic charm chiefly in nature, almost never in art. The transitoriness of a sunset glory, or of human life, is rife with poetic pathos ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... putting themselves in another person's place. Jealousy particularly is not a feeling which any one can understand without having experienced it, unless he is endowed with the imagination of a great poet. And as few husbands have a great poetic imagination, it is only after they have felt the claws of the monster tearing at their own hearts that they can understand their wives' feelings, and are willing to act so as to save them—and themselves, of course—the ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... work I have aimed more consistently at poetic form, but have included on account of their biographical interest two or three rather unsuccessful versions of late ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... scattered through the historical books; again, considerable portions of prophetic literature are found to take a lyric form. Even in the ordinary versions the Psalms and Lamentations retain something of their poetic structure; the less obvious features of lyric rhythm will be illustrated in the selections admitted into ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... feet swept the broad and noble river, reflecting on its surface the snowy masses of "thunderhead" clouds, around which the lightning still played, and which, transfigured and glorified in the light of the setting sun, seemed to the poetic imagination of the young man like the City of God descending out of heaven, with its streets of gold and foundations of precious stones, while the rainbow that spanned the heavens seemed like the rainbow of the Apocalypse round about the ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... writings, which everything conspired to render grave and sober, the almost poetic nature of his mind shows forth. In one of his (unpublished) note-books, now in the Royal Society's ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... Cut-off Parts] which he dedicates to his great master wherein he not only declares the models of his wonderful operations in restoring of lost members, but gives you cuts of the very instruments and ligatures he made use of therein; from hence our Author (cum poetica licentia [with poetic ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... speeches, and be coaxing and dazzling and mock-matronly by turns; and above all, how she would enjoy it, and make him enjoy it, too; and yet sometimes, when they were quiet and alone, would drop all her whimsical little airs and graces, and make such tender, unselfish, poetic little speeches, that he would find himself startled in life wonder at the depth and warmth and generosity of her girlish heart. He often found her surprising him-after this manner, and the surprise usually came when he had just been most ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... it will be obvious that the drift-laden hurricanes of the country were more than ordinarily formidable. They scarcely seemed to provide a subject for poetic inspiration; still the following effusion appeared by McLean, ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... up in Raphael's heart with the suddenness of poetic inspiration. He looked around him, and felt the influence of the forbidding gloom that society breathes out in order to rid itself of the unfortunate; it nipped his soul more effectually than the east wind grips the body in December. He locked his arms over his chest, set ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... But Mr. Harrison did not return. He fulfilled an honorable career as incumbent of a London parish, as chaplain to Henry Cromwell, viceroy of Ireland, and as a hunted and persecuted preacher in the evil days after the Restoration. But the "poetic justice" with which this curious dramatic episode should conclude is not reached until Berkeley is compelled to surrender his jurisdiction to the Commonwealth, and Richard Bennett, one of the banished Puritans of Nansemond, is chosen ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... in 1860; the plucking of Venice like a ripe fruit in '66; of Rome, in 1870; all the deliriums of freedom, vengeance, union—these immortal names and passions and actions, were thrilling through the girl's fresh poetic sense, and capturing all her sympathies. Had Italy indeed been 'made too quick'? Was all the vast struggle, and these martyred lives for nothing—all to end like a choked river in death and corruption? Well, if so, whose fault was it, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... published the second part of World Chronicles, and a few issues of a short-lived periodical entitled "Dannevirke" which among other excellent contributions presented his splendid poem, "The Easter Lily," a poetic dramatization of our Lord's resurrection, about which the poet, Baggesen, said that "it outweighed all Oehlenschlaeger's tragedies and that he himself had moments when he would rather have been the author of this incomparably beautiful poem than ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... sight to see children on a morning in June going through the fields to the country church, I still insist that the beauty of that sight does not answer the question how it is that Matthew forgot to say anything about salvation through Christ. Prof. Swing is a man of poetic temperament, but this is not ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... appreciate that the simplest expressions of nerve response— the reflexes—are motor in character, but it is difficult to understand how such intangible reactions as love, hate, poetic fancy, or moral inhibition can be also the result of the adaptation to environment of a distinctively motor mechanism. We expect, however, to prove that so-called "psychic" states as well as the reflexes are products of adaptation; that they occur automatically ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... say, "See that old mansion mossed and fair, Poetic souls therein are they: And O that gaudy box! Away, You vulgar ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... by Monti that, had this passage been noted by Newton, it might have given him a better hint than the falling apple. Perhaps it did, for Newton was no poet, and it is the poetic, associative-minded men of genius who have always preceded the greatest, strictly scientific minds, and far surpassed the latter in the comprehensiveness of their views. Bear with me, ye men of Induction, for I believe ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic feelings of childhood began to fix themselves in definite thoughts. Nature—the world I could touch—was folded and filled with myself. I am inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... the liberty of concluding with offering two instances of poetic dances; the one in the serious, the other in the comic vein, which are furnished rather as hints of the improvable nature of such compositions, than in the least ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... put into better English; it might almost have sounded like poetry had Guy Oscard been possessed of the poetic soul. But this, fortunately, was not his; and all that might have been said was left to the imagination of Meredith. What he really felt was that there need be no rivalry, and that he for one had no thought ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... surrender him wholly to the tutelage of the pagan (which, literally interpreted, signifies village) muse without yet a further effort for his conversion, and to this end I resolved that whatever of poetic fire yet burned in myself, aided by the assiduous bellows of correct models, should be put in requisition. Accordingly, when my ingenious young parishioner brought to my study a copy of verses which he had written touching the acquisition ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... get the whole significance of this symbol is by noticing how the idea is strengthened by the word that accompanies it. Christ does not say 'I am a Shepherd,' but He says, 'I am the good Shepherd.' At first sight that word 'good' is interpreted, as I have said, in a kind of sentimental, poetic way, as expressing our Lord's tenderness and love and care; but I do not think that is the full meaning here. You find up and down this Gospel of St. John phrases such as, 'I am the true bread,' 'I am the true vine,' and the meaning of the word that is here translated 'good' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... Edinburgh will be coming, and the poor woman be deaved with their spiering." And then he began to laugh. "Did you ever hear o' sic a thing as poetic justice, Sergeant? Nae, it's no' the kind you'll get in the courts of law. Weel, it's poetic justice for a birkie soldier, wha claims the airth and the fullness thereof, to have to tak' his orders from ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... interests. This species of success appears to meet the views of the mysterious paternal intentions toward me. What they seem to require is that I shall sound and resound. From that point of view, i' faith, politics have a poetic side which is not out of ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... the great men of the world owe their greatness more to surrounding circumstances than to the genius within them. The highest genius can be dwarfed or deformed by the force of adverse circumstances; hence the poetic truth of Gray in those ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... eccentric, didn't seem to her as worth while as it had done before, though it was decidedly similar. Blaney read some of his poems, to a zithern accompaniment, but they weren't very impressive, and not nearly so poetic as the lines he had written for her. She wondered if she had really inspired him to greater heights of song than he ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... as it stands in prose. Here is Tennyson's poetic version, which is full of the dash and daring of the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and their meaning, the form and the substance, seemed to come to her like richly blended music, stirring all her senses and quickening all her dormant faculties. Then she opened them again, and looked steadily upon the dark, wan face, with its sharp thin outline and strange poetic abstraction. By chance he spoke for a moment of De Quincey, and a shudder passed through all her being. Could such a face as that be a murderer's face? The utter morbidness of such a thought oppressed her only for ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... notable establishment and an excellent table, a rare circumstance with his poetic brothers, who are rarely favourites of Plutus as he was. He was then sixty years old, and had a hundred and twenty thousand francs a year. It has been said maliciously that this great man enriched ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to the Lesser Antilles in the summer of 1887, the writer of the following pages, landing at Martinique, fell under the influence of that singular spell which the island has always exercised upon strangers, and by which it has earned its poetic name,—Le Pays des Revenants. Even as many another before him, he left its charmed shores only to know himself haunted by that irresistible regret,—unlike any other,—which is the enchantment of the land upon all who wander away from ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... social life which had been the wonder and admiration of the world before Simon de Montfort had blighted the fair life of Provence. More than ever before in Spain, women were put into positions of prominence in this court; and so great was the poetic and literary atmosphere which surrounded them, that they were known more than once to try their hands at verse making. Their attempts were modest, however, and no one has ever been tempted to quote against them Alphonse Karr's well-known epigram: "A woman who writes, commits two sins: ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... wrote stanzas in the dialect of the Vale of Towy—rough, full of peasant phrases and mangled English words; and he wrote them, not in books, but on the memory of the people. In the same valley, a century later, Williams Pant y Celyn wrote hymns, melodious and inspiring, of great poetic beauty, though with a trace of dialect; they were written and published, but they also haunted every ear that heard them. Beyond the Black Mountains, in the hills of West Monmouth, after another century, Islwyn wrote odes without a trace of dialect; they were written ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... be derived from such a volume, but lasting and useful impressions. Many are keenly alive to the harmony of verse and the fresh outbursts of poetic feeling, who would pore with delight over such a volume, and many might thus be won to high thought and serious ...
— Hymns, Songs, and Fables, for Young People • Eliza Lee Follen
... book of essays on various subjects, and calls it The Optimist; and then devotes several pages of preface to an argument, lexicon in hand, proving that the applicability of the term optimist is 'obvious.' An editor, at intervals of leisure, indulges his true poetic taste for the pleasure of his friends, or the entertainment of an occasional audience. Then his book appears, entitled not Miscellaneous Poems, but Asleep in the Sanctum, by A. A. Hopkins. Sometimes, not ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... It was not a poetic expression. I wish the reader to note that I do not record it as such. I only preserve it as evidence of the major's humanity, and of the unaffected sympathy for the stranger, which at ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... darling of Dante, Montaigne, Voltaire, Chesterfield; the "old popular Horace" of Tennyson; the Horace whose "sad earnestness and vivid exactness" pierced the soul and brain of aged John Henry Newman. "His poems," says a great French critic (St. Beuve, "Horace"), "form a manual of good taste, of poetic feeling, of practical and worldly wisdom. The Christian has his Bible; the scholar his Homer; Port Royal lived on St. Augustine; an earlier philosophy on Montaigne; Horace comes within the range of all: in reading him we break not in any way with modernity, yet retain our ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... he saw that success was complete, beyond every expectation, he was deeply moved. The ministers of the Italian princedoms could hardly keep their virtuous indignation within bounds. Sir James Hudson called the speech "a rocket falling on the treaties of 1815"; the Russian Minister, waxing poetic, compared it with the shining dawn of a fine spring day. The "grido di dolore," rapturously applauded in the Chamber, rang like a clarion through Italy. And no one suspected whence this ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk, and not a troubadour? These questions are far ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Arator's poetic version of the Acts of the Apostles was written in hexameters; whether good or ill, Basil felt unable to decide, and he wished Decius had been here to whisper a critical comment. In any case he would have found ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... straight, a want caused by the fall in the price of cinchona, a misfortune which had involved many a fair estate and reduced it to the desolate and unkempt condition exemplified by the one now visited. But even unkempt and uncared for, what a picture it made! It was the realisation of a poetic death—the victim smothered by roses beside the singing waters of a brook. It was a long time before any one came, and the two visitors sat in the verandah feeling rather shy and uncomfortable, for this was the neighbour's first visit, and the native, who had ushered ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... Twick'nam Fountains, say, What Homage to the Bard shall Britain pay! The Bard! that first, from Dryden's thrice-glean'd Page, Cull'd his low Efforts to Poetic Rage; Nor pillag'd only that unrival'd Strain, But rak'd for Couplets [1] Chapman and Duck-Lane, Has sweat each Cent'ry's Rubbish to explore, And plunder'd every Dunce that writ before, Catching half Lines, till the tun'd Verse went round, Complete, in smooth ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... as the curtains shook and fell back into their places, when the ghastly procession had vanished behind them. And then, with one of those extraordinary transitions of which I have already spoken, she again threw off her veil, and broke out, after the ancient and poetic fashion of the dwellers in Arabia,[*] into a paean of triumph or epithalamium, which, wild and beautiful as it was, is exceedingly difficult to render into English, and ought by rights to be sung to the music of ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... entering on a wrong path, that his was not music at all, that he must keep to Himmel and Hummel, otherwise he would never do anything decent—the clever Pan Elsner had already very clearly perceived what a poetic kernel there was in the pale young dreamer, had long before felt very clearly that he had before him the founder of a new epoch of pianoforte-playing, and was far from laying upon him a cavesson, knowing well that such a noble thoroughbred may indeed be cautiously ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... will drag a man down into the mire if he is left to himself, or bring him to the highest heights of political power if he has some stern friend to keep him in hand. Neither Chesnel, nor the lad's father, nor Aunt Armande had fathomed the depths of a nature so nearly akin on many sides to the poetic temperament, yet smitten with a terrible weakness ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... most difficult species of poetic composition; but difficulty, well subdued, is excellence. Mrs. Smith says she has been told that the regular Sonnet suits not the nature or genius of our language. Surely this assertion cannot be demonstrated, and therefore was not ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... practiced more sedulously than my comrade; and hence, no doubt, arose the interchange of positions, the disciple turned into the master. It was not, however, an overwhelming infatuation, a painful obsession; it was rather a recreation, almost a poetic feast. As our great lyric writer put it in the preface to his volume, Les Rayons et les ombres: 'Mathematics play their part in art as well as in science. There is algebra in astronomy: astronomy is akin to poetry; there is algebra in music: music ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... which they found there was the famous grotto, so familiar to all from the accounts of tourists, and from the well-known description in Hans Andersen's Improvisatore. After that glowing, poetic, and enthusiastic narrative, no other need be attempted. Here they passed three or four days, and when at length they bade adieu to the artist and his wife, it was with many sincere regrets on both sides, and many earnest wishes ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... fly'st thou know'st not whom, and therefore fly'st! "O'er Delphos' lands, and Tenedos I sway, "And Claros, and the Pataraean realms.— "My sire is Jove. To me are all things known, "Or present, past, or future. Taught by me "Melodious sounds poetic numbers grace.— "Sure is my dart, but one more sure I feel "Lodg'd in this bosom; strange to love before.— "Medicine me hails inventor; through the world "My help is call'd for; unto me is known "The powers of plants and herbs:—ah! hapless ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... there was a wide difference, for while Paganini's manner was such as to induce his hearers to believe that they were under the spell of a demon, Ole Bull took his hearers to the dreamy moonlit regions of the North. It is this power of conveying a highly poetic charm which enabled him to fascinate his audiences, and it is a power far beyond any mere trickster or charlatan. He was frequently condemned by the critics for playing popular airs, which indeed formed his ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... first in its unhandsome aspect. You would much rather hear a lute in the moonlight upon the lawn, and behold! a coarse plough and a frightful harrow. Yet, so lutes and lawns begin. You like the smooth music of a silken court, the picturesque ceremony, the poetic tradition, the perfume, the splendor, and lo! a troop in jerkin pricking to the fray in horrible earnest, and blood, and ghastly wounds, and torture, and merciful death! Yet, so courts and ceremonies are instituted. One of the hardest battles that reform ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... some wives, are artists at achieving and momentarily living up to romantic settings, but quickly flop down to the lower levels of decent fairness between the high spots of their sentimental flare-ups. Others cannot utter a poetic phrase, make a romantic gesture, or let their eyes show the quick intensity of their tender emotions if they must die for it. This difference is one of make-up and ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... generally have, its outline—beautiful as it is—forming a serrated edge, and it appeared singularly striking from Tacubaya, where I first beheld it. Nevertheless, all these three mountains—the highest points in the country—are of volcanic origin. The majestic and poetic peaks of the "Smoking Mountain" and the "Sleeping Woman" form part of the Sierra Nevada, or Cordillera of Anahuac, in company with Malinche, another of the highest culminating peaks, 14,630 feet above sea-level. This chain is a cross ridge of volcanic and more recent ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... are the beings who I had thought were poetic ornaments of speech! But what is the old lady doing in such ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... spurs of the greater Sonnstein, and rises precipitously, looming, massive and lofty, like a very fortress for giants, where it stands right across that road which, if you follow it long enough, takes you on through Zirl to Landeck—old, picturesque, poetic Landeck, where Frederic of the Empty Pockets rhymed his sorrows in ballads to his people—and so on, by Bludenz, into Switzerland itself, by as noble a highway as any traveller can ever desire to traverse ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... he was THE ONLY GOD, the Creator and Providence of all the universe; but was man also, the GOD-MAN. Thus, gradually, the actual facts of his history were lost out of sight, overgrown with a great mass of fictions, poetic and other stories, which make him a mythological character; the Jesus of fact was well-nigh forgot,—the Christ of fiction ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... man expects to take his whack first—I mean to hit some man on the head, or stab some woman in the breast, first. Then he professes himself quite ready for the consequences, and poetic justice is satisfied." ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... series of earthquakes and titanic convulsions. Narrow miss he has had, of pulling down his house about his ears, and burying self, son, wife, family and fortunes, under the ruin-heap,—a monument to remote posterity. Never was such an enchanted dance, of well-intentioned Royal Bear with poetic temperament, piped to by two black-artists, for the Kaiser's and Pragmatic Sanction's sake! Let Tobacco-Parliament also rejoice; for truly the play was growing dangerous, of late. King and Parliament, we may suppose, return to Public Business ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... at those Italian poets who bewail the isolation of their Lauras, yet, recalling my Lady Buckingham's repeated rescues, I begin to recognize a reason for the existence of that poetic fervor which agitates the artistic heart when either its safety or its vanity is ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... to Scotland," he said. "Your Scotland is grand, mountainous—all that there is of the most savage and poetic. It is a Switzerland lined with Brittany. But that which most speaks to the heart of a stranger is the peaceful beauty of ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... danger this impure game of false statesmanship, this system of bribes, frauds, flatteries, and intimidations threatened the Confederacy, exposed to it on all sides. Two poems, written about the year 1510 or 1511, "The Labyrinth" and "A poetic Fable concerning an Ox and several Beasts," are to be received partly as pictures of the time, and partly as lessons of warning. Vigorous, rich in thought, original in conception, but somewhat rude in language, they exhibit a row of well-drawn ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... world of thought—have an intense human interest, and belong essentially to the creative imagination of poetry. It is with these moments that my poem is chiefly concerned, not with any impossible attempt to cover the whole field or to make a new poetic system, after the Lucretian ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... muse,—Sometimes apt to refuse The guidance of bit and of bridle, Still blankly demur, spite of whip and of spur, Unimpassioned, inconstant, or idle; Only let me puff, puff, till the brain cries enough, Such excitement is all I'm in lack o', And the poetic vein soon to fancy gives reign, Inspired by ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... of herself, and she was one of a population in a universal nation whose devout citizen she was. Sometimes, in response to an interjection from Ingolby, deftly made, she told of some incident which revealed as great a poetic as dramatic instinct. As she talked, Ingolby in his imagination pictured her as a girl of ten or twelve, in a dark-red dress, brown curls falling in profusion on her shoulders, with a clear, honest, beautiful eye, and a face that only spoke of a joy of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... love with Helen, but he had taken for granted the thought that she liked him better than anyone else. Now he was beginning to fear that perhaps she did not, and, with his temperament, wounded vanity and poetic imagination supplied the rest. Within a fortnight he considered himself desperately ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... days after Jones' conversation with him he was silent and thoughtful at his work. Instead of making poetic memos, like Service, in his cage, he made note of the work he waded through, and tried to picture himself in a private office. That was going one further than Jones' imaginary desk with the telephone at one's elbow, but the imagination ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... Browning's mother of Scottish and German origin; his father a man of exceptional powers, artist, poet, critic, student; Mr. Browning's opinion of his son's writings; the home in Camberwell; Robert Browning's childhood; concerning his optimism; his fondness for Carravaggio's "Andromeda and Perseus"; his poetic precocity; origin of "The Flight of the Duchess"; writes Byronic verse; is sent to school at Peckham; his holiday afternoons; sees London by night, from Herne Hill; the significance of the spectacle ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... opera done at Dresden 1820, is the most favored of Weber's compositions. It is truly German, being both fantastic and poetic. The libretto is an old German legend and ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Goldsmith's Hermit, are not quite so satisfactory in actual practice as in poetic theory; at least to a young lady who had been habituated to all the luxuries of fashionable life. It was in ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... bracing songs, full of the Imperial spirit, of healthy sentiment and fresh air, and not without a true sense of poetic style.' ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... libre and the deliberate straining for poetic effect these lyrics of Mrs. Johnson bring with them a certain sense of relief and freshness. Also the utter absence of the material theme makes an appeal. We are all weary of the war note and are glad to return to the softer pipings of old time themes—love, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... to be able to sing. The old song is given in full in Wagenseil's book, and on the next page I have reproduced a portion of this song in fac-simile, so that my readers can observe the accuracy of Wagner's quotation and form an idea of the nature of the poetic frenzy which used to fill the mastersingers, as well as enjoy the ornamental passages (called "Blumen" in the old regulations) and compare them with the fiorituri ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Wagner seems to have been a woman of marked mentality—not especially musical or poetic, but possessing a fine appreciation of all good things, and best of all, she had commonsense. She very early came to regard Richard as her most promising child, and before he was ten years of age, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... lawyers," whether arguing to courts or juries. In the same way, critically correct but unimaginative scholars, who "can pardon anything but a false quantity,"—who "see the hair on the rope, but not the rope," and detect minute errors, but not poetic apprehension,—admitted at last the fulness and variety of his scholastic attainments. And perhaps the finest tribute to the power and subtlety of his influence was, that, to the last, juries, who began cases by steeling themselves against ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... Since then so much poetic liberty is taken with the Devil, relating to his most early state, and the time before his fall, give me leave to make an excursion of the like kind, relating to his History immediately after the fall, and till the creation of man; an interval which I think much of the Devil's story is to be ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... composition. It has been said that a true taste for Shakespeare is like the creation of a special sense; and this saying is nowhere better approved than in reference to his subtile variations of language and style. He began with what may be described as a preponderance of the poetic element over the dramatic. As we trace his course onward, we may discover a gradual rising of the latter element into greater strength and prominence, until at last it had the former in complete subjection. Now, ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... "an' I found out where he got them, too. He let out that he bagged them all out by the Upper St. John's River, due west of here. He declared the birds were as thick as the stars at night, but I reckon some allowance has to be made for poetic license and the red ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... vessels we ever were acquainted with, there was never such a thing heard of, as 'nothing to do.' As to 'Saturday nights' exclusively devoted to pledging 'sweethearts and wives' over a flowing can in the forecastle, we are sorry to say, we regard that as little better than a poetic myth. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... the incredible events of the past few days, and the actors drifted before her vision fitfully: Isabelle, white-bosomed and beautiful, in her prime; Tony Pope, passionate and wretched; Royal, low-voiced, dreamy, poetic, with his eloquent black eyes; Nina, newly awakened; Ward, weak, boyish, ardent; Madame Carter full of theatrical dignity and well-rounded phrases, and lastly—simple, strong, anxious to protect them all, even from their ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... not possess poetic imagination himself, he considered it a most superfluous quality in others. Painters and musicians he could tolerate, and even encourage, because he could relish the results of their art; he could see the charm of a fine picture, and feel the pleasure ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... italics. According to the principle stated above, the reader should avoid giving them that pronunciation which the correct rending of the poetry would require, but should read them as prose, except where he can throw off all accent and thus compromise the conflict between the poetic reading and the correct reading. That is, he must read the poetry wrong, in order to ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... was, it lacked the fulness of poetic justice, since the chief offender escaped him. While Gourgues was sailing towards Florida, Menendez was in Spain, high in favor at court, where he told to approving ears how he had butchered the heretics. Borgia, the sainted General ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... II. resided while visiting his sister, Marie Antoinette. It is known now as Foyot’s; this name must awaken many happy memories in the hearts of American students, for it was long their favorite meeting-place. In the early seventies a club, formed among the literary and poetic youth of Paris, selected Foyot’s as their “home” during the winter months. Their summer vacations were spent in visiting the university towns of France, reciting verses, or acting in original plays at Nancy, Bordeaux, Lyons, or Caen. The enthusiasm these youthful performances created inspired ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... considered himself an idiot, a fool, for having all his life adored chimeras, and followed, as children do passing music, the fanfares of poetic chivalry. Yes, faith, enthusiasm, love, were so many cheats, so many lies. All beings who, like himself, were worshippers of the ideal, all dreamers of better things, all lovers of love, were inevitably doomed to deception, treason, and the stupid ironies of fate. And, full of anger ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... this breach for the passage of the army. There is another version of the making, which links it with the throes of Roland's defeat and death at Roncesvalles, at the end instead of at the beginning of the invasion; but even under unbounded poetic license, the mind refuses to admit that the wounded hero, bleeding and gasping for breath, could have made his way a hundred miles over the mountains from Roncesvalles, to shiver his sword against the cliffs of the Cirque and end his death-struggles ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... a delicate world of fays and hobgoblins, made for a woman's soul. When the great creation of the saintly Legend gets stopped and dried up, that other older, more poetic legend comes in for its share of welcome; reigns privily with gentle sway. It is the woman's treasure; she worships and caresses it. The fay, too, is a woman, a fantastic mirror wherein she sees herself in ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... moaning, as if I were not there; I not daring to speak to the lone and awful woman. After a little pause, she knelt down before the picture of our Lady of the Holy Heart, and spoke to her by all the fanciful and poetic names of ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... travelled backwards and forwards by omnibus—children who had no other recreation than an occasional visit to the Zoological Gardens, or a somewhat sombre walk up to Hampstead to see their aunt; and I have often regretted that they never had any experience of those perfect poetic pleasures which the boy enjoys whose childhood is spent in the country, and whose home is there. A country ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... evening in his favorite May; Who warns his friend "to shake off toil and trouble, And quit his books, for fear of growing double"; Who, both by precept and example, shows That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose; Convincing all, by demonstration plain, Poetic souls delight in prose insane, And Christmas stories, tortured into rhyme, Contain the essence of the true sublime; Thus, when he tells the tale of Betty Foy, The idiot mother of "an idiot boy," A moon-struck silly lad who lost his way, And, like his bard, confounded ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... fell into a revery, and her eyes were veiled. Daniel remained in a state of anxious expectation, impressed with the solemnity of the occasion. His poetic imagination made him see, as it were, clouds slowly dispersing and disclosing to him the sanctuary where the wounded lamb was kneeling at ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... of the intelligent edility of Hyeres, he has been interred, below this frugal stone, in the garden which he honoured for so long with his poetic presence.) ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... turn my ravished eyes, Gay gilded scenes and shining prospects rise; Poetic fields encompass me around, And still I seem to ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... bottom), a bottomless depth; hence any deep place. From the late popular abyssimus (superlative of Lon Latin abyssus) through the French abisme (i.e. abime) is derived the poetic form abysm, pronounced as late as 1616 to rhyme with time. The adjective "abyssal'' or "abysmal'' has been used by zoologists to describe deep regions of the sea; hence abysmal zone, abysmal flora and fauna, abysmal accumulations, the deposit on the abysmal bed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... how these citizens, rough and sordid as many of them were, rose to the poetic value of the situation. As one of them, who had seen (and loved) the girl, told of her youth and beauty, they all stood in rigidly silent attention. "She's hardly more than a child," he explained, "but you never ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... aroused the Germans to a real sense of what their native heath meant for them; neither is Heimatkunst opposed to naturalism. In both Heimatkunst and naturalism nature is the watchword, but with the difference that what for the one is the principle is for the other the subject of poetic representation. Naturalism aimed to give the impression of inexorable fidelity to nature in the reproduction of the unhealthful and of that which strictly speaking was contrary to nature; Heimatkunst, on the other hand, had recourse to free and open nature as the unfailing fountain ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just spirit of equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... numerous, powerful, and warlike nation, but at the time of my birth had dwindled in numbers to about five hundred souls, and were restricted in territory to some six or seven thousand acres. They then, and at present, sank their primitive appellation in the less poetic name of Gayheads, which was given them by the white people with reference to the little elbow or promontory of land where they lived. Though the manners and customs of the Whites had made sad inroads on the primitive Indian character, there yet remained, at the time ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... lose poetic flow Soon after twenty-seven or so; Professionizing moral men Thenceforth admire what pleased them then; The poems bought in youth they read, And say them over like their creed. All autumn crops of rhyme seem strange; ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... imagination went straight back to Socrates and Leonidas, and pictured in the islander or the hillsman who rose against Mahmud II. the counterpart of those glorious beings who gave to Europe the ideals of intellectual energy, of plastic beauty, and of poetic truth. The illusion was a happy one, if it excited on behalf of a brave people an interest which Servia or Montenegro might have failed to gain; but it led to a reaction when disappointments came; it gave inordinate importance to the question of the physical descent of ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... stirred to a faint surprise and contempt the jaded spirit of one reluctant listener present among them. This was a stranger who had arrived that evening at the monastery, and who intended remaining there for the night—a man of distinguished and somewhat haughty bearing, with a dark, sorrowful, poetic face, chiefly remarkable for its mingled expression of dreamy ardor and cold scorn, an expression such as the unknown sculptor of Hadrian's era caught and fixed in the marble of his ivy-crowned Bacchus-Antinous, whose half-sweet, half-cruel smile suggests a perpetual doubt of all ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... admiration of romantic and elevated minds. But it wants that yet higher excellence, which arises from a thorough knowledge of human nature—a graphic delineation of actual character, a faithful picture of the real passions and sufferings of mortality. It is the most perfect example of poetic fancy; but the highest species of the epic poem is to be found not in poetic fancy, but poetic history. The heroes and heroines of the Jerusalem Delivered are noble and attractive. It is impossible to study ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... for many of these men are toiling thus wearily for laughing-lipped children, calm-browed wives, or saintly mothers, gathering around the household hearth in some far-away country. Even among the few now remaining on the river there are wanderers from the whole broad earth, and, oh, what a world of poetic recollection is suggested by their living presence! From happiest homes and such luxuriant lands has the golden magnet drawn its victims. From those palm-girdled isles of the Pacific, which Melville's gifted pen has consecrated to such beautiful ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... faculty of perceiving and appreciating analogies. It is certainly not necessary that an interpreter of Scripture should be a poet; but to possess in some measure that eye for parallels which constitutes the basis of the poetic faculty, is a most desirable qualification for one who proposes to help his neighbours in the study of the parables. It is, indeed, true that a man who possesses only a very small measure of this or of other mental ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... as a separable faculty, but as a pure vital suffusion. Hence he is an inevitable poet. There is no drop of his blood, there is no fibre of his brain, which does not crave poetic expression. Mr. Carlyle desires to postpone poetry; but as Providence did not postpone Whittier, his wishes can hardly be gratified. Ours is, indeed, one of the plainest of poets. He is intelligible and acceptable to those who have little either of poetic culture or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... draw our own morals!" He usually made these chaotic exclamations after reading through several pages of very neat manuscript in which the sentences were long and involved, and in which were employed polysyllabic adjectives of a poetic connotation. This editor liked short, crisp sentences. He wanted his adjectives served hot. He despised poetic connotation. Being only an editor, his name was Brown. If he had been a writer, he would have had three names, beginning with ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... Lucille went up to pack her bag. Archie strolled out on to the terrace outside the hotel, where he smoked, communed with nature, and thought of Lucille. He always thought of Lucille when he was alone, especially when he chanced to find himself in poetic surroundings like those provided by the unrivalled scenery encircling the Hotel Hermitage. The longer he was married to her the more did the sacred institution seem to him a good egg. Mr. Brewster might regard their marriage as one of the world's most unfortunate ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... to the cosmical meaning of the Court of the Universe his four elements - monumental, horizontal compositions of pronounced decorative effect. Air is the one of finest poetic feeling. She holds the star to her ear and listens to the music of the spheres. The eagle, the symbol of the air, is used with finely balanced effect. On her back are fastened wings, and man, puny man, is aiming, by attaching wings to himself, ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... it stands rather apart from all the recognised species of poetry, and is hard to classify and criticise. Its political and contemporary character cut it off from the imaginative and historical subjects which form in general the matter of poetry, while its genuinely poetic emotion and language separate it from the political pamphlet or the occasional verse. It is a poetic treatment of a political subject raised to a high level by the genuine enthusiasm and fire with which ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... for those thoughts themselves. He wrote little and carefully. He is remarkable for his virtuosity, his harmonious handling of the most varied meters. He never, like Zorrilla, produces the effect of careless improvisation. In the matter of poetic form Espronceda has been the chief inspiration of Spanish poets down to the advent of Rubn Daro. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, with his happy knack of hitting off an author's characteristics in a phrase, says: "He still stirs us with his ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... and recondite—a mine of gold, which the farther it is worked, the more precious its yield becomes. But it everywhere bears the stamp of passion and religious ardour, and does not bespeak the critical incisiveness of a highly civilised age. Argumentative acumen would have been as much below the poetic mind of David in one respect as it was above it in another, and while his rapturous language of admiration and faith seems above the range of human genius; his bitter denunciations of his enemies remind us of his date, and the circumstances by which he was surrounded. Such ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Our feelings lose poetic flow Soon after thirty years or so: Professionising modern men Thenceforth admire what pleased ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is very nave in feeling, very charming in the graceful modeling of the little girl. The decorative scheme of this poetic unit is very simple and well-sustained throughout its ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... said Goethe, "is an unconscious result of the poetic mood. If one should stop to consider it mechanically, when about to write a poem, one would become bewildered and accomplish nothing ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... Fritz Bagger had made his mark, although not as a lover. He had become Counsellor, and was particularly distinguished for the skill and energy with which he brought criminals to confession. It is thus that a man of fine and poetic feelings can satisfy himself in such a business, for a time at least: with the half of his soul he can lead a life which to himself and others seems entire only because it is busy, because it keeps him at ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... shapes before I assumed a consistent form"—that of a sword, a tear, a star, an eagle, etc. Then he was created, without father or mother.[1215] Similar pretensions are common to the medicine-man everywhere. But from another point of view they may be mere poetic extravagances such as are common in Celtic poetry.[1216] Thus Cuchulainn says: "I was a hound strong for combat ... their little champion ... the casket of every secret for the maidens," or, in another place, "I am the bark buffeted ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... long ago Has haunted me; at last I know The heart it sprung from: one more sound Ne'er rested on poetic ground. But, Barry Cornwall! by what right Wring you my breast and dim my sight, And make me wish at every touch My poor old hand could do as much? No other in these later times Has bound me in so potent rhymes. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor |
