"Poetically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... free-fantasia style of the novel, could this great prose-poet have found the right field in which to do justice to her powers. The dry technique in music was a stumbling-block of which she was impatient. History and literature she enjoyed in whatever they offered that was romantic, heroic, or poetically suggestive. In her Nohant surroundings there was nothing to check, and much to stimulate, this dominant, imaginative faculty. Her youthful attempts at original composition she quickly discarded in disgust; but it seemed almost a law of her mind ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... force, or intelligence; and by metaphysical philosophers, soul. If he approached the subject logically, as in his essay, "On a Future State," the ignis fatuus seems to escape him and be lost; if poetically, with the innate voice which speaks ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... to the old name: the 16th of December is now changed into the 26th of June." He explained that the robe, the Bible, the sword, and the sceptre were presents to his Highness from the Parliament, and dwelt poetically on the significance of each. "What a comely and glorious sight," he concluded, "it is to behold a Lord Protector in a purple robe, with a sceptre in his hand, a sword of justice girt about him, and his eyes fixed upon the Bible! Long may you prosperously enjoy them all, to your own ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... "Arrangements in Black," or "Harmonies in Amber and Brown." Here we have the desperate reaction from the idea that l'anecdote is everything to the idea that it is sufficient to represent nothing (poetically conceived!) with little color and less form, with the vaguest and slightest and most untechnical technique. It is hard to say which would most puzzle Titian redivivus—"Little cold tooties," or a blue-gray wash with a point or two of yellow, bearing some imaginary resemblance to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... belief. Sounds, attitudes, practices, etc., are so many vehicles of expression, and may be multiplied indefinitely. They become letters and words and figures of a language which, while being conventional in a way, is also natural and imitative, and speaks more clearly and eloquently and poetically than any other human language. This is what makes the Catholic religion so beautiful as to compel the admiration of believers ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... the Swiss women of the mountains entitled to their reputation for beauty. If strength, proportions on a scale that is scarcely feminine, symmetry that is more anatomically than poetically perfect, enter into the estimate, one certainly sees in some of the cantons, female peasants who may be called fine women. I remember, in 1828, to have met one of these in the Grisons, near the upper end of the valley of the Rhine. This woman had a form, carriage, and proportions that would ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... with a broad and slightly curved blade, used in the Middle Ages; hence, poetically, any type ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... torment shall be as clean and orderly as the cleanest and most orderly place I know in Ireland, which is our poetically named Mountjoy prison. Well, perhaps I had better vote for an efficient devil that knows his own mind and his own business than for a foolish patriot who has no ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... out to him the droll porpoises which had absorbed his attention, and while they stood looking and laughing at them, Henderson came up unobserved, and patting Walter on the back, observed poetically— ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... misfortune and death to those who behold it, throws herself across the path of her rival in the hope of driving her and those interested in her by sheer force of terror from the castle and from Berlin, had been poetically conceived, and it furnished Miss Bretherton with an admirable opportunity. As the White Lady, gliding between rows of armed and spectral figures on either hand, and startling the Princess and her companion by her sudden apparition in a gleam of moonlight ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... glad to see Mr Ward, R. A., again in the Exhibition. His "Virgil's Bulls," is a subject poetically conceived. The whole landscape is in sympathy, waking, watchful sympathy, with the bulls in their conflict. Not a tree, nor a hill, nor a cloud in the sky but looks on as a spectator. All is in keeping. There is no violence in the colour, nothing to distract ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... of which is not so good, poetically considered, as the magnificent beginning, but which ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... think the points you mention look equivocal; but Hunt was a many-laboured and much belaboured man, and as much allowance as may be made on this score is perhaps due to him—no more than that much. His own powers stand high in various ways—poetically higher perhaps than is I at present admitted, despite his detestable flutter and airiness for the most part. But assuredly by no means could he have stood so high in the long-run, as by a loud and earnest defence of Keats. Perhaps the best excuse for him is the remaining possibility ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... representation of flowers, the chances are ten to one that the accompanying lines are of a compromising character. It is obviously cruel to send to a recently-widowed Uncle some verses about "Darby and Joan," and my Mother-in-law is not likely to feel complimented if I forward to her a poetically expressed suggestion that there is no pleasanter place than her own home—away, of course, from her Son-in-law! And yet these are the problems that meet the would-be Yule Tide card distributer at every turn! I remain, my dear Mr. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... dance a little, can't you?" said Jack, in a tone and with a look that made the words better than any compliment any other man had ever paid me on my dancing, though I'd been likened to feathers, and vine-tendrils, and various poetically airy things. ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Moddle, living in the atmosphere of Miss Pecksniff's love, dwelt (if he had but known it) in a terrestrial Paradise. The thriving city of Eden was also a terrestrial Paradise, upon the showing of its proprietors. The beautiful Miss Pecksniff might have been poetically described as a something too good for man in his fallen and degraded state. That was exactly the character of the thriving city of Eden, as poetically heightened by Zephaniah Scadder, General Choke, and other worthies; part and parcel of the talons of that great American Eagle, which is always ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... have thought of Maria speaking poetically? But her words did indeed seem to be the truth. In spite of the embarrassment of her situation and the flutter of her feelings, she was in a state of composure unexampled. Albinia had just gratified her greatly by a few words on Captain ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... morass he came to a great piece of water, six miles long, and three broad, called Drummond's Pond, but more poetically celebrated as the Lake of the Dismal Swamp. It was more elevated than any other part of the swamp, and capable of feeding canals, by which the whole might be traversed. Having made the circuit of it, and noted all its characteristics, he encamped for the night upon the firm land which bordered ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... palms sprouting up in isolated clusters amid tamarisks and bristly reeds. The stream, meanwhile, continued to divide and subdivide into smaller rivulets. After a good deal of walking on this kind of ground, we finally reached the head of the waters—the eye, as the Arabs poetically call a fountain, alluding to its liquid purity, its genial play ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... kind of service is true service. She has many successors among Christ's true followers, who cannot 'gush' nor rise to the heights of His loftiest teaching, but who have taken Him for their Lord, and can, at any rate, do humble, practical service in kitchen or workshop. Their more 'intellectual' or poetically emotional brethren are tempted to look down on them, but Jesus is as ready to defend Martha against Mary, if she depreciates her, as He is to vindicate Mary's right to her kind of expression of love, if Martha should seek to force her own kind ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... run abeam of a cape or object. To cut through a sea, the surface of which is poetically termed breast.—To breast the sea, to meet it by the bow on a wind.—To breast the surf, to brave it, and overcome it swimming.—To breast a bar, to heave at the capstan.—To breast to, the act of giving a ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... tragic jump, like a white horse running away, mad with unreasoning terror. Nevertheless, my bodily eyes were only glass windows which my spirit had deserted. It left them blank still, at Bolton Abbey, which is poetically beautiful (though not as lovable as Fountains), on, up the great brown hill of Barden Moor, through Skipton, where, in the castle, legend says Fair Rosamond lived; until—Haworth. There—before we came to the steep, straight hill leading up to the bleak and huddled ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... sentiment prevailing in Massachusetts would naturally be very powerful in determining any question pertaining to the army. When the country sprang to arms in response to that shot fired at Lexington, the echoes of which, poetically speaking, were heard around the world, the free Negroes of every Northern colony rallied with their white neighbors. They were in the fight at Lexington and at Bunker Hill, but when Washington came to take command of the army he soon gave orders ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... it all was, Milly thought, as they threaded their way homewards through the slovenly, garish Chicago streets, mindful of naught but themselves and their Secret. How could anything so poetically wonderful happen in workaday Chicago? And Milly thought to herself how could any woman consider for a moment sacrificing THIS—"the real, right thing"—for any bribe ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... what has become most obvious to me as a result of it all? First, that I idolize you, and that it is a good thing that I do so. We two are one, and only in that way does a human being become one and a complete entity, that is, by regarding and poetically conceiving himself as the centre of everything and the spirit of the world. But why poetically conceive, since we find the germ of everything in ourselves, and yet remain forever only a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... ruinous, tax without a railing accusation? And why not teach us to help what the laws cannot help?—Why teach us to hate a Nero or an Appius, and not an underselling oppressor of workmen and betrayer of women and children? Why to love a Ladie in bower, and not a wife's fireside? Why paint or poetically depict the horrible race of Ogres and Giants, and not show Giant Despair dressed in that modern habit he walks the streets in? Why teach men what were great and good deeds in the old time, neglecting to show them any good for themselves?—Till ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... that soften their rugged precipices, by festooning them to the very brink. Then there are wild dells running back in the wooded parts of the hill, and walks seem to be made through them for the convenience of maids who love the moon—or more probably, and more poetically too, for the refreshment of the toiling citizens of the smoky town, who wander about among these sylvan recesses, with their wives and families, and enjoy the wondrous beauty of the landscape, without having consulted Burke or Adam Smith on the causes of their delight. As you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... built on seven hills, viz. the Palatine, Capitoline, Quirinal, Esquiline, Viminal, Caelian, and Aventine; hence it was poetically ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... has more than a touch of the divine quality. He did not attempt to compose tragedies of life, for his temperament forbade it; but in his finest music he is never commonplace, because he had a strongly marked temperament and was poetically inspired. By dint of a sincerity that was perfect he made music which, though it is shaped in outline by the classical spirit, will be for ever interesting. To listen to him immediately after Tschaikowsky ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... Fountain of Youth, the Fountain (visible only once a-year) of Immortality, and the Fountain of Resurrection. Many monstrous tribes of enemies supervene; also a Forest of Maidens, kind but of hamadryad nature—"flower-women," as they have been poetically called. It is only after this experience that they come to the Fountain of Youth—the Fontaine de Jouvence—which has left such an indelible impression on tradition. Treachery had deprived Alexander of access to that of Immortality; and ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... friend in the East, or how keenly the ex-Confederate may feel over the "lost cause," the warm-blooded son of Kentucky will fight as bravely under the flag of the republic as will his frozen-featured brother from Minnesota, and the dreamy individual who gazes poetically upon the placid waters of Puget Sound will shout as loudly for one country, and one allegiance to its glorious emblem, as will the gilded youth whose republicanism is artistically refreshed by a constant vision of the Statue of Liberty triumphantly ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... of speech; but in many instances, according to present practice, the same words may be used either adjectively or adverbially. Firmer and ruder are not adverbs, but adjectives. In the example above, they may, I think, be ranked with the instances in which quality is poetically substituted for manner, and be parsed as relating to the pronouns which follow them. A similar usage occurs in Latin, and is considered elegant. Easiest, as used above by Pope, may perhaps be parsed upon the same principle; that is, as relating to those, or to persons ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... "Cockpits." Those highlands are furrowed through and through, as by an earthquake, with a series of gaps or ravines, resembling the California canons, or those similar fissures in various parts of the Atlantic States, known to local fame either poetically as ice-glens, or symbolically as purgatories. These chasms vary from two hundred yards to a mile in length; the rocky walls are fifty or a hundred feet high, and often absolutely inaccessible, while ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... the sigh with her smile—"and now, I'm done. Consider yourself acquainted. And, oh, if you encounter our sages more intimately, a word of warning, especially if the encounter be in the stag room: Dar Hyal is a total abstainer; Theodore Malken can get poetically drunk, and usually does, on one cocktail; Aaron Hancock is an expert wine-bibber; and Terrence McFane, knowing little of one drink from another, and caring less, can put ninety-nine men out of a hundred under the table and go right on lucidly ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... and he must do something to keep from sleeping. He remembered a little interloping hotel, which had lately forced its way into precincts sacred to cottage life, and had impudently called itself the St. Johnswort Inn, after St. John's place, by a name which he prided himself on having poetically invented from his own and that of a prevalent wild flower. Upon the chance of getting an early cup of coffee at this hotel, Hewson finished dressing, and crept down stairs to let ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... poetically does he describe the Modesty of the Man, who wou'd be content, if Merlin wou'd grant him his Request, with a Son ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... houses of Babylonia were constructed of reeds, while the temples and palaces were built of hard-baked clay. "Reed-hut" and "clay structure," thus embracing the architecture of the country, are poetically used to designate the inhabitants of Shurippak. The address to the huts and structures has been appropriately compared by Professor Haupt to the ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... she was put to death can only be likened to that of the lover in Heinrich von Kleist's poetically sublime, but morally atrocious, tragedy, Penthesilcia, except that, in poor Marie's case, the woman suffered from the awful frenzy of the male, in whom the "gentlest passion" degenerated in Saturnalia of revolting cruelty. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... present day their style be thought too elaborate and the allusions commonplace, it cannot be denied that the fine art of English composition would be poorer without them. The stanzas in Childe Harold on Waterloo are full of the energy which takes hold of and poetically elevates the incidents of war—the distant cannon, the startled dancers, the transition from the ball-room to the battlefield, from the gaiety of life to the stillness of death. Nothing very original or profound in all this, it may be said; yet the great difficulty of dealing ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of his are drawn from the outside, and not made actually to live. "His Bailie Jarvies, Dinmonts, Dalgettys (for their name is legion), do look and talk like what they give themselves out for; they are, if not created and made poetically alive, yet deceptively enacted as a good player might do them. What more is wanted, then? For the reader lying on a sofa, nothing more; yet for another sort of reader much. It were a long chapter to unfold the difference in drawing a character between a Scott and a Shakespeare ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... private tutor who succeeded Dr. Lau. He had the children learn the most of Schiller's ballads by heart. Fontane always remained grateful for this, probably because it was as a writer of ballads that he first won recognition. If we look upon the ballad as a poetically heightened form of anecdote we discover an element of unity in his early education, and that will help us to understand why the technique of his novels shows such a ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... supposed poetically that unusual events cast their shadows before them, and I am prepared to maintain the correctness of such a belief. But unless the silence of the constable who walked beside me was due to the unseen presence of such a shadow, and not to a habitual taciturnity, there was nothing in that march ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... to eat a quantity of what may be termed thick porridge, that would have been ample allowance for a hundred ordinary men. Before commencing, San-it-sa-rish desired an aged medicine-man to make an oration, which he did fluently and poetically. Its subject was the praise of the giver of the feast. At the end of each period there was a general "Hou! hou!" of assent—equivalent to the ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... the belly and chest maroon to brown. Two strands, made of a horn substance covered with down, rose over its tail, which was lengthened by long, very light feathers of wonderful fineness, and they completed the costume of this marvelous bird that the islanders have poetically named "the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... we all turned our faces towards it, and began warming our already scorched hands. A great blazing fire, too big, is the visible heart and soul of Christmas. You may do without beef and plum-pudding; even the absence of mince-pie may be tolerated; there must be a bowl, poetically speaking, but it need not be absolutely wassail. The bowl may give place to the bottle. But a huge, heaped-up, over heaped-up, all-attracting fire, with a semicircle of faces about it, is not to be denied us. It is the lar and genius of the meeting; the proof positive of ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... the power of the worshipful Quarterly County Court to issue a mandamus to compel fair weather on that notable Tuesday when the jury of view were to set forth, the god of day could scarcely have obeyed with more alacrity that peremptory writ once poetically ranked as "one of the flowers of the crown." The burnished yellow sunshine had a suggestion of joyous exuberance in its wide suffusions. Even the recurrent fluctuations of shadow but gave its pervasive ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Felix's habitual confusion, and in that mist they lose dramatic emphasis; muted, they are not able to break up the agreeable monotone in which the narrative is delivered. But underneath these surfaces, seen so poetically, there is a substantial bulk of human life, immemorial folkways powerfully contending with the new rebellion ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... at once the opportunity to speak before a convention of suffragists at Atlantic City in an effort to prove his great belief in suffrage. He said poetically, "The tide is rising to meet the moon . . . . You can afford to wait" Whatever we may have thought of his figure of speech, we ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... colour so much admired on bronze statues is fine dark green from the oxide formed upon the metal, which, being placed without doors, is more liable to be corroded by water holding in solution the principles of the atmosphere; "and the rust and corrosion, which are made poetically, qualities of time, depend upon the oxydating powers of water, which, by supplying oxygen in a dissolved or condensed state enable the metal to form new combinations."—Sir ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... and believed to possess an efficacy, though their actual meaning is forgotten. He says they are used at any time as defence from evil, when a person is startled, sneezes, or stumbles. Among these I think I ought to class that peculiar form of friendly farewell or greeting which the Doctor poetically calls a "blown blessing" and the natives Ibata. I thought the three times it was given to me that it was just spitting on the hand. Practically it is so, but the Doctor says the spitting is accidental, a by-product I suppose. The method consists in taking ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... truer faith than Lanier's, nor a faith more poetically and devoutly expressed. In his Sunrise he attains at times the beauty of The Marshes of Glynn, and voices in some of the lines a veritable rhapsody of faith. Yet for sustained elevation of feeling ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... sincerity which bacchanalian poetry, to do it justice, very often has. There is something in it of bravado, something which makes us feel that we have not the man speaking to us with his real voice; something, therefore, poetically unsound. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... freshness verging upon unintelligence. If we had the good fortune to live in a world in which the sky was green and the grass blue, the symbolism would have been different. But for some mysterious reason this habit of realizing poetically the facts of science has ceased abruptly with scientific progress, and all the confounding portents preached by Galileo and Newton have fallen on deaf ears. They painted a picture of the universe compared with which the Apocalypse with its falling stars was a mere idyll. They declared ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... to give the power which I see manifested in the universe an objective form, personal or otherwise, it slips away from me, declining all intellectual manipulation. I dare not, save poetically, use the pronoun "He" regarding it. I dare not call it a "Mind." I refuse even to call it a "Cause." Its mystery overshadows me; but it remains a mystery, while the objective frames which my neighbours try to make it fit, simply ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... in the form of vapor and liquid globules, an eminence is gradually formed, rising constantly in tapering shape, until it reaches a considerable altitude, sometimes one-fourth or one-third the height of the Fall itself. This is known as the Cone. The French people call it more poetically Le Pain de Sucre, or sugar-loaf. On a bright day in January, when the white light of the sun plays caressingly on this pyramid of crystal, illuminating its veins of emerald and sending a refracted ray into its circular air-holes, ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... head, and emerald colour at the throat, chestnut on the breast and belly. Two horned, downy nets rose from below the tail, that prolonged the long light feathers of admirable fineness, and they completed the whole of this marvellous bird, that the natives have poetically named the "bird ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... was all inchoate, unformed, undisciplined, and burning with capricious fires; all expectant, eager, reluctant, tingling, timid, innocently and wistfully audacious. By taking the boy's hand, Big James might have poetically symbolised their relation. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... was, so to speak, the inverse inspiration of the stirring lines "The Lost Leader." Browning's strong sympathies with the Liberal cause are here portrayed with an ardor which is fairly intoxicating poetically, but one feels it is scarcely just to the mild-eyed, exemplary Wordsworth, and perhaps exaggeratedly sure of Shakespeare's attitude on this point. It is only fair to Browning, to point out how he himself felt later that ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... of Ercildoune,) why don't you write to me?—as you won't, I must. I was near you at Aston the other day, and hope I soon shall be again. If so, you must and shall meet me, and go to Matlock and elsewhere, and take what, in flash dialect, is poetically termed "a lark," with Rogers and me for accomplices. Yesterday, at Holland House, I was introduced to Southey—the best-looking bard I have seen for some time. To have that poet's head and shoulders, I would almost have written his Sapphics. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... romanticists, and what he came to abhor he had first adored. He was that pathetic paradox, a prophet who cannot practise what he preaches, who cannot build his doctrine into the edifice of a living faith. Zola was none the less, but all the more, a poet in this. He conceived of reality poetically and always saw his human documents, as he began early to call them, ranged in the form of an epic poem. He fell below the greatest of the Russians, to whom alone he was inferior, in imagining that the affairs of men group themselves strongly about a central interest ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... replied Carlino, vexed. Noemi, having observed that in that case it was useless to drag them about Bruges at such an hour, he poetically compared his preparatory study, his almost photographic notes, to the garlic which is useful in the kitchen, but is not brought to table, and he continued to talk of the ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... works lay two sunshiny novels of childhood, Asmus Semper's Childhood Land (1904), by Otto Ernst, and Gottfried Kaempfer (1904), by Hermann Anders Krueger. These were the most successful novels of those years; Strauss' Death the Comforter is, next to the conclusion of Buddenbrooks, the poetically most significant of these stories of childhood. The writer, rich in comprehension of the vitality of the problems and in the delicacy of his treatment of them, has not had to repeat himself: his novel Friction (1904) is a fine psychological study in the form of a love story, in which life ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... act from motives from which men do not act. They must aspire to be dull, and be proud of their dulness. They must emulate one another's dulness, or they are unfaithful votaries. In short, they are poetically made, and should be so made, to do, consciously and purposely, that which, in real life, they do undesignedly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... my mother's coronet and ring; and Nature might have still so far prevailed that I could have forgiven you at last. But, madam, you have taken the Rajah's Diamond—the Eye of Light, as the Orientals poetically termed it—the Pride of Kashgar! You have taken from me the Rajah's Diamond," he cried, raising his hands, "and all, madam, all is at an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heavens consists of myriads of stars, so remote as to be incapable of definition by unaided vision. Milton's description of this vast assemblage of stars is worthy of its magnificence, and the purpose with which he poetically associates this glorified highway testifies to the sublimity of his thoughts and to the originality of his genius. In those parts of his poem in which he describes the glories of the celestial regions, and instances the beautiful phenomena associated with ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... observed the dawn of day, and witnessed a degree of redness and red clouds, or, more poetically, rosy-tinted clouds, which I never before observed in all the Sahara. Probably now the sky will change to a colouring more like England. Sunset and sunrise in the Sahara are essentially different from those of England, the colours in the desert being exceedingly light and bright; and ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... Arthur gayly called her to her face, a Dutch Deformed Woman, was too simple and sincere in her religious faith to tolerate with equanimity the thought that any one of the name of Merlin should be domiciled in the House of Sin, as she poetically described the ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... generally supposed to forebode evil to the member of the family to whom it appeared, and its movements have thus been poetically described by Lord Byron, who, it may be added, maintained that he beheld this uncanny spectre before his ill-starred ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... and woman ought to know, two main and quite distinct diseases (any other being unimportant) poetically termed "Venereal" because chiefly, though not by any means only, propagated in the intercourse over which the Roman goddess Venus once presided. These two diseases are syphilis and gonorrhoea. Both these diseases are very serious, often terrible, in their effects on the individual ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... ability to see things poetically. To him the rays of the rising sun were not only shining but "laughing on the roof" of his home. His imagery is rich and skillfully applied. Many of his hymns abound in striking similes. Their outstanding characteristic, however, ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... that the Greek tragedy had its origin in the Chorus; and though, in process of time, it became independent, still it may be said that poetically, and in spirit, the Chorus was the source of its existence, and that without these persevering supporters and witnesses of the incident a totally different order of poetry would have grown out of the drama. The abolition of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... many an evening Barop or Middendorf told us of the places through which we were to pass, their history, and the legends which were associated with them. They were aided in this by one of the sub-teachers, Bagge, a poetically gifted young clergyman, who possessed great personal beauty and a heart capable of entering into the intellectual life of the boys who were entrusted ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... most celebrated of the works belonging to this class of so-called "visionary" writings is the Fis or "Vision" which goes under the name of the famous Irish saint, Adamnan, who was poetically entitled the "High Scholar of the Western World." This particular vision, the Fis Adamnain, is remarkable among other things for its literary quality, which is far superior to anything of the time, and for the fact that it represents "the highest level of the school to which it belonged," ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... favorite words, for seeming to undervalue the facts of natural science, as such, and to belittle the works of the natural historian because he does not give us poetry and lessons in morals instead of botany and geology and ornithology, pure and simple. "Everything," he says, "should be treated poetically—law, politics, housekeeping, money. A judge and a banker must drive their craft poetically, as well as a dancer or a scribe. That is, they must exert that higher vision which causes the object to become ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... This house is a good house, certainly, but not one in which people feel poetically, are easily moved, open their arms at once, and press new-comers to their heart. It is a straightforward, prosaic house, where requests are made and refused in few words; and it is a proud and rigid house besides. Remember this, it is no tender welcome to which you are leading ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... life has but small value in the history of thought. His difficulties do not go deep enough; his struggle is intellectually not serious enough—we see in it only a common incident of modern experience poetically told; it throws no light on the genesis and progress of the great forces which are molding and renovating the thought of the present—it tells us nothing ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... time become an affectation. He was confident that there were many people, both men and women, who knew only Italian, who would gladly read not only his verses but his treatise on science,—The Banquet,[220] as he poetically ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... with a great noise of eager gobbling, much like that of the swine's trough fresh filled, as though a vast assembly of the hungered had seated themselves clamorously and fallen to on meats and drinks in a silence, save of the chaps. A rapid walker poetically and humourously minded gathers multitudes of images on his way. And rain, the heaviest you can meet, is a lively companion when the resolute pacer scorns discomfort of wet clothes and squealing boots. South-western ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... unfortunately. But, our noses—there is the solution. In direct proximity to the eye, the color, properly applied, tints one's vision of all things. Green shadows in a green world," mooned Cyrus the Gaunt poetically. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... canvas of "Pan," now in the Berlin Gallery, is the picture of which Vasari wrote: "He painted for Lorenzo dei Medici, on canvas, some nude gods, which were much praised ... and presented to the said Lorenzo."[50] Sometimes called the "School of Pan," it is more poetically described in the German catalogue "Pan, as God of Natural Life, and Master of Music, with his Attendants." It is full of poetry, and of idyllic charm with all its stately solemnity. The sad beauty of the ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... periodically morbid, a transmuted heritage. The financial need directed her training into practical lines; she studied stenography and was fortunate in securing a position in the office of John Evanson, the energetic senior member of a growing leather-manufacturing firm. There was something poetically appealing to this busy man in the quiet, sometimes sad-faced, fine- faced, competent woman, which gradually created in him a hungering sense of need-and he called one night. He afterwards said if he hadn't married Charlotte, he would have married her mother, who, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... by which he poetically intimated the pleasing ceremony which had awaked him to the duties of the day. I think it needless to subjoin that the Doctor's cold did not get better as long as we remained in the neighbourhood, and that, had it not been for the daily ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... books, the conversations of musicians to the lectures of professors, he first neglected and at last altogether abandoned the study of the healing art. A. Boguslawski, who wrote a biography of Elsner, tells the story differently and more poetically. When, after a long illness during his sojourn in Breslau, thus runs his version, Elsner went, on the day of the Holy Trinity in the year 1789, for the first time to church, he was so deeply moved by the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... 'false morality.' In illustration he gives a singular list of words, including 'fate, chance, heaven, hell, providence, prudence, innocence, substance, fiend, angel, apostle, spirit, true, false, desert, merit, faith, etc., all of which are mere participles poetically embodied and substantiated by those who use them.' A couple of specific applications, often quoted by later writers, will sufficiently indicate ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... translate it word for word ... but I will not and have not translated it in that way, and I will venture to maintain that my translation is a faithful one, historically faithful, inasmuch as I have never wilfully altered or interpolated anything, and poetically faithful inasmuch as I have tried with all my might vividly to express what I saw in the poem.... Whoever understands both languages and possesses a poetical sense will see what I mean, and whoever is deficient in knowledge or sense, or both, may stick to his own view, if he will ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... and retrieved in the morning by his housemaid under the chandelier. Neither is Lady Dedlock less reprehensible in her conduct than many women of fashion have been and will be: but it would not therefore have been thought poetically just, in old-fashioned morality, that she should be found by her daughter lying dead, with her face in the mud of a St. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... can, you false-hearted crocodile!" said Rhoda, poetically, in distant imitation of the flowers of rhetoric of her friend Molly. "I ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... full-length glass, and the worst immediately happened. It might have been a little less violent, perhaps, if Penrod's expectations had not been so richly and poetically idealized; but as things were, ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... is, the aspect of the mansion under the varying influence of twilight and moonlight, and cloud and sunshine operating upon its halls, and galleries, and monkish cloisters, is enough to breed all kinds of fancies in the minds of its inmates, especially if poetically or superstitiously inclined. ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... poet, Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586, had written and circulated among his friends a more ambitious collection of a hundred and eight sonnets. Most of Sidney's sonnets were addressed by him under the name of Astrophel to a beautiful woman poetically designated Stella. Sidney had in real life courted assiduously the favour of a married lady, Penelope, Lady Rich, and a few of the sonnets are commonly held to reflect the heat of passion which the genuine intrigue developed. But Petrarch, Ronsard, and Desportes inspired the majority of Sidney's ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... and Tea, viewed Classically, Poetically, and Practically. Containing Numerous Curious Dishes and Feasts of all Times and all Countries, besides Three Hundred Modern Receipts. New York. D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... had turned on his heel and gone, he stood there, graceful head lowered a little and partly turned as though poetically appreciative of the soft twittering music which the bluebirds were ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... striking scenery without being deeply moved by it. As for the mere candles, if placed on a deal dresser or shop-counter, they might have failed to touch him; but if burning in some lyke-wake beside the dead, or in some vaulted crypt or lonely rock-cave, he also could not have looked other than poetically on them. I have seen him awed into deep solemnity, in our walks, by the rising moon, as it peered down upon us over the hill, red and broad, and cloud-encircled, through the interstices of some clump of dark ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... her companions. Seized with love for her, he carried her off to his grotto. Plato, by the mouth of Socrates, rejects a rationalist interpretation of this myth. According to this explanation, an outward, natural fact is poetically symbolised by the narrative. A hurricane seized the king's daughter and hurled her over the rocks. "Interpretations of this sort," says Socrates, "are learned sophistries, however popular and usual they may be.... For one who has pulled to pieces one of these mythological forms ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... Inglesi, or the Protestant burial-ground, stretches calmly and beautifully below the Pyramid of Cestius. The site was admirably chosen,—nothing can be more poetically and religiously sepulchral than this most attractive spot. It is worth a thousand churches. No one can stand long there without feeling in full descent upon his spirit the very best influences of the grave. The rich, red, ruinous battlements of the city, broken ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... the thong about your neck until you choke to death," finished Neil. "That's the 'Straight Death.' If the end doesn't come by morning the sun will finish the job. It will dry out the wet rawhide until it grips your throat like a hand. Poetically we call it the hand of Strang. ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... system of Schools and Universities, Milton goes on to explain what he would substitute. As he poetically expresses it, he will detain his readers no longer in the wretched survey of things as they are, but will conduct them to a hill-side where he will point out to them "the right path of a virtuous and noble education, laborious indeed at the first ascent, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... for her meals. Consequently when I found her within easy reach of a goose and in an atmosphere of herbs of a savoury character, it seemed unnatural to me that she should deliberately turn her back upon all these good things to listen to Mr. TREE'S poetically (but lengthily) expressed views upon liberty. I could but wonder why her choice had not fallen upon the goose on the table. Mr. BROOKFIELD as Louis the Eleventh, incidentally suggests that that wily monarch was guilty of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... the bank, as it passes, the Mississippi steamboat looks like a large hotel, or mansion of many windows, set adrift and moving majestically—"walking the water like a thing of life," as it has been poetically described. Some of the larger ones, taking into account their splendid interior decoration, and, along with it their sumptuous table fare, may well merit the name oft bestowed upon ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... feet of the Chinese women, though admired by the Chinese and poetically referred to by them as "three-inch gold lilies," are in our eyes a very unpleasant deformity—but still, even with this deformity, the walk of the Chinese woman is more comely than the gait of the Japanese woman as she shambles ungracefully along with her little bent legs, scraping ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... events, the attack of William the Lion of Scotland on Alnwick Castle, and the more famous affair still, the struggle between Percy and Douglas known as the battle of Otterburn, which was fought in "Chevy Chase" (Cheviot Forest). More important poetically than politically, it stands out more vividly in the records of the time than many other conflicts of larger import. The personal element in the fight, the deeds of gallantry recorded, the sounding roll of the chief knights' names, and the high renown of the two leaders, throw ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... than poetically just. Let us cultivate, under the command of good principles, 'la thorie des sensations agrables;' and, as Mr. Burke once admirably counselled a grave ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... unpleasant. I should be sorry to live in a house that contained one of them. The best thing of Haydon was a hasty dash of a sketch for a small, full-length portrait of Wordsworth, sitting on the crag of a mountain. I doubt whether Wordsworth's likeness has ever been so poetically brought out. This gallery is altogether of modern painters, and it seems to be a receptacle for pictures by artists who can obtain places nowhere else,—at least, I never heard of their names before. They were very uninteresting, almost without exception, and yet some of the pictures were done ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... chosen by Verdi for his "Falstaff" and Puccini for his "Manon Lescaut." In truth, "Iris" is none of these. It begins as an allegory, grows into a play, and ends again in allegory, beginning and end, indeed, being the same, poetically and musically. Signor Illica went to Sr Peladan and d'Annunzio for his sources, but placed the scene of "Iris" in Japan, the land of flowers, and so achieved the privilege of making it a dalliance with pseudo-philosophic ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... tale, of which I give you all The random scheme as wildly as it rose: The words are mostly mine; for when we ceased There came a minute's pause, and Walter said, 'I wish she had not yielded!' then to me, 'What, if you drest it up poetically?' So prayed the men, the women: I gave assent: Yet how to bind the scattered scheme of seven Together in one sheaf? What style could suit? The men required that I should give throughout The sort of mock-heroic gigantesque, ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... may find choice little spots, farm-houses, over which the woodbine and the honeysuckle clamber, while the surrounding wheat fields—(I have lost my volume of WHITMAN, and forget what the wheat fields do, poetically.) Perhaps it is my duty to here introduce some remarks about farming, but, as the Self-made Man is struggling with that subject, and as a certain innocent, who has been abroad, proposes to handle ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... gorgeous flowers upon the mountain slopes, radiant rhododendron, rosebay, and laurel, and the azalea rising like flame; or the rare beauties of the water—the cataract of Linville, taking its shimmering leap into the gorge, and that romantic river poetically celebrated in the lines: ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... great remodeller of myths, Stesichorus (122-201) who first in his "Destruction of Ilion" brought Aeneas to the land of the west, that he might poetically enrich the world of fable in the country of his birth and of his adoption, Sicily and Lower Italy, by the contrast of the Trojan heroes with the Hellenic. With him originated the poetical outlines of this fable as thenceforward fixed, especially the group of the hero ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... if prudent, rich man; and no one, in short, plays his part like a puppet, but acts as one expects him to act, always allowing the peculiar atmosphere of these tales; and to crown all, as the story comes to its end, the high-souled and poetically conceived Illugi throws a tenderness on the dreadful story of the end of the hero, contrasted as it is with that of the ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... of this party were yclept poetically by their own people, as noms de guerre, the Sun and the Moon, i. e., Bulan, for moon, and Matari for sun. The Sun was as fine a young man as the eye would wish to rest upon; straight, elegantly yet strongly made, with a ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... of recollections from the Old Testament, was put together in a natural way; but allowing its composition to have been perfectly natural, it cannot be ascribed to the artless Mary, but to him who poetically wrought out the tradition in circulation respecting the scene in question" ("Life of Jesus," by Strauss, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... One of the philosophers, whose doctrines were poetically paraphrased in the report of the scientific responses upon human immortality, writes that he enjoyed the poetical paraphrase very much, and never laughed over anything so heartily. It would be pleasant to hear the real sentiments of the remainder. It would be equally interesting ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... of the ice [poetically taken from the frost] still congealed the hail-drops in her hair; they were like the specks of white ashes on the twisted boughs of the blackened and half-consumed oak that ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... sons, Bob and John, though he knew very well of that ploughed-ground appearance near the corners of her once handsome eyes, and that the little depression in her right cheek was not the lingering dimple it was poetically assumed to be, but a result of the abstraction of some worn-out nether millstones within the cheek by Rootle, the Budmouth man, who lived by such practices on the heads of the elderly. But what of that, when ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... of a Baronetcy to her father—the only return which it was then in the power of the Crown to bestow, for the heavy losses he had sustained—was gratefully declined on the ground of poverty. In 1644 important changes took place in her family, or, as she poetically expresses it, alluding to the state of public affairs, "as the turbulence of the waves disperses the splinters of the rock," so were they separated. Her brother William died in consequence of a fall from ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... mouth has ten thousand charms, that touch the soul. When she smiles, 'tis with a beauty and sweetness that forces adoration. She has a vast quantity of fine fair hair; but then her person!—one must speak of it poetically to do it rigid justice; all that the poets have said of the mien of Juno, the air of Venus, come not up to the truth. The Graces move with her; the famous statue of Medicis was not formed with more delicate proportions; ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... with a profusion of thanks that was remarkable for them to indulge in, adding that they would be sure and have it placed in the centre of the great table at the wedding. I had also contemplated accompanying it with a few complimentary verses,—not that I was at all poetically inclined, but my idea was that they would feel a little grand at having some poetry about on the occasion. Indeed, I did write something, but it was so much of an effort that I have never made a second attempt. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... Lien, "Filial and Honest"), showing how ethical ideas continued to dominate the literary tribunals. It is now Chu-jin, and denotes nothing but promotion or prize man. The prize, a degree answering to A. M., poetically described as a sprig of the Olea fragrans, was the more coveted as the competitors were all honour men of the first grade, and it was limited to one in a hundred. Its immediate effect is such social [Page ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... humming-birds that they hover about it all day long, burying themselves in its blossoms until petal and wing seem one. At first upright, a little later the gorgeous bells droop downward and fall to the ground unwithered, being poetically called Cupid's tears. Flowers abound here which are only known to us in our hothouses, whose brilliant colors, like those of the cactus, scarlet, yellow, and blue, are quite in harmony with the surroundings, where everything is aglow. There was pointed out to us a specimen of the frangipanni, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... translations of Hindu sacred books must be taken with a certain amount of caution. Enthusiastic and poetically inclined minds have produced translations which can only be said to remotely represent the originals (if we are to accept the opinion of some who are competent to know), into which they have read much more than is really to be found there. Also, terms taken from Christian theology have, ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... poetically effective order has been attempted. The English mind has passed through phases of thought and cultivation so various and so opposed during these three centuries of Poetry, that a rapid passage between Old and New, like rapid alteration of the eye's focus in looking ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... neared town, my mind turned to the strange being at my side. Here was a man who could think, and think both learnedly and poetically of the wonders of heaven and earth; and yet who could talk of driving from town a business competitor! Surely that part of his talk which seemed so laughable was in spirit wholly dramatic—intended rather to fill the assumed expectations of his hearers, than truly representing ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... suitable to the poetry of a nation of eccentrics; of people for the time being removed far from the centre of intellectual interests. The hearty and pleasant task of expressing one's intense dislike of something one doesn't understand is much more poetically achieved by saying, in a general way "Grrr—you swine!" than it is by laboured lines such as "the red fool-fury of the Seine." We all feel that there is more of the man in Browning here; more of Dr. Johnson or Cobbett. Browning is ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton |
