"Sonnet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Emerson's poems were published, there was quite a desire to know what his sonnet to our friend William H. Channing was like. The disappointment was great when, instead of a grand, glowing sonnet to a great-souled man, it took up only an exceptional point of feeling in his mind on the Abolition question, on which they were not quite agreed. Quite a little ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... genius combined with force of character released men from the shackles of ordinary morality."[2254] Cellini was a specimen man of his age. He kept religion and morality far separated from each other.[2255] Varchi wrote a sonnet on him which is false in fact and in form, and displays the technical and conventional insincerity of the age.[2256] The augmentative form of the name Lorenzaccio expresses the notion that he was great, awful, and ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... rarest edition of him, which I have been able to put my hand upon, is that printed at Bologna in 1476 with the commentary of Franciscus Philelphus. Each sonnet is followed by its particular comment. The type is a small roman, not very unlike the smallest of Ulric Han, or Reisinger's usual type, and a full ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... show delicate appreciation of the beautiful, and imaginative quality. A sonnet entitled 'Dreams' is peculiarly full of sympathy and feeling." — ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... and apprehension, and before it had found the love which was to reveal it to itself, transform the character, and give new impulse and direction to personal force and individual sense. These were written when I was twenty and twenty-one years of age, and the sonnet sequence of 'A Lover's Diary' was begun when I was twenty- three. They were continued over seven years in varying quantity. Sometimes two or three were written in a week, and then no more would be written ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... It's fanciful, perhaps but, if you don't mind waiting a little, I should like to contribute—not my card, but a sonnet. I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... which gradually merges in that grave final resolve, that sudden seeing how Beatrice can be glorified by him, that solemn, quiet, brief determination not to say any more of her as yet; not till he can show her transfigured in Paradise. "After this sonnet there appeared unto me a marvellous vision, in which I beheld things that made me propose unto myself to speak no more of this blessed one, until the time when I might more worthily treat of her. And that this may come to pass, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... well against law and lawyers,' says Coleridge to Godwin, 'be so good as to leave a larger place for your wafer, as by neglect of this a part of your last was obliterated.' Again, in a more serious tone, 'Ere I had yet read or seen your works, I, at Southey's recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half understanding of your principles, and the not half understanding of my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist.' His moods and circumstances, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... they possess many characteristics which claim attention and deserve applause. They are never drunkards or wife-beaters; they don't drag their business to the dinner-table and bed; they are not given to profane speech; and they show greater interest in a sonnet than in the price ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... survive perfidy"; and in the relations between men and women unfaithfulness is held to cancel all bonds, however indissoluble they may seem. Now and again, it is true, some strange voice reaches us, keyed to a different music. Shakespeare, for example, in his famous one hundred and sixteenth sonnet, boldly ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... sank, never to return. I dashed off the jests well enough, but somewhere between the keys and the types they were lost, and the results, when I came to scan the paper, were depressing. And once I tried a sonnet on the keys. Exactly how to classify the jumble that came out of it I do not know, but it was curious enough to have appealed strongly to D'Israeli or any other collector of the literary oddity. More ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... to be sure I must, but I always could get myself out of them again. Why, I'll tell you an instance of it.—You must know I was once a journeyman sonnet-writer to Signor Squallini. Now, his method, when seized with the furor harmonicus, was constantly to make me sit by his side, while he was thrumming on his harpsichord, in order to make extempore verses to whatever ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... this way. We've ten days more to go. Let's stick it out as we've begun. It has been best for us, for the office, for the business. The next time you find yourself choked up with a stock of fancy adjectives, write a sonnet to me. Work ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... safeguard of the poet's soul. She is already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She already beholds the face of the Ever-blessed. And the envoye of the Vita Nuova is the promise of the Commedia. "After this sonnet" (in which he describes how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady receiving honor and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed spirit)—"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... this world obscured. It is just what happens every day when the glare of the sunlight, revealing to us every little flower and leaf and insect, shuts out from us the great universe of God which stands forth in the midnight sky. Do you know Blanco White's famous sonnet? He is imagining what Adam must have felt as the first night fell on the earth. All the beautiful world that he had known for but a day was vanishing from him into darkness. Was the end of all things come already? But lo, a stupendous unexpected ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... Tavern," No. 71, Cheapside, the poet Keats once lived. The second floor of the house which stretches over the passage leading to this tavern was his lodging. Here, says Cunningham, he wrote his magnificent sonnet on Chapman's "Homer," and all the poems in his first little volume. Keats, the son of a livery-stable keeper in Moorfields, was born in 1795, and died of consumption at Rome in 1821. He published his "Endymion" (the inspiration suggested from Lempriere alone) in 1818. We annex the glorious sonnet ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... out, the twentieth sonnet, with its reference to the "one thing to my purpose nothing," is alone enough to show that Shakespeare was not a genuine invert, as then he would have found the virility of the loved object beautiful. His sonnets may fairly be compared to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... spirit seemed to assert itself, and passing from smooth prose to smoother poetry, sonnet, song, or psalm, flowed down the page in cadences stately, sweet, or solemn, filling the reader with delight at the discovery of a gift so genuine, yet so shyly folded up within itself, unconscious that its modesty was the surest token of its worth. More than once Sylvia laid ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... Mountcashel, With that malty stuff which Chandos Drivels as no other man does. Catch (i. e. if catch you can) One idea, spick and span, From my Lord of Salisbury,— One idea, tho' it be Smaller than the "happy flea" Which his sire in sonnet terse Wedded to immortal verse.[1] Tho' to rob the son is sin, Put his one idea in; And, to keep it company, Let that conjuror Winchelsea Drop but half another there, If he hath so much to spare. Dreams of murders and of arsons, Hatched ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the closing lines of the first sonnet, and then ran over the second. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed; "when ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... attention and observation to keep it accurately in time to the fiddling. The smallest diversion of the thought, the briefest relaxing of the mind, is fatal to the performance. 'Tis as easy to fix attention on a sonnet of Shakspeare while working at whist as gloat upon your partner while waltzing. It can not be intelligently, appreciatively, and ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... whole months during which he never ventured to cross his threshold at Venice, lest he should fall in with some incensed Florentine like the younger Strozzi. Nor did he escape the cudgels and the daggers of his enemies, although they failed to have the effect which Berni prophesied him in a famous sonnet. Aretino died in his ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... The sonnet to the Earl of Nottingham, the famous admiral and quondam rival of Sir Walter Raleigh, is ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... lady, a sweetheart of Aristotle's; for what was to hinder Aristotle having a sweetheart? I dare say Thomas Aquinas, dry and arid as he was, raised his unprincipled eyes to some Neapolitan beauty, began a sonnet to some lady's eyebrow, though he might forget to finish it. And my belief is that this lady, ambitious as Semele, wished to be introduced as an eternal jewel into the great vault of her lover's immortal Philosophy, which was to travel much farther and agitate far longer than his ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... amid For rest and peace he hankers, Amari aliquid His joys aesthetic cankers: Whate'er he sees, he knows He has to write upon it A paragraph of prose Or possibly a sonnet: ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... This note contains three burlesque sonnets whose chief interest is, that they are, with the exception of the unclaimed sonnet printed in the Monthly Repository in 1834, the first ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... established 1881; Browning's letter thereupon to Mr. Yates; trips abroad; his London residences; his last letter to Tennyson; revisits Asolo; Palazzo Rezzonico; his belief in immortality; his death, Thursday, Dec. 12th, 1889; funeral in Westminster Abbey; Sonnet by George Meredith; new star in Orion; R. Browning's place in literature; Summary, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... and Wordsworth's sonnet, 'In the Pass of Killicranky,' in which the aspiration for 'one hour of that Dundee' is prompted by the fear ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... have thought, that, where all else perished, Odes, Idyls, Lines, Stanzas, this one Sonnet to the stars should be miraculously reserved for such a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the other three 'evening bells,' that to do honour to the pic-nic, we should be dressed alike, in a sort of uniform. Well, of course, the others agreed; but then, how to find the five dresses alike! Of course, we couldn't wear anything made in Saratoga. The poet had entreated us, in a sonnet, to be all dressed in white; so we fixed upon white batiste—but, how to get them, was ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... ideas, to use himself or to sell again. Known to all writers and artists, intimate friend of the palette, familiar spirit of the writing-desk, he was the Asmodeus of the arts. He would sell you cigars in exchange for the plot of a dime novel, slippers for a sonnet, a fresh catch of fish for a paradox; he would talk at so much an hour with newspaper reporters whose duty was to record the lively capers of the smart set. He would get you passes to the parliament buildings, or invitations to private parties; he gave lodgings by the night, the ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... but among the verses of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet and the friend of Charles Lamb, I lately chanced upon a sonnet "written on hearing it remarked that the scenery [of Kingly Bottom] was too gloomy to be termed beautiful; and that it was also associated with dolorous recollections of Druidical sacrifices." In this poem Barton takes a surprisingly novel line. "Nay, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... of the very element Of bondage, that here holds me pent, I'll make my furious sonnet: I'll turn my noose To tightrope use And madly ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... noted," is his own account of himself (Sonnet xcix.), and with what love he noted them, and with what carefulness and faithfulness he wrote of them, is shown in every play he published, and almost in every act and every scene. And what I said ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... 2: Georg Friedrich, Margrave of Baden, was a partisan of the Calvinistic Friedrich V, Elector Palatine, who was chosen King of Bohemia in 1619, and is known as the "Winter King." As the sonnet shows, the defeated Protestants set high hopes on the Margrave of Baden, who commanded an army of 20,000 men; but he was soon defeated by the imperial forces ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... whom they were written. They were copied and preserved with the greatest care in the albums of kings and queens, and some of them were translated into foreign languages. The poem which we quoted first was translated as an Italian sonnet in the thirteenth century, and has been published in Franc Trucchi's "Poesie ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the question of mere ability was concerned, it was found upon experiment, that there was nothing he stopped at. Under a sharp pressure, and when the necessary question of the Play required it, and nothing else would serve, it was found that he could compose 'a sonnet' as well as a state paper, or a decision, or a philosophical treatise. He wrote a sonnet for Essex, addressed to Queen Elizabeth, on one very important occasion. If it was not any better than those attempts at lyrical expression in another department of song, which he has produced ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... a year he writes, "I have not written any poetry this whole summer. Old Mrs. Themis says that I shall not visit any more at the Miss Muses. I'll see the old catamaran hanged, though, but what I will, and I'll write a sonnet to my old shoe directly, out of mere desperation. Pity and sympathize with me." And on March 28, 1843, we find him writing to a ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... into a quotation again. The sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by, unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory. She roused herself to say, as they struck by order into another path, "Is not this one of the ways to Winthrop?" ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... published last week, and enthusiastic Dullborough to have got half through them. (I doubt, by the way, whether it had ever done half that, but that is a private opinion.) A young gentleman with a sonnet, the retention of which for two years had enfeebled his mind and undermined his knees, got the sonnet into the Dullborough Warden, and gained flesh. Portraits of Shakespeare broke out in the bookshop windows, and our principal artist painted a large original portrait ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... of Britain." Compare also Wordsworth's "Sonnet to Wycliffe," and the lines, attributed to an unknown writer of Wycliffe's time: "The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea; And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad, Wide as ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... detailed review nor can justice here be done to all that honest, earnest, hopeful effort of the world-loving artist - he who delights in the myriad phases of our lovely-terrible life, who naively labors to bring forth his sonnet of praise. Be kind to him all ye who contemplate, and remember how much easier it is to criticize than to - be intelligently sympathetic. It is all for you. Take what you like, and leave the rest without pollution. It may serve to comfort and to joy ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... impossible to say. But the example was evidently before them, and the result is certainly such an avoidance. Nevertheless both, and especially Wyatt, had a great deal to learn. It is perfectly evident that neither had any theory of English prosody before him. Wyatt's first sonnet displays the completest indifference to quantity, not merely scanning "harber," "banner," and "suffer" as iambs (which might admit of some defence), but making a rhyme of "feareth" and "appeareth," not on the penultimates, but on the mere "eth." In the following poems even worse liberties are ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... offer some peculiarities. He has one composed of lines of six syllables, others of eight, besides those considered regular in French, consisting, namely, of twelve syllables. The following sonnet addressed to Roumania appears to be ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... be observed that this sonnet consists entirely of monosyllables, and yet that the style of it shows considerable power and vigour. The words printed in italics are all derived from Latin, with the exception of the word phrase, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... The following of the Rose would take a volume, even treated as the poem itself is here. The English version has been referred to: Italian naturalised it early in a sonnet cycle, Il Fiore. Every country welcomed it, but the actual versions are as nothing to the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... spite of all that has been said about Moliere's passionate fondness for his profession, I imagine he must now and then have felt some slight, or suffered from some want of consideration. Hence perhaps the above sentence. Compare with this Shakespeare's hundred and eleventh sonnet: ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... look well to the main chance before they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her. After that may come the marriage, and the sonnet written by the next of friendship, and printed to hang up in all the shop-windows, celebrating the auspicious event. If he be rich, or can write nobile after his Christian name, perhaps some abbate, elegantly addicted to verses and alive to grateful consequences, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... paper of his did gain the honours of publication, so that his disease did not die out, as happens with some. He went on, writing whatever came into his head, and putting his ideas out in every variety of literary mould—from a blank-verse tragedy to a sonnet, and a three-volume novel to a society paragraph—with equal ardour and ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... into English poetry by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. Their experiments in the sonnet were published in Tottel's Miscellany in 1557, and were prompted by an admiration of Petrarch and other Italian models. Italy was almost certainly the original home of the sonnet (sonnetItal. sonetto, a little sound, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Sir to anger you, But a dry sonnet of my Corporals To an old Suttlers wife, and that I'll burn, Sir. 'Tis like to prove a fine age ...
— A King, and No King • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... rhymed prose to Charizi, but again he shows his devotion to two masters by writing Hebrew sonnets. The sonnet was new then to Italian verse, and Immanuel's Hebrew specimens thus belong to the earliest sonnets written in any literature. It is, indeed, impossible to convey a just sense of the variety of subject and form in the Machberoth. "Serious and frivolous topics trip each other by the ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... record of this resting-place in Michelangelo's story. We know how Goethe escaped from the stress of sentiments too strong for him by making a book about them; and for Michelangelo, to write down his passionate thoughts at all, to express them in a sonnet, was already in some measure to command, and have his ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... for "Hard," "Enough" and "Desolation," from In Merry Measure, by Tom Masson; "A Branch Library" and "Table Manners," from Tomfoolery, by James Montgomery Flagg; "The Sonnet of the Lovable Lass and the Plethoric Dad," by J.W. Foley; "Thoughts for an Easter Morning," by Wallace Irwin; "Suppressed Chapters," by Carolyn Wells; "The Conscientious Curate and the Beauteous Ballad ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... the matter of sonnets, I find myself compelled to depend upon others for my opinions. I'm sorry that such is the case, for I'd rather not deal in second-hand judgments if I could help it. About the most this sonnet can do for me is to make me wonder what my world is. I suppose that the size of my world is the measure of myself, and that in my schoolmastering I am simply trying to enlarge the world of my pupils. I saw a gang-plough the other day ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... eternal worlds I steer, And seas are calm and skies are clear, And faith in lively exercise, And distant hills of Canaan rise, My soul for joy then claps her wings, And loud her lovely sonnet sings, "Vain ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... but she declined, saying that an habitue of the opera who could so transform himself so as to paint the admirable Abbe Birotteau, could certainly surpass her in writing une preface de femme. She did, however, write the sonnet on the Marguerite which Lucien de Rubempre displayed as one of the samples of his volume of verses to the publisher Dauriat; also Le Chardon. Balzac made use of this poem, however, only in the original edition of his work; it was replaced in the Comedie ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... French. Prince Waldeck came in during the evening; I was introduced to him, and he gave me a very friendly welcome. He could speak Italian very well, and during the carnival he chewed me great kindness. He presented me with a gold snuffbox as a reward for a very poor sonnet which I had written for his dear Grizellini. This was her family name; she was called Tintoretta because her father ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... effort to elevate himself or to change his swinish nature in any particular, but thinks we should all bring ourselves down to the boar's mental and physical level as soon as we can. The closing verses of the third sonnet may be freely ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... volume may be avoided in a second series. I have retained the metres of the originals with but trifling variations, except in those cases where there was nothing specially characteristic to make this desirable (as e.g., in the case of Islwyn, where I have thrown some of my translations into sonnet form) or where—as in the Song of the Fisherman's Wife—the metre, even if it could be reproduced, would not in English harmonise with the meaning. I ought perhaps to ask pardon beforehand for the audacity ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... in the promise conveyed through his son; and is buried by Seth "in a fair tomb, with some Church sonnet." ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... asked whether Mr. W. wrote anything on the journey, and my answer has always been, 'Little or nothing.' Seeds were cast into the earth, and they took root slowly. This reminds me that I once was privy to the conception of a sonnet, with a distinctness which did not once occur on the longer Italian journey. This was when I accompanied him into the Isle of Man. We had been drinking tea with Mr. and Mrs. Cookson, and left them when ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... down to the post office (to mail to an editor a sonnet I thought fairly well of) saying to myself: That book is imported from England, it may be a big book, it may even cost four dollars. How much better to exhibit the stoic tenacity of all great men, go back ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Sonnet compare Hamlet's "Give me that man That is not passion's slave," etc. Shakespeare's writings show the deepest sensitiveness to passion:—hence the attraction he felt in ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... vital factor in the development of his dramatic art, and that this could not be said either of Lord Pembroke or Lord Southampton. Indeed, whoever he was, he could not have been anybody of high birth, as was shown very clearly by the 25th Sonnet, in which Shakespeare contrasting himself with those who are "great princes' favourites," says quite ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... suggested the similarity between the closing part of this passage, about our deafness to the music of the stars, owing to the "muddy vesture," and the sonnet of Blanco White which speaks of the starry splendors to which our eyes are blinded by the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... wondrous land. At last Hilda broke that spell. Carried away by the excitement of the moment she started to her feet, and stood erect in the carriage, and then burst forth into that noble paraphrase which Byron has made of the glorious sonnet of Filicaja: ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... of his vigilance, to have several Conversations with the daughter, as I cheapened articles in the shop. I made terrible long bargains, and examined the articles over and over, before I purchased. In the meantime, I would convey a sonnet or an acrostic under cover of a piece of cambric, or slipped into a pair of stockings; I would whisper soft nonsense into her ear as I haggled about the price; and would squeeze her hand tenderly as I received my halfpence of change, in a bit of whity-brown paper. Let this ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... "lady authoress" with a mission to show up the vices of a society which she knew only by hearsay. Hither came, unwittingly, simple-minded Church dignitaries, who, Sybell hoped, might influence for his good the young agnostic poet who had written a sonnet on her muff-chain, a very daring sonnet, which Doll, who did not care for poetry, had not been shown. Hither, by mistake, thinking it was an ordinary dinner-party, came Hugh, whom Sybell said she had discovered, and who was not aware that he was in ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... said Rivington; "you couldn't have applied to a better shop. What I don't know about little old New York wouldn't make a sonnet to a sunbonnet. I'll put you right in the middle of so much local colour that you won't know whether you are a magazine cover or in the erysipelas ward. When do ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... suffer this circumstance, trifling at first, to swell into importance by frequent remembrance. The little vanity it had excited (for the incertitude which forbade her to presume upon having inspired the sonnet, forbade her also to disbelieve it) passed away, and the incident was dismissed from her thoughts amid her books, her studies, and ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... conspicuous my name By absence shall appear; When I have lost all hopes of fame, Which once I held so dear; When 'plucked' I seek a vain relief In plaintive dirge or sonnet; Thou wilt have caused that bitter grief, Thou ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... his wares and expatiate on their merits. There is the daughter of a wealthy China merchant, a young woman of great accomplishments who can write "commercially" and has won a prize in a poetic contest with a sonnet. She is, consequently, very dear—100 yen, say $100—but that is of no consequence; what matters is that she has a disfiguring scar on her cheek. She will not do. Then there is Mlle. Jasmin, a pretty girl of fifteen years, who can be had for $18 or $20 a month (contract cancellable ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to Venice, where he indulged in amorous escapades which compelled his departure from that city. He went to Treviso and taught rhetoric in the university, incidentally took part in political movements, lampooned an opponent in a sonnet, and was ordered out of the republic. In Dresden, whither he turned his steps, he found no occupation for his talents, and journeyed on to Vienna. There, helped by Salieri, he received from Joseph II the appointment ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... accomplice, in the great bird medley; but later her crafty instinct would seem to warn her that silence is more to her interest in the pursuit of her wily mission. In June, when so many an ecstatic love-song among the birds has modulated from accents of ardent love to those of glad fruition, when the sonnet to his "mistress's eyebrow" is shortly to give place to the lullaby, then, like the "worm i' the bud," the cow-bird begins her parasitical career. How many thousands are the bird homes which are blasted ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... looking at itself. So I set myself to find it; for it lay in fragments in the drawers and cabinets of my memory. And before I got home I had found all the pieces and put them together; and then it was a lovely little sonnet which a friend of mine had written and allowed me to see many years before. I was in the way of writing verses myself; but I should have been proud to have written this one. I never could have done that. Yet, as far as I knew, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... manfully in his harness—now, contrasting strangely with the elaborately powdered peruke and delicate lace ruffles of Beau Livingstone, the gallant, with the whitest hand, the softest voice, the neatest knack at a sonnet, and the deadliest rapier at the court of good Queen Anne. Nay, you could trace it in the features of many a fair Edith and Alice, half counteracting the magnetic ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... inharmonious as Petrarch's often are from being too crowded with words, for which room is made by numerous elisions, which prevent the softening alternacy of vowels and consonants. That thicket of words was occasioned by the embarrassing nature of the sonnet: a form of composition I do not love, and which is almost intolerable in any language but Italian, which furnishes such a profusion of rhymes. To our tongue the sonnet is mortal, and the parent of insipidity. The Mutation in some degree of it was extremely noxious ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... to it, and paw the platform. Dear to me as the bugle-note to any war-horse, as the first twittering of the birds in the hedgerows to the light-sleeping vagabond, that cry of 'Take your seats please!' or—better still—'En voiture!' or 'Partenza!' Had I the knack of rhyme, I would write a sonnet-sequence of the journey to Newhaven or Dover—a sonnet for every station one does not stop at. I await that poet who shall worthily celebrate the iron road. There is one who describes, with accuracy and gusto, the insides of engines; but he will not do at all. I look for another, who shall ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... pen a hundred years hence. Glorious material here for art of every kind! If I had the misfortune to be a poet, I should now be obliged to rush out in a fit of inspiration, hide myself in the kennel, and, at a safe distance from all exciting causes, write a passionate sonnet, while the fox kept biting my heels. But, as I am no poet, I prefer to enjoy the beautiful when it is before me, to putting it into rhyme." And again he looked admiringly at ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... "Faith" as "an obscene worm." The sonnet on the Fall of Bonaparte concludes with a reference to "Bloody Faith, the foulest birth of time." Shelley frequently conceives Faith as serpentine and disgusting. In ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... kitchen the shrine of our civilization, the focus of all that is comely in life. The ruddy shine of the stove is as beautiful as any sunset. A well-polished jug or spoon is as fair, as complete and beautiful, as any sonnet. The dish mop, properly rinsed and wrung and hung outside the back door to dry, is a whole sermon in itself. The stars never look so bright as they do from the kitchen door after the ice-box pan is emptied and the whole place is 'redd ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... with his mother, who married a second time, till his tenth year, when he was placed at the academy of Turin. After he had passed a twelvemonth at the academy, he went on a short visit to a relation who dwelt at Coni; and during his stay there he made his first poetical attempt in a sonnet chiefly borrowed from lines in Ariosto and Metastasio, the only poets he had at that time read. When thirteen years of age he was induced to begin the study of civil and canonical law; but the attempt only served to disgust him with every species of application and to increase ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... she wrote, some years later; 'how that name recalls the happy, happy hours I passed with you at Eartham; when by the title 'Muse' you summoned me to the morning walk!' Amongst the drossy twaddle which passed current as poetry at Eartham, a sonnet in Romney's honour by a true poet—William Cowper—may be counted as ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... about form? Here you will find it in absolute perfection. Edfu is the consecration of form. In proportion it is supreme above all other Egyptian temples. Its beauty of form is like the chiselled loveliness of a perfect sonnet. While the world lasts, no architect can arise to create a building more satisfying, more calm with the calm of faultlessness, more serene with a just serenity. Or so it seems to me. I think of the most lovely buildings I know in Europe—of the Alhambra at Granada, of the Cappella Palatina in ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... know," said Clovis, "I only guessed. When you wanted to turn the prosaic lorry of commerce into a feathered poem flitting through the verdure of a tropical forest, I knew you must be working up a sonnet, and Florrie was the only female name that suggested ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... in Wordsworth's case the reader is not conscious of a magnetic personality drawing his judgment away from purely aesthetic standards? Again, consider the case of Keats. For us the facts of his life must color almost every line he wrote. How are we to determine whether his sonnet, When I Have Fears, is great poetry or not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love for Fanny Brawne, and his ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... franticke head: His chamber hanged about with elegies, With sad complaints of his love's miseries, His windows strow'd with sonnets and the glasse Drawn full of love-knots. I approach'd the asse, And straight he weepes, and sighes some Sonnet out To his fair love! and then he goes about, For to perfume her rare perfection, With some sweet smelling pink epitheton. Then with a melting looke he writhes his head, And straight in passion, riseth in his bed, And having kist his hand, strok'd up his ...
— English Satires • Various
... conquer the stars, but it does nothing by jumps. As a Scientist, as well as a philosopher, I am accustomed to reaching the Transcendental by winding paths. It is characteristic of me that I should have consented to preface this remarkable Sonnet Cycle only after supreme deliberation, and that I should at last have determined to speak in behalf of the Car Conductor ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... 71, Times for times. Also where the employment or omission of a capital is plainly due to misprinting, as too frequently in the 1673 edition, I silently make the correction. Examples are, notes for Notes in Sonnet xvii. l. 13; Anointed for ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the hands of the corn-fed multitude, educated God knows how or where. Fiction, once a profession, has become a trade, and so has the drama. The line between journalism and literature is lost. Grub Street has become an emporium. Any one, anything can get into a story or a sonnet.... ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Miss Oliver found pleasure in looking at him for his good looks—he was so exactly like what she would have liked her own son to be. Glossy black hair, brilliant dark grey eyes, faultless features. And a poet to his fingertips! That sonnet sequence was really a remarkable thing for a lad of twenty to write. Miss Oliver was no partial critic and she knew that Walter ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the specific object the soul sees an infinite meaning. Indeed, one can almost say that the more specific or limited the artistic object, the more clearly is the absolute or infinite meaning portrayed and discerned. A sonnet is oftener than not more expressive than a long poem; the Red Badge of Courage reveals more impressively than does the Dynasts the absolute essential horror of war. There are present, apparently, in the more pronounced ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... age of sixteen, if we may trust the account given by his early friend Mr. Octavius Gilchrist, in the "London Magazine" for January, 1820, Clare composed the following sonnet "To ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... vehement aspiration after a novelty, I think. Those confounded poets, with their terrenely-celestial descriptions, did as much with me as the lady: they fired my imagination, and set me upon a desire to become a goddess-maker. I must needs try my new-fledged pinions in sonnet, elogy, and madrigal. I must have a Cynthia, a Stella, a Sacharissa, as well as the best of them: darts and flames, and the devil knows what, must I give to my cupid. I must create beauty, and place it where nobody else ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... lovest Or the throbbing mischief will my heart betray." This being a fair and honest specimen of Easley's early attempts at versification, it was said of him by those best qualified to judge, that had he but stuck to the pulpit and sonnet writing, he would in time have become an adept, for he could compose pathetically enough, and so regulate his points as to make his theology appear quite profound. But he had a weakness which ran to the getting of gold, and this betrayed him into the commerce of literature, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... had, how kindly she used him in such a place, how she smiled, how she graced him, and that infinitely pleased him; and then he breaks out, O sweet Areusa, O my dearest Antiphila, O most divine looks, O lovely graces, and thereupon instantly he makes an epigram, or a sonnet to five or seven tunes, in her commendation, or else he ruminates how she rejected his service, denied him a kiss, disgraced him, &c., and that as effectually torments him. And these are his exercises between comb and glass, madrigals, elegies, &c., these his cogitations till he see ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... taste," said Charles Larkyns. "Well, this shop - you see the name - is Spiers'; and Wordsworth, in his sonnet to Oxford, has immortalized him. ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... correspondence between his brother and Essex, which was to fall into the Queen's hands in order to soften her wrath and show her Essex's most secret feelings. When the Queen proposed to dine with him at his lodge in Twickenham Park, "though I profess not to be a poet," he "prepared a sonnet tending and alluding to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my Lord." It was an awkward thing for one who had been so intimate with Essex to be so deep in the counsels of those who hated him. He ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... consideration which induced us to regard "Manawyd" as a proper name in a former stanza, has caused us to leave "Gwanar" untranslated in this place. It is not improbable, however, from the shortness of this sonnet, that the line containing the name of its hero may have been lost. In that case we should translate "chwerthin wanar," "their leader laughed." That Gwanar was occasionally used as a proper name by the ancient Britons, appears from Triad xl. (first ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... sonnet; but a sonnet to him was a thing of fourteen five-foot iambic lines, and there all rules ended. Sometimes he even crowded six feet into a line. It is possible his laxness of form was due to ignorance, but more likely ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... sonnet on Cartesian geometry roused even the math-fiend to compassion. And don't you remember Professor Squeeler, whose heart seemed to leap with delight whenever he could tell you that, in spite of incessant toil on your part, he had again flunked you in physics with fifty-nine ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... inheritance of the German people. Buerger attempted a translation of the Iliad in iambic blank verse, and a prose translation of 'Macbeth.' To him belongs also the credit of having restored to German literature the long-disused sonnet. His sonnets are among the best in the language, and elicited warm praise from Schiller as "models of their kind." Schiller had written a severe criticism of Buerger's poems, which had inflamed party ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch[708] or Ariosto,[709] filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of daring thought and action. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Agincourt (Oct. 1415) dates the second period of Charles's life. The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in the play of HENRY V.; and it is at least odd that we can trace a resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, "I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle; and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene, would be quite in character for a man who spent many years of his life capping verses ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at this period was residing in a small but elegant little home, superintended by his ever-faithful guardian, his wife's mother—his own aunt, Mrs. Clemm, the lady whom he so gratefully addressed in after years in the well-known sonnet, as "more than mother unto me." But a change came o'er the spirit of his dream! His severance from 'Graham's', owing to we know not what causes, took place, and his fragile schemes of happiness faded as fast as the sunset. His means melted away, and he became unfitted by ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... editor, whose language we might assimilate with, "We have received intelligence from," &c. Here and there, perhaps, a straggling beam of genius broke through the mental twilight, in the shape of, "Some Account of the poet, Burns;" a Rustique by Bloomfield, or an elegant sonnet by Bowles or Charlotte Smith. The rest of would-be-sonneteers, tragedy-writers, and essayists, have long ago found, with their mediocrities, a congenial oblivion in "the tomb ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various
... Sonnet with the Compliments of the Season 13 When I came back to Fleet Street 14 The Truce of ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... fame rests on his being the father of his son. Of the boy's mother we have only obstructed glances and glimpses through half-flung lattices in the gloaming. Raphael was her only child. She was scarce twenty when she bore him. In a sonnet written to her, on the back of a painting, Raphael's father speaks of her wondrous eyes, slender neck, and the form too frail for earth's rough buffets. Mention is also made of "this child born in purest love, and sent by ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... estranged daily. How keenly he felt the estrangement, not from Oxford, but from old friends, about this time, can be read only in his own words." It is in such poems as the "Qua Cursum Ventus," or the sonnet beginning, "Well, well,—Heaven bless you all from day to day!" that it is to be read. These, with a few other fugitive pieces, were printed, in company with verses by a friend, as one part of a small volume entitled, "Ambarvalia," which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... deplored by Cavour, who insisted that the art of writing ought to be acquired when young; otherwise it could not be practised without labour, and never with entire success. He once said that he found it easier to make Italy than a sonnet. In his own case he regretted never having become a ready writer, because he knew that the pen is a force; he held that a man should cultivate every means at his disposal ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... the tawny flowing hair in battle, I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in front, bearing a bright sword in thy hand, Now ending well in death the splendid fever of thy deeds, (I bring no dirge for it or thee, I bring a glad triumphal sonnet,) Desperate and glorious, aye in defeat most desperate, most glorious, After thy many battles in which never yielding up a gun or a color, Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers, Thou yieldest ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... American women poets. Emily Dickinson is more imaginative, but her utter scorn of form in composition makes her work, unique as it is, less satisfying. Mrs. Jackson was a favorite with Emerson, and he is said to have liked best among her poems this sonnet, "Thought." ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... like flowers? I will not write a sonnet, Singing their beauty as a poet might do: I just detest those on Aunt Nipson's bonnet, Because they are like her,—all gray and blue, Dusty and pinched, and fastened on askew! And as for heaven's own buttercups and daisies, I am not good enough ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... Poets he affirms have contributed very much to the spoiling the Tongue: And who would he have to restore it? Himself, and his Brethren. Himself a Poet of Renown, and who, if he would once speak his Mind, I make no question is Prouder of his Elegy upon Patridge, and his Sonnet on Miss Biddy Floyd, than of all His Prose Compositions together, or even that elegant Poem, call'd The Humble Petition of Frances Harris, which is the Pink ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... of the players seemed to lend a new charm, delicate and indefinable, to the development of the clear and heart-strengthening theme with its subtle variations and its powerful, emphatic close, like the fullness of meaning in the last line of a noble sonnet. ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... Cowper's poetry lacked the true note of passion, that there was an absence of the "lyric cry." I protest that I find the note of passion in the "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture," in his two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce not less marked than I find it in other great poets. I find in The Task and elsewhere in Cowper's works a note of enthusiasm for human brotherhood, for man's responsibility for man, for universal kinship, ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... hang himself; nor to be rhymed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland; yet thus much curse I must send you in the behalf of all poets; that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... his superb sonnet to Sir Henry Vane the Younger, declares that Rome, in the most prosperous age of the Republic, never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... send Mrs. Dobell the autograph. It was the word 'Album' that frightened me I thought she wished me to write a sonnet on purpose for it, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... lines,' he said, picking up a piece of manuscript which was lying on the table. 'It is in Italian, but I will translate it for you.' 'No,' said I; 'read it as it is written; I understand Italian.' Then he read the opening lines of a sonnet which was written to Laura in the shadow. He read about six lines and ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... first opportunity offers, or hidden by the rank growth of comment and reflection about it. Such research is illuminating for those who do not believe in the teaching of composition; and if it begins at home, so much the better. And finally, the technique of writing has to do with the whole, whether sonnet, or business letter, or report to a board of directors. How to lead one thought into another; how to exclude the irrelevant; how to weigh upon that which is important; how to hold together the whole structure so that the subject, all the subject, and nothing but the subject shall be laid before ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... week, another club was founded at the Essex Head, in Essex street, where an old servant of Mr. Thrale's was the landlord. "Its principles (he said) were to be laid in frequency and frugality; and he drew up a set of rules, which he prefaced with two lines from a Sonnet of Milton. ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... learning went the men of fashion, eager to learn and copy the new manners of a society whose moral teacher was Machiavelli, and whose patterns of splendour were the courts of Florence and Ferrara, and to learn the trick of verse that in the hands of Petrarch and his followers had fashioned the sonnet and other new lyric forms. This could not be without its influence on the manners of the nation, and the scholars who had been the first to show the way were the first to deplore the pell-mell assimilation of Italian manners and vices, which was the unintended result ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... do with Apollo and Minerva, whom she was sure to call Pallas, as being more poetical. Probably she had dealings with Diana too, for this kind of woman does not in any age affect the "sea-born," save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no fruits; a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being to her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... in the lives of poets—he continued his work of self-education. Some of his Cambridge friends appear to have grown a little anxious, on seeing one who had distinction stamped upon his brow, doing what the world calls nothing; and Milton himself was watchful, and even suspicious. His second sonnet ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... philosopher (born c. A.D. 60). He is an earnest preacher of righteousness and his philosophy is eminently practical. For Arnold's personal debt to him see his sonnet To a Friend. ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... memorial, which is first addressed to the Friends of the Beautiful, and whose object is to touch the heart, we give a sonnet of M. Edmond Rostand. It is entitled, "The Cathedral," and will show that pride may be taken by the victim of violence, and that a crime against the beautiful diminishes only the brute ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... the sonnet had been but little used in England, the principal writers being Surrey, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton. Shakspeare left one hundred and fifty-four, which exhibit rare poetical power, and which are most of them addressed to a ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... got my Piozzi[1] home at last; he looks thin and battered, but always kindly upon me, I think. He brought me an Italian sonnet written in his praise by Marco Capello, which I instantly translated of course; but he, prudent creature, insisted on my burning it, as he said it would inevitably get about the town how he was praised, and how Mrs. Thrale translated and echoed the praises, so ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... his love in equal measure. Their liaison lasted several years, during which Boccaccio recorded the various phases of their passion with exemplary assiduity in verse and prose. Besides paying her due and discreet homage in sonnet and canzone, he associated her in one way or another, not only with the Filocopo (his prose romance of Florio and Biancofiore, which he professes to have written to pleasure her), but with the Ameto, the Amorosa Visione, the Teseide, and the Filostrato; and ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... dark-green gardens,—which is yours?" he questioned. "All day I have been wondering. That is the single thing that really stirs me here, that really gives me a feeling—its association with you. All day I have been hearing a sonnet of Ronsard's—do you remember it?—Voicy le bois. But I wish I knew which villa is your villa, which garden is your garden. Why did n't I find out before I was driven from Paradise? I could easily find out here by inquiring, I suppose. But your name is too sacred. I can't profane it ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... attract us; we love to ruffle it in silk as well as in mail or in homespun. The voices and faces of fair women make music and beauty for our ears and our eyes; we love the harp and the lute as well as the mavis and throstle in the hedgerow, and we pore as diligently over a sonnet as thou dost ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... Georgians held the album between them, and favored us with the few specimens of its contents, which they considered ridiculous enough to be worth hearing. One extract met with deserved applause. It was a "Sonnet to the Snow on Mount Washington," and had been contributed that very afternoon, bearing a signature of great distinction in magazines and annuals. The lines were elegant and full of fancy, but too ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hand in evidence of your love," said Claudio, producing a feeble sonnet which Benedick had written to his sweetheart. "And here," said Hero, "is a tribute to Benedick, which I picked out ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... had missed his sonnet. She laid it almost tenderly in a conspicuous place on his table, and put a bronze head of Pallas Athene on it to keep it down. Then she wondered again whether he enjoyed the bookshop, whether he enjoyed making catalogues raisonnes, whether he enjoyed ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... finished, he committed to the flames.[63] As he states in his Essay on the Imitation of Popular Poetry, that, for ten years previous to 1796, when his first translation from the German was executed, he had written no verses "except an occasional sonnet to his mistress's eyebrow," I presume this Conquest of Granada, the fruit of his study of the Guerras Civiles, must be assigned to the summer of 1786—or, making allowance for trivial inaccuracy, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... the fire, making the sparks go up chimney. "Five pages about Massanutton in her autumn robes, and a sonnet to ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... sing or say In sonnet sad or sermon chill, "Alas, alack, and well-a-day, This round world's but a bitter pill." Poor porcupines of fretful quill! Sometimes we quarrel with our lot: We, too, are sad and careful; still We'd rather be ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... Seashore Security September Shah, To the Shakspeare Snow-Storm, The Solution Song of Nature Song of Seyd Nimetollah of Kuhistan Sonnet of Michel Angelo Buonarotti Sphinx, The Spiritual Laws Summons, The Sunrise Sursum ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... far before the air began to grow dark. I glanced again at the sun. The clouds had gathered thick about him. Suddenly a mountain wind blew cold in my face. I never yet can read that sonnet of Shakspere's, ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... of Netherlander against the Spaniards; his fame as an author rests securely on his euphuistic prose romance "Arcadia," his critical treatise "The Defence of Poesy," and above all on his exquisite sonnet-series "Astrophel and Stella," in which he sings the story of his hapless love for Penelope Devereux, who married Lord Rich; was the friend of Edmund Spenser, and the centre of an ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... writing materials for two months the slate and pencil looked very inviting. I composed a few pieces of verse, including a sonnet on Giordano Bruno and some epigrams on Parson Plaford, Judge North, Sir Hardinge Giffard, and other distasteful personages. But as every piece written on the slate had to be rubbed out to make room for the next, I soon sickened of composition. ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... forms for complete short compositions, known as fixed forms. The most common are the ballade, rondel, rondeau, and triolet, developed especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and revived in our own, and the sonnet, introduced from ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... put the numbers as high as two hundred thousand, and contemporary poetry as well as history has celebrated this pious assemblage of Christians of every nation, language, and age around the tomb of their fathers in the faith. "The old man with white hair goeth far away," says Petrarch (Sonnet xiv.), "from the sweet haunts where his life hath been passed, and from his little family astonished to find their dear father missing. As for him, in the last days of his age, broken down by weight of years and a-weary of the road, he draggeth along as best he may by force ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... about to separate. A modification of it is familiar to us all in Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers debate whether the song they hear is of the nightingale or the lark; the aubade, with the two other great forms of love-poetry then floating in the world, the sonnet and the [220] epithalamium, being here refined, heightened, and inwoven into the structure of the play. Those, in whom what Rousseau calls les frayeurs nocturnes are constitutional, know what splendour they give to the things of the morning; and how there comes something of relief from physical ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... the closest relationship to his glorious lady, so that we may believe it was her brother, came to him and prayed him to write something on a lady who was dead. Dante, believing that he meant the blessed Beatrice, accordingly wrote for him a sonnet; and then, reflecting that so short a poem appeared but a poor and bare service for one who was so nearly connected with her, added to it a Canzone, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... possession so; Had, having had, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream; All this the world well knows; yet none knows well, To shun the Heaven that leads men to this Hell!" —Shakespeare. Sonnet 129. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... for love of thee, As when the sun goes down upon the sea And finds no mate in all the realms of earth. I, too, have look'd on Nature in its worth And found no resting-place in all the spheres, And no relief beyond my sonnet-tears,— The soul-fed shudderings of my lonely harp That knows the gamut now ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... that Peter's love for his wife, though perhaps that of a primitive man, was of the true Portuguese stamp, and with this view composed the following pleasing Sonnet: ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... 1616, and the Hymns, etc., in 1624. The work is full of energy and spirit, and well maintains its place among the many later translations by men of such high poetic powers as Pope and Cowper, and others: and it had the merit of suggesting Keats's immortal Sonnet, in which its name and memory are embalmed for many who know it in no other way. C. also translated from Petrarch, and completed Marlowe's ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... is that of Rossetti. In the course of the House of Life, the dark curtain of the exotic mood, with its strange odours and glimpses, its fallen light, its fevered sense, is raised at intervals upon a sonnet of pure transparency and delicate sweetness, as though the weary, voluptuous soul, in its restless passage among perfumed chambers, looked out suddenly from a window upon some forest glade, full of cool ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had difficulties to contend with, which arose from the form of the building or the shape of the wall on which he had to place his frescoes. Painting on the ceiling was no easy task, and Michelangelo, in a humorous sonnet addressed to Giovanni da Pistoya, gives a burlesque portrait of himself while he was ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... fills her with enthusiasm until the articles come back, and up to now she had not written poetry. But, as I say, I leaned upon a broken reed, for when, the next day, I asked her what she was writing, she laughed and showed me a sonnet. ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... "That sonnet, Abate, Beautiful, I am quite exhausted by it. Your phrases turn about my heart And stifle me to swooning. Open the window, I beg. Lord! What a strumming of fiddles and mandolins! 'Tis really a shame to stop indoors. Call my maid, or I will make ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... were different from his own. His sole relaxations were those of a retiring, mild, and pensive temper, and were limited to a ramble, almost always solitary, among the woods and hills, in praise of which, he was sometimes guilty of a sonnet, but rather because he could not help the attempt, than as proposing to himself the fame or the rewards which attend the successful poet. Indeed, far from seeking to insinuate his fugitive pieces into magazines and newspapers, he blushed at his poetical attempts even while alone, and, in fact, was ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... a radical penny-a-liner, be implored in more abject terms? Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Scudery, Le Fevre, talked, wrote, and spared no expense for their dear friend. Brebeuf, the poet, who had neither influence nor money, took to his bed and died of grief. Hesnault, author of the "Avorton," a sonnet much admired in those days, and translated with approval into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... now sleeps in skies" is Sir Philip Sidney, and the line, with a slight inversion for the sake of the rhyme, is taken from a sonnet in "Astrophel and Stella," ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... a grain of common sense entered the brain of the flower of chivalry. You might call it the dawn of reason. We had spent part of the morning in High Street, "the noblest old street in England," as our dear Hawthorne calls it. As Wordsworth had written a sonnet about it, aunt Celia was armed for the fray,—a volume of Wordsworth in one hand, and one of Hawthorne in the other. (I wish Baedeker didn't give such full information about what one ought to read before one can approach these places in a proper spirit.) When we had done High Street, we went ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and habits of Alfieri and those of the noble poet of England, no less remarkable coincidences might be traced; and the sonnet in which the Italian dramatist professes to paint his own character contains, in one comprehensive line, a portrait of the versatile author of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... musician, not Debussy even, was better prepared for bringing the symbolist movement into music. Loeffler is affiliated in temper, if not exactly in achievement, with the brilliant band of belated romanticists who adopted as their device the sonnet of ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... of art in our modern education, of the knack or science or how of things, is to be followed next by the emphasis of the art that conceals art, genius, the norm and climax of human ability. Any finishing-school girl can out-sonnet Keats. The study of appearances, the passion for the outside has run its course. The next thing in education is going to be honesty, fearless naturalness, upheaval, the freedom of self, self-expectancy, all-expectancy, and the passion for possessing real things. The personalities, persons with ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... rather unusual combination of the Artist and the Moralist, both elements being marked in his writings to a very high degree. The famous and oft-quoted sonnet by his friend, the late Mr. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... advance was made this winter (1831-32) with his Shelleyan "Sonnet to a Cloud" and his imitations of Byron's "Hebrew Melodies," from which he learnt how to concentrate expression, and to use rich vowel-sounds and liquid consonants with rolling effect. A deeper ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... A sonnet has come to my hands, the production,—and nearly the first poetical Production,—of a very young Lady. I have not the Author's consent to publish it: and there is no time to ask it. But I cannot omit adding such a flower to the Wreath of Glory of my Friend. ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... English giant,' said Charles aside to an attendant: then turning eagerly to Sidney, whose transcendent accomplishments had already become renowned, Charles welcomed him to court, and began to discuss Ronsard's last sonnet, showing no small taste and knowledge of poetry. Greatly attracted by Sidney, the King detained the whole English party by an invitation to Walsingham to hear music in the Queen-mother's apartments; and Berenger, following in the wake of his friends, found himself in a spacious hall, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge |
