"Spenser" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that numerous poets and authors, from Edmund Spenser to many humbler craftsmen of the pen, were busy translating from the Italian the tales of Boccaccio, or the ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... kiss a page, or a smooth chin, that has the despair of a beard; be a stateswoman, know all the news, what was done at Salisbury, what at the Bath, what at court, what in progress; or, so she may censure poets, and authors, and styles, and compare them, Daniel with Spenser, Jonson with the t'other youth, and so forth: or be thought cunning in controversies, or the very knots of divinity; and have often in her mouth the state of the question: and then skip to the mathematics, and demonstration: and answer ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... course, is at the opposite pole of the poet's genius. A few plain verses of the Odyssey, almost bald in their reticence, are the point de repere of the most magical vision expressed in the most musical verse. Here is the languid charm of Spenser, enriched with many classical memories, and pictures of natural beauty gorgeously yet delicately painted. After the excision of some verses, rather fantastical, in 1842, the poem became a flawless masterpiece,—one of the eternal ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... lines in Spenser's "Colin Clout's come home again,"[3] on the instability and hollowness of patronage, may ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... But Mr. Spenser was too wise to enter into any particulars, and merely informed Mrs. Fothergill that she would know ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... literature he was master of Shakespeare and Milton, of our earlier dramatic authors; of many picturesque and interesting passages from our old historical chronicles; and was particularly well acquainted with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on romantic fiction, of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful imagination, before the passions have roused themselves, and demand poetry of a more sentimental description. In this respect his acquaintance with ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... influence. Sidney, the nephew of Lord Leicester, was the idol of his time, and perhaps no figure reflects the age more fully and more beautifully. Fair as he was brave, quick of wit as of affection, noble and generous in temper, dear to Elizabeth as to Spenser, the darling of the Court and of the camp, his learning and his genius made him the centre of the literary world which was springing into birth on English soil. He had travelled in France and Italy, he was master alike ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... you can branch off once more at any one of ten thousand points into still wider circles. And thus you may continue up and down the centuries as far as you like, yea, even to Chaucer. If you chance to read Hazlitt on *Chaucer and Spenser*, you will probably put your hat on instantly and go out and buy these authors; such is his communicating fire! I need not particularise further. Commencing with Lamb, and allowing one thing to lead to another, you cannot fail to be more and more impressed by the peculiar suitability to ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... cannot, of course, suggest the choice of your library to you: every several mind needs different books; but there are some books which we all need, and assuredly, if you read Homer,[81] Plato, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Dante,[82] Shakspeare, and Spenser, as much as you ought, you will not require wide enlargement of shelves to right and left of them for purposes of perpetual study. Among modern books avoid generally magazine and review literature. Sometimes it may ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... mummery, if the blows had been gentle, considerate, and forbearing? A "make-believe" blow would have implied a "make- believe" hammer and a "make-believe" curtain. No!—hammer away, like Charles Martel; "fillip me with a three-man beetle;" be to me a malleus hreticorum; come like Spenser's Talus—an iron man with an iron flail, and thresh out the straw of my logic; rack me; put me to the question; get me down; jump upon me; kick me; throttle me; put an end to me in any ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... of wiry grey hair, and a little cape of faded black silk over his shoulders, he looked like an old French abbe. He was buoyant and pleasant as ever; and was busy upon a vindication of Chaucer and Spenser from Cardinal Wiseman, who had attacked them for alleged sensuous and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the one, in all their excellences, are just the reverse of the other. It has been the fashion of late to cry up our author's poems, as equal to his plays: this is the desperate cant of modern criticism. We would ask, was there the slightest comparison between Shakespeare, and either Chaucer or Spenser, as mere poets? Not any.- -The two poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and of TARQUIN AND LUCRECE appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses, and ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... of Dryden's Juvenal and Persius Rymer prefixed to his translation of Rene Rapin's Reflections on Aristotle's Poesie some Reflections of his own on Epic Poets. Herein he speaks under the head Epic Poetry of Chaucer, in whose time language was not capable of heroic character; or Spenser, who "wanted a true Idea, and lost himself by following an unfaithful guide, besides using a stanza which is in no wise proper for our language;" of Sir William Davenant, who, in Gondibert, "has some strokes of an extraordinary judgment," but "is for unbeaten tracks and ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... poets. We may be sure—to appropriate an idea of the late Sir James Stephen—that if Robert Browning had lived in the sixteenth century, he would not have written a poem like 'The Ring and the Book'; and if Edmund Spenser had lived in the nineteenth century he would not have written a poem ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Porphyry and Lucian Syrians, Philo, St. Paul, and probably the Fourth Evangelist were Jews. These men all belong to the history of Greek culture. And if these were Greeks how shall we deny the name to Raphael and Michael Angelo, to Spenser and Sidney, to Keats ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of the present day, from the too great confinement of the couplet, is unfit for the drama. We must not estimate the rhyme of Shakespeare by the mode of subsequent times, but by a comparison with his contemporaries or with Spenser. The comparison will, without doubt, turn out to his advantage. Spenser is often diffuse; Shakespeare, though sometimes hard, is always brief and vigorous. He has more frequently been induced by the rhyme to leave out something necessary ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Janet, in a mystified way. She had a general impression of Jonathan's library as of century-old preserves, altogether dried up and quite indistinguishable one from the other except by labels. Poetry she could not imagine as being there at all. Finally she thought of the early Victorians, and Spenser and Chaucer. The library might include them, but she had an idea that Spenser and Chaucer were not fit reading for a little boy. However, as she remembered Spenser and Chaucer, she doubted if Johnny could understand ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Wild Sports mere shadow. We have too little of "the goodly rivers," "all sorts of fish," "the sweet islands and goodly lakes, like little inland seas," "of the most beautiful and sweet countrey," as Spenser phrases it in the author's title-page; and there is not so much as the author promises in his preface, of shooting the wild moors and fishing the waters, of days spent by "fell and flood," and light and joyous nights in mountain bivouacs and moorland ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... lusty spring all dight in leaves and flowres - then came the jolly sommer being dight in a thin cassock coloured greene, then came the autumne all in yellow clad - lastly came winter cloathed all in frize, chattering his teeth for cold that did him chill," from "The Faerie Queene," by Edmund Spenser. On the western gateway, "For lasting happiness we turn our eyes to one alone, and she surrounds you now, great nature, refuge of the weary heart and only balm to breasts that have been bruised. She bath cool hands for every fevered brow and gentlest silence for the troubled ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... law-books. He might have assisted a young man by the name of Blackstone in compiling his "Commentaries," as their lodgings were not far apart, but he did not. They met occasionally, and when they did they always discussed Spenser or Milton, and waxed warm ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... rather tedious by their similarity, and offensive from the smell of the shambles; and which any quick-witted stripling with the knack of rhyming might perhaps have done as well, and less coarsely, after reading Chapman's or Ogilby's Homer, or the fighting scenes in Spenser, the Border Ballads, &c. But even this composition is not unconscious of the true afflatus, such as is incommunicable by learning, not to be inhaled by mere imitative powers, and which might be vainly sought for in hundreds of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Spenser; perhaps you had better begin with the Hymn to Beauty, page 39, and then go on to the Tears; but you'll see how you like it. It's better than Longfellow; ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... a warlike people of Germany gave their name to France. 2. My son Joseph has entered college. 3. You blocks! You stones! 0 you hard hearts! 4. Mecca a city in Arabia is sacred in the eyes of Mohammedans. 5. He himself could not go. 6. The poet Spenser lived in the reign of Elizabeth. 7. Elizabeth Queen of England ruled ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... sympathies are submitted. Every thing, therefore, which interferes with this fair and legitimate credulity is directly noxious to the effect of the poem; it puts us back one stage further from the point of absolute faith, and materially diminishes the interest which we take in the progress of the piece. Spenser's Faerie Queen is a notable example of this. Could we but think that Una was intended, though only by the poet's fancy, to be the portraiture of a mortal virgin, unfriended and alone amidst the snares and enchantments of the world, would we not tremble for her sweet sake, knowing that some as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... wandered in solitude through the woods, or by the river, his health improved, he acquired a passion for nature, and in his father's library, which was excellent, he began eagerly to read. He devoured Sharon Turner's History of England, and the great work of Gibbon. Shakespeare and Spenser introduced him to the region of the spirit in its highest and deepest, its purest and noblest forms. Unhappily he also fell in with Byron, the worst poet that can come into the hands of a boy, and always retained for him an admiration which would now be thought excessive. By these means he ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Hughes published a very accurate edition of the works of our famous poet Edmund Spenser, in six volumes, 12mo. to this edition are prefixed the Life of Spenser; an Essay on Allegorical poetry; Remarks on the Fairy Queen; on the Shepherd's Calendar, and other writings of Spenser; and a Glossary explaining the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... disclaimed, for his own part, any belief that they were poems. Enthusiasts, however, have been found to declare that Emerson 'moves more constantly than any recent poet in the atmosphere of poesy. Since Milton and Spenser no man—not even Goethe—has equalled Emerson in this trait.' The Problem, according to another, 'is wholly unique, and transcends all contemporary verse in grandeur of style.' Such poetry, they say, is like ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... tombs of David Garrick, the great actor and delineator of Shakspeare's characters; George Frederick Handel, the eminent composer, the author of that beautiful anthem, "I know that my Redeemer liveth;" the great Milton; rare old Ben Jonson; Edmund Spenser, author of the "Faery Queene;" and those of Southey, Dryden, Addison, Gray, Campbell, and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... him. Of the War, B. III. ch. 8. sect. 9. This, I think, may well be looked on as the very last instance of any thing like the prophetic Urim among the Jewish nation, and just preceded their fatal desolation: but how it could possibly come to pass that such great men as Sir John Marsham and Dr. Spenser, should imagine that this oracle of Urim and Thummim with other practices as old or older than the law of Moses, should have been ordained in imitation of somewhat like them among the Egyptians, which we never hear of till the days of Diodorus Siculus, Aelian, and Maimonides, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... morning at breakfast Dallas ventured to express some surprise that he had written nothing else. An admission or confession followed that "he had occasionally written short poems, besides a great many stanzas in Spenser's measure, relative to the countries he had visited." "They are not," he added, "worth troubling you with, but you shall have them all with you if you like." "So," says Dallas, "came I by Childe Harold. He took it from a small trunk, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... poets in whom we begin to feel that the background begins to be almost as important as the figures of the foreground; Spenser is genuinely interested in his stories of chivalry and honour, and in his moral allegory, but we sometimes wonder whether the most important thing in his poetry is not the chequered light and shade of his forests, the picturesque splendour of his castles, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... remembered that when a class has a morality it does not follow that it is an adequate morality. The middle-class ethic was inadequate for some purposes; so is the public-school ethic, the ethic of the upper classes. On this last matter of the public schools Dr. Spenser, the Head Master of University College School, has lately made some valuable observations. But even he, I think, overstates the claim of the public schools. "The strong point of the English public schools," ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... Pycroft's "Course of English Reading," that he, Landor, failed to appreciate Chaucer, the old man, much vexed, refuted such a falsehood, saying: "On the contrary, I am a great admirer of his. I am extremely fond of the 'Canterbury Tales.' I much prefer Chaucer to Spenser; for allegory, when spun out, is unendurable." It is strange that a man apparently so well read as Mr. Pycroft should have so unjustly interpreted Landor, when it needed but a passing reference to the Conversations to disprove his statement. By ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... perfect. Its law is progress. A point which yesterday was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be its starting-post to-morrow.' Political science, indeed, is only another one of those 'illustrations of universal progress,' which the genius of Herbert Spenser has made familiar to our literature. And therefore it is that we cannot too much admire the sagacity of the patriots who framed our Constitution. It was a sagacity drawing its inspiration from all history, which taught, and teaches, that if progress ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... which, for moral wisdom and knowledge of the human soul, appear to us almost to be dictated by the voice of inspiration. The prince of philosophers too, the great miner and sapper of the false systems of the middle ages, Francis Bacon, then commenced his career, and Spenser dedicated to Elizabeth his "Fairy Queen," one of the most truly poetical compositions that genius ever produced. The age produced also great divines; but these did not occupy so prominent a place in the nation's eye as during the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... a certain number of French phrases that custom has declared shall take the place of that "pure English undefiled" whereof Spenser wrote. In a few cases these chance to be shorter, more euphonious, and more directly to the point than the corresponding English phrase. For instance, the word "chaperon," so important in its signification at the present, ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... me such an alliance! One minute sufficed to put the quick-witted young Irish woman in possession of our little drama and the several parts we were playing. To look was to understand, to wish was to execute, with this ardent child of nature. Like Spenser's Bradamant, with martial scorn she couched her lance on the side of the party suffering wrong. Her rank, as sister-in-law to the constable of Scotland, gave her some advantage for winning a favorable audience; and throwing her aegis over me, she ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the image "fair as the moon, clear as the sun," and those who have seen a moon in the sky of Arabia will thoroughly appreciate it. We find it amongst the Hindus, the Persians, the Afghans, the Turks and all the nations of Europe. We have, finally, the grand example of Spenser, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... be out anon, and then you will be free, shall you not? Have you seen Tennyson's new poem, and what of it? Miss Martineau is to discourse about Egypt, I suppose; but in the meanwhile do you hear that she forswears mesmerism, as Mr. Spenser Hall does, according to the report Robert brings me home from the newspaper reading. Now I shall leave him room to stand on and speak a word to you. Give my love to Gerardine, and don't forget to mention her letter. I hope you are happy about your friends, and that, in particular, Lady Byron's ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... "A certain Mr. Spenser, a friend of Oscar's father, asked him to bring his boy round to his office, and he would employ him. 'He will have to do a little drudgery at first, but I think we can promote him soon, if ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... the spirit of the Popery laws, and some even of their actual provisions, as applied between Englishry and Irishry, had existed in that harassed country before the words Protestant and Papist were heard of in the world. If we read Baron Finglas, Spenser, and Sir John Davies, we cannot miss the true genius and policy of the English government there before the Revolution, as well as during the whole reign of Queen Elizabeth. Sir John Davies boasts ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... woman who is either Clay by name or Clay by blood." Another chivalry is coming into the world besides that felt by a strong man for a beautiful woman. It is that felt by strong women for their weaker and less fortunate sisters. It is the chivalry foreshadowed by Spenser in The Faerie Queene, in Britomart, the noble knight, herself a woman, who rescued Amoretta and devoted herself to the help of all weak and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... The Battle of Dorking was taken up by articles in the daily press and the magazines. Later on came the Jingo fever (anti-Russian, by the way; but let us not mention that just now), Stead's Truth About the Navy, Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, the suppression of the Channel Tunnel, Mr. Robert Blatchford, Mr. Garvin, Admiral Maxse, Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, The National Review, Lord Roberts, the Navy League, the imposition of an Imperialist Foreign Secretary on the Liberal ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... were, for instance, a dozen playwrights, like Jonson, Fletcher, Ford, Marlowe, and Greene, in whose works can be found literary and dramatic touches of the very highest order. There were poets less prolific than Spenser, and yet to be credited with a few works of the utmost beauty, minor geniuses like Ralegh, Sidney, Lodge, Shirley, Lyly, Wotton, Wither, John Donne, Bishop Hall, Drayton, Drummond, Herbert, Carew, Herrick, Breton, Allison, Byrd, Dowland, Campion—so one might run on without ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... keeping of one day of the week for a sabbath."—Barclay cor. "The doing of a thing is contrary to the forbearing of it."—Id. "The doubling of the Sigma is, however, sometimes regular."—Knight cor. "The inserting of the common aspirate too, is improper."—Id. "But in Spenser's time the pronouncing of the ed [as a separate syllable,] seems already to have been something of an archaism."—Phil. Mu. cor. "And to the reconciling of the effect of their verses on the eye."—Id. "When it was not in their power to ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Arctic zone were once very numerous along the north shore of Barrow's Strait and Lancaster Sound, the following localities were found to abound with ruins:—The gulf between Bathurst and Cornwallis Land, the whole southern shore of Cornwallis Island, Wellington Channel, Cape Spenser, and Cape Riley; Radstock Bay, Ommanney Harbour, near Cape Warrender, where the "Intrepid" discovered numerous well-finished graves, bearing the marks of a comparatively more recent date. Passing Cape ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... novelist; and as they turn to Lamb and Hazlitt as essayists. The poet is, of course, at his best immortal—time cannot stale Beowulf, or the nameless lyrists of the fourteenth century, or Chaucer, or Spenser, and so with the rest, la mort n'y mord. But it is as a writer of prose that Stevenson must be remembered. If he is not the master British essayist of the later nineteenth century, I really cannot ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reading of the first folio. Pioned is explained by MR. COLLIER, "to dig," as in Spenser; but MR. HALLIWELL (Monograph Shakspeare, vol. i. p. 425.) finds no authority to support such an interpretation. MR. COLLIER'S anonymous annotator writes "tilled;" but surely this is a very artificial process to be performed by "spongy April." Hanmer proposed "peonied;" ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... dwarfs fashioned Sif's golden hair, the ship Skidbladnir, the point of Odin's spear Gungnir, the ring Draupnir, the golden-bristled boar Gullin-bursti, the hammer Mioelnir, and Freya's golden necklace Brisinga-men. They are also said to have made the magic girdle which Spenser describes in his poem of the "Faerie Queene,"—a girdle which was said to have the power of revealing whether its wearer were ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... portraits of Spenser differ so much from each other as to throw doubts on their resemblance to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... as Spenser says: I did half hope they could not get it down; but the loyal Tuscans (evermore awed by the name principe) told us it was right to get rid of them, as one of the cones, of which they bore vast quantities, might ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... chivalry older and finer than any Spenser sung, Mr. Power befriended these forlorn souls, and David was his faithful squire. Whoever knocked at that low door was welcomed, warmed, and fed; comforted, and set on their way, cheered and strengthened by ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... plastered down in a love-lock on his forehead, and low cunning eyes. I felt uncomfortable. I would not think of it. I recalled the fact that in all our talks I had never heard Oscar use a gross word. His mind, I said to myself, is like Spenser's, vowed away from coarseness and vulgarity: he's the most perfect intellectual companion in the world. He may have wanted to talk to the boys just to see what effect his talk would have on them. His vanity is greedy enough to desire ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... cogitation concerning her mistress's singular ways. Still, she could not restrain a supposition that the latter must have supposed the priest to speak to her, when she heard the Earl say, "I hear from Geoffrey Spenser, [Note 2], that our stock of salt ling is beyond what is like to be wanted. Methinks the villeins might have a cade ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... persons to add to their more solid acquirements the easy learning of this little volume, much of the poetry of Milton which has appeared to them "harsh and crabbed" would be found "musical as is Apollo's lute." Our citations, taken from more than twenty-five poets, from Spenser to Longfellow, will show how general has been the practice of borrowing ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... anathema from the neighborhood, because their songs interrupted his nocturnal meditations. But the memory of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, (once proprietor of Knole,) the best poet of his time, and 'the immediate father-in-verse of Spenser,' sufficiently redresses the stigma of so churlish a proscription, and the nightingales may well claim perpetual franchise under sanction of a name to which the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... those that add more than they borrow are the notices of Beaumont and Fletcher, Chaucer, Cleveland, Corbet, Donne, Drayton, Phineas Fletcher, Greene, Greville, Jonson, Lodge, Lovelace, Middleton, More, Randolph, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Warner, and Withers. ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... the German at all that I want you. Maria has found a Spenser at last, and I am going to read her the 'Hymn of Heavenly Beauty,' I know you never can hear ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... pap. By the same token I am inclined to think that I should drop Carlyle and Hawthorne for Matthew Arnold and, perhaps, Cardinal Newman." (Furbush was a High Churchman of a militant dye.) "What I should, of course, do would be to divide the present first term between Spenser and Milton, instead of giving it all to Shakespeare." This last was said directly to Dawson. It had been Mr. Dawson's particular joy that he could give one whole ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... glory that he appeared in the second generation following Spenser and Shakespeare—he was born in Shakespeare's lifetime—and carried off the palm, which he still keeps, for the greatest English poem. In spiritual kinship he is much nearer to Spenser than to Shakespeare. Shakespeare hides ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... baneful qualities. So Spenser says, wicked weed; so, in opposition, we say herbs or medicines have virtues. Bacon mentions virtuous Bezoar, ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... that Rowley was a prodigy, and wrote better than all his contemporaries; and that this is not at all incredible, it happening very frequently. And how, think you, gentle reader, he proves his first point? He produces some verses from Spenser, written about the year 1571; some from Sir John Cheke, written in 1553; and others from Sir H. Lea, master of the Armoury to queen Elizabeth. These having not the smallest relation to the present question, Ishall take no notice of them. He then cites ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... Spring Passion Joel Elias Spingarn Advice to a Lover S. Charles Jellicoe "Yes" Richard Doddridge Blackmore Love Samuel Taylor Coleridge Nested Habberton Lulham The Letters Alfred Tennyson Prothalamion Edmund Spenser Epithalamion Edmund Spenser The Kiss Sara Teasdale Marriage Wilfrid Wilson Gibson The Newly-wedded Winthrop Mackworth Praed I Saw Two Clouds at Morning John Gardiner Calkins Brainard Holy Matrimony John Keble The Bride Laurence Hope ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... frightened to perceive that they did not point so definitely to Shakspeare's tomb as she had heretofore supposed. There was an unmistakably distinct reference to a tomb, but it might be Bacon's, or Raleigh's, or Spenser's; and instead of the "Old Player," as she profanely called him, it might be either of those three illustrious dead, poet, warrior, or statesman, whose ashes, in Westminster Abbey, or the Tower burial-ground, or wherever they sleep, it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... men had "digged villainous saltpeter out of the bowels of the harmless earth" to manufacture powder, and others had invented cannon (S239), "those devilish iron engines," as the poet Spenser called them, "ordained to kill." Without artillery, the old feudal army, with its bows, swords, and battle-axes, could do little against a king like Henry, who had it. For this reason the whole kingdom lay at his mercy; and though the nobles ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Spenser, the divinely tongued, pictures April as a lusty youth, riding upon the bull with the golden horns (Taurus), wading through a flood, and adorned with garlands of the fairest flowers and buds. A better figure would have been Europa riding Zeus. And Chaucer also makes ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... said Ramorny, "and beware how you tempt me. Such as I brook not jests upon our agony. See thou keep thy scoffs, to pass upon misers [that is, miserable persons, as used in Spenser and other writers of his time, though the sense is now restricted to those who are covetous] in ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... inevitable that the twentieth century should find the Filocopo, Ameto, and Amorosa Visione tedious reading. The Teseide determined the form in which Pulci, Boiardo, Bello, Ariosto, Tasso, and, with a slight modification, our own Spenser were to write, but its readers are now few, and are not likely ever again to be numerous. Chaucer drew upon it for the Knight's Tale, but it is at any rate arguable that his retrenchment of its perhaps inordinate length was judicious, and that what he gave was better than what he borrowed. ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... best a thin, ragged coat that had been black but was green-brown with age, and he made his spunks as well as sold them. He brought Bacon and Adam Smith into Thrums, and he loved to recite long screeds from Spenser, with a running commentary on the versification and the luxuriance of the diction. Of Jamie's death I do not care to write. He went without many a dinner in order to ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... poetry in the hearts of the people, the great masterpieces of our national song made little or no appeal to them. They were bidden to a feast of rarest quality and profusion, but it consisted of food that they could not assimilate. Spenser, Milton, Pope, Keats, Tennyson, all spoke to them in a language which they could not understand, and presented to them a world of thought and life in which they had no inheritance. But the Yorkshire dialect verse which ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... from 1863 to 1872 the North American Review. His prose, beginning with an early volume of Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 1844, has consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, {502} Emerson, Shakespere, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle, etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like Witchcraft, New England Two Centuries Ago, My Garden Acquaintance, A Good ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... sweet spirit of the Christian religion. We see the conversion of England in the very process of its accomplishment. We see the beauties of Paganism and those of Christianity blending with each other, much as the Medieval and the Renaissance are blended in Spenser. In the one aspect Andrew is the valiant hero, like Beowulf, crossing the sea to accomplish a mighty deed of deliverance; in the other he is the saintly confessor, the patient sufferer, whose whole trust ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... himself a lasting name amongst the improvers of poetry in England. In tragedy he gave the first regular model; in personification he advanced far beyond all his predecessors, and furnished a prototype to that master of allegory, Spenser. A greater than Spenser has also been indebted to him; as will be evident, I think, to all who compare the description of the figures on the shield of war in his Induction, and especially those of them ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... prayer-book, Shakespeare, Spenser, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Lowell's Fable for Critics, Walton's Complete Angler, and ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... to moralists for a refutation of this Neo-Malthusian philosophy. Does any decent ordinary man or woman agree with it? Ask the man in the street. Turn the pages of our literature. Refer to Chaucer or Spenser, to Shakespeare or Milton, refer to Fielding or Burns or Scott or Tennyson. Some of these men were very imperfect; but they all knew the difference between lust and love; and it is because they can tell us at least ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... had every appearance of a cold blow; and soon after sundown it came on. Again it was clew up and haul down, reef and furl, until we had got her down to close-reefed topsails, double-reefed trysail, and reefed fore spenser. Snow, hail, and sleet were driving upon us most of the night, and the sea was breaking over the bows and covering the forward part of the little vessel; but, as she would lay her course, the captain refused ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... used for a decorative purpose, and is brought into an artistic relation with the elements of action and character. Such a use is made of landscape, for example, in the "Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto and the "Faerie Queene" of Spenser. The settings depicted by these narrative poets are essentially pictorial, and are used as a decorative background to the action rather than as part and parcel of it. If we seek an example in prose rather than in poetry, we need only turn to the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney. In this again the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... first acquaintance with the sea and the poem together, she soon came to fancy that she could not fix her attention on the book without the sound of the waves for an accompaniment to the verse—although the gentler noise of an ever flowing stream would have better suited the nature of Spenser's rhythm; for indeed, he had composed the greater part of the poem with such a sound in his ears, and there are indications in the poem itself that he consciously took the river as his chosen analogue after which to model the flow ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... forehead;[227] too careless of calumny,[228] too fearless of danger; he was, in a word, a man of sensation, acting from impulse; scorning, indeed, prudential views, but capable at all times of embracing grand and original ones; compared by the jealousy of faction to the Spenser of Edward the Second, and even the Sejanus of Tiberius, he was no enemy to the people; often serious in the best designs, but volatile in the midst; his great error sprung from a sanguine spirit. "He was ever," says Wotton, "greedy of honour and hot upon the public ends, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... by Boswell, ii. 250) contends that Spenser alludes to Lodge, in his "Tears of the Muses," under the name of Alcon, in the ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... bread and milk at breakfast, it would not very much surprise him; while yet his appetite for the substantial food remains the same. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland seem nowhere very strange to him, while Chaucer and Spenser need only to be simply told, while Dana's Two Years Before the Mast and Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days at Rugby hold their own as well as Jack and the Bean-Stalk. Grown up people have their prejudices, but ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... invention," he says, "seem to be the talents of the English; taste, judgment, propriety, and order, of the French. In the old English poets, in Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, there often appears, amidst some irregularities and extravagancies, a strength of imagination so vast, so gigantic and supernatural, as astonishes and confounds the reader into that admiration of their genius which makes him despise ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... haven't anything to do with him! But as for us, we didn't leave England until 1620, when Shakespeare had been perfectly dead four years. We took very good care not to come away too soon. Chaucer and Spenser were dead, too, and we had nothing to ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the two young ladies are well. Do let me forget that they are nieces of yours, and let me say that I never saw a more interesting, sweeter pair of sisters in my life. I am the fool of my feelings and attachments. I often take up a volume of my Spenser to realise you to my imagination, [109a] and think over the social scenes we have had together. God grant that there may be another world more congenial for honest fellows beyond this; a world where these rubs and plagues of absence, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... than once he has been offering him his patronage, to reconcile him to a world, of which his misfortunes have made him weary[3]. There is another Sidney still remaining, though there can never be another Spenser to deserve the favour. But one Sidney gave his patronage to the applications of a poet; the other offered it unasked. Thus, whether as a second Atticus, or a second Sir Philip Sidney, the latter in all respects will not have the worse of the comparison; and if he will take up with ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... authors. One may admit at once the comparative worthlessness of the pamphlet as a contribution to criticism or critical theory. Defoe's comments upon specific writers are thoroughly conventional and commonplace, as may be seen from a glance at his remarks about Milton, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and others on ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... which he travelled presented the aspect of a street in which a fair is held. Pipers came forth to play before him in a style which was not exactly that of the French opera; and the villagers danced wildly to the music. Long frieze mantles, resembling those which Spenser had, a century before, described as meet beds for rebels, and apt cloaks for thieves, were spread along the path which the cavalcade was to tread; and garlands, in which cabbage stalks supplied the place of laurels, were offered to the royal hand. The women insisted on ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... constant swain and doom him to perish miserably for love of her. Beware of the fountains and of the wells of this forest of Broceliande, for there she is most commonly to be encountered, and you may know her by her bright hair—"like golden wire," as Spenser says of his lady's—her red, flashing eyes, and her laughing lips. But if you would dare her wiles you must come alone to her fountain by night, for she shuns even the half-gloom that is day in shadowy Broceliande. The peasants when they speak of her will assure you that she and ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... Prospectus Lecture I. General character of the Gothic Mind in the Middle Ages II. General Character of the Gothic Literature and Art III. The Troubadours—Boccaccio—Petrarch—Pulci—Chaucer—Spenser IV-VI. Shakspeare (not included in the original text) VII. Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger VIII. 'Don Quixote'. Cervantes IX. On the Distinctions of the Witty, the Droll, the Odd, and the Humorous; the Nature and Constituents of Humour; Rabelais, Swift, Sterne X. Donne, Dante, Milton, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... theater-actor would have made. Nobody came down from London; there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears—there was merely silence, and nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh, and the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare's time passed from life! No praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited seven years before ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at what seems high prices for wooden utensils and were often named and bequeathed in wills. Maple-wood has been used and esteemed by many nations for cups and bowls. The old English and German vessel known as a mazer was made of maple-wood, often bound and tipped with silver. Spenser speaks in his Shepheard's Calendar of "a mazer yrought of the maple wood." A well-known specimen in England bears the legend in ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... have pleaded my cause with less effect; and the "J'y allois" of La Fontaine was not quoted with more approbation in the circles of Paris, than the naivete of my equally veracious and spontaneous reply. The triumph of my simplicity did not increase Kemble's good humour; and, shortly after, Mr. Spenser carried him off in his carriage, to prevent any further attacks on my ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... and in the Elizabethan era he is at the richest period of the English mind, with the chief men of action and of thought which that nation has produced, and with a pregnant future before him. Here he has Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon, Chapman, Jonson, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, Herbert, Donne, Herrick; and Milton, Marvell, and Dryden, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... we except Rabelais, appear in the latter half of the sixteenth century—Tasso and Camoens and Cervantes, [Footnote: Don Quixote did not appear till 1605; but Cervantes was then nearly sixty.] Spenser and Marlowe and Shakespeare, as well as Montaigne. But even in the first half of the century, Copernicus enunciated the new theory that the Sun, not the Earth, is the centre of the astronomical system; and before the end of our period, the new methods had established themselves ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... literature—English classics, will supply the place, we deny it; for there is not an English classic of value to an artist, who was not, to his very heart's core, embued with a knowledge and love of the ancient literature. We might instance but two, Spenser and Milton—the statute-books of the better English art—authors whom, we do not hesitate to say, no one can thoroughly understand or enjoy, who has not far advanced in classical education. We shall never cease to throw out remarks of this kind, with the hope that our universities will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... storme-bett vessell safely ryde; This is the port of rest from troublous toyle, The worlde's sweet inn from paine and wearisome turmoyle. Faerie Queene. E. SPENSER. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... the military history of the Civil War the author is specially indebted to "The Civil War in the United States," by W. Birkbeck Wood and Major J. E. Edmonds, R.E., with an introduction by Spenser Wilkinson: Methuen & Co., London, and Putnam, New York, which is the only concise and complete history of the war written with full knowledge of all recent works bearing on the subject. Mr. Nicolay's chapters in the "Cambridge Modern History" give a very lucid narrative ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... of Mr. Spenser Wilkinson in "Owens College Essays," do not convince me that Napoleon alone devised that plan. Chuquet's conclusion ("Toulon," 176), "Bonaparte partageait l'avis des representants," seems to me thoroughly sound. So, too, Cottin, "Toulon et ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... name, out of the times gone by, The poets dearest to me, I should say, Pulci for spirits, and a fine, free way, Chaucer for manners, and a close, silent eye; Spenser for luxury and sweet sylvan play, Horace for chatting with from day to day; Milton for classic taste and harp strung high, Shakspeare for all—but most, society. But which take with me could I take but one? Shakspeare, as long as I was unoppress'd With the world's weight, ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.22 • Various
... nature: Virgil and Homer have not one of them. And those who are guilty of so boyish an ambition in so grave a subject are so far from being considered as heroic poets that they ought to be turned down from Homer to the "Anthologia," from Virgil to Martial and Owen's Epigrams, and from Spenser to Flecknoe—that is, from the top to the bottom of all poetry. But to return to Tasso: he borrows from the invention of Boiardo, and in his alteration of his poem, which is infinitely for the ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... Plot. The greater part of the fable seems to have been invented by Shakespeare. The Hero and Claudio story is found in the twenty-second novel of Bandello, and in at least three other books (one of them Spenser's Faerie Queene). It was also known to the Elizabethans in a ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... decorum. But here was a new language, a choice and arrangement of words, a variety, elasticity, and harmony of verse most grateful to the ears of men. If not passion, there was fervor, which was perhaps as near it as the somewhat stately movement of Spenser's mind would allow him to come. Sidney had tried many experiments in versification, which are curious and interesting, especially his attempts to naturalize the sliding rhymes of Sannazzaro in English. But there is everywhere the uncertainty of a 'prentice hand. Spenser ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... art proofe against them, and indeed Above th' ill fortune of them, or the need. I, therefore will begin. Soule of the Age ! The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our Stage ! My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye A little further, to make thee a roome : Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe, And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give. That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses ; I meane with great, but disproportion'd ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... extraordinary of all. In France, this work remained the dominant work of poetic literature, and "the source whence every rhymer drew for his needs" down to the period of the classical revival led by Ronsard (when it was edited by Clement Marot, Spenser's early model). In England, it exercised an influence only inferior to that which belonged to it at home upon both the matter and the form of poetry down to the renascence begun by Surrey and Wyatt. This extraordinary ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... must console ourselves—if not with Mr. Hardy's statement that 'ideal physical beauty is incompatible with mental development, and a full recognition of the evil of things'—at least with the pictures of those who had some comeliness, and grace, and charm. Dr. Grosart says of a miniature of Edmund Spenser, 'It is an exquisitely beautiful face. The brow is ample, the lips thin but mobile, the eyes a grayish-blue, the hair and beard a golden red (as of "red monie" of the ballads) or goldenly chestnut, the nose ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... have been insignificant ones, in building up their country's literature. Of the great writers, Professor Craik devotes but little space to Shakspeare and Milton, because their works are in everybody's hands; while from Chaucer and Spenser, Swift and Burke, ample specimens are given, the author assuming that their writings are but little read. Indeed, he declares that the great poets and other writers even of the last generation have already faded from the view of the most numerous class of the educated and reading public,—and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... recording what it is probable the personage before me might most desire to have concealed. Indeed, his figure was so closely veiled and wimpled, either with a mantle, morning-gown, or some such loose garb, that the verses of Spenser ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... him; he reveled in the rich and elegant strains of Virgil, and of the many toned lyre of Horace and the silver lute of Catullus." From the full and inexhaustible fountain of English letters he drank unceasingly. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, and, later, Tennyson were ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... the children of the monarch Eochaidh Fiedloch," says O'Donovan (cited in O'Mahony's translation of Keating's "History," p. 276) "by far the most celebrated was Meadbh or Mab, who is still remembered as the fairy queen of the Irish, the 'Queen Mab' of Spenser." ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... whom other contemporary writers may be grouped. In Great Britain the several and successive periods might thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John Wiclif, Thomas More or Henry Howard, Edmund Spenser or Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakspere or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler, Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith, William ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... say, but certainly for almost, if not quite, the first) the famous "Christabel" metre—iambic dimeter, rhymed with a wide licence of trisyllabic equivalence. This was to be twice revived by great poets, with immense consequences to English poetry—first by Spenser in the Kalendar, and then by Coleridge himself—and was to become one of the most powerful, varied, and charming of English rhythms. That this metre, the chief battle-ground of fighting between the accent-men and the quantity-men, never arose till after rhymed quantitative metre had met ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of the suggested revival. Ours is not the first period that has suffered under the dealers in concetti. They have had things somewhat their own way before—in the century which included Spenser and Donne, for instance. Our euphuists may pass away like those of the Elizabethan era, or, like the best of them, live in spite of faults with which they were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... years, the lad, who had become delicate from rapid growth, spent half a year with an aunt, Miss Janet Scott, at Kelso. He had now awaked to the poetry of Shakespeare and of Spenser, and had acquired an ample and indiscriminate appetite for reading of all kinds. To this time at Kelso he also traced his earliest feeling for the beauties of natural objects. The love of Nature, especially when combined with ancient ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... Spenser in the measure of his verse, and in the harmony, simplicity, and variety of his composition. Antique expressions I have avoided; admitting, however, some old words, where they seemed to suit the subject: but I hope none will be found that are now obsolete, or in any degree not intelligible to ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... treasures of classic lore in music and literature. Homer, Herodotus, Plato, she has read, with Tasso and his chivalrous lays, and Spenser and his stately verse. In music, Glueck and Gretry, Beethoven and Boieldieu's dulcet tones have helped to fashion ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... I began to read and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's works." The delight in Spenser wakened all the music in him, and in 1628, in his tenth year, he wrote a "Tragical Historie of ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... in which are written Spenser's 'Faerie Queen,' Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence,' and Byron's 'Childe Harold,' and it is the highest flight of poetry: after which comes the heroic verse, in which we lap the heavy poems we call epic—their Latin appellation; of these the Iliads of Homer and the AEneids ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... he was the most poetical of his countrymen. Milton thinks he could have surpassed Virgil had he attempted epic poetry. He was nearest to the romantic school of all the classical authors, and Chaucer, Ariosto, and Spenser owe to him great obligations. Like Pope, his verses flowed spontaneously. His "Tristia" were more admired by the Romans than his "Amores" or "Metamorphoses,"—probably from the doleful description of his exile,—a fact which shows that contemporaries are not always ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... which spouted water like a whale. It lived in a fresh-water lake.[157] In the same number of the same Journal Sir George Grey gives extracts from a Maori legend of the dragon, which he compares with corresponding passages from Spenser's "Faery Queen". "Their strict verbal and poetical conformity with the New Zealand legends are such as at first to lead to the impression either that Spenser must have stolen his images and language from the New Zealand poets, or that they must have acted unfairly by ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... willing to be godfather "to the first heyre" of Shakespeare's "invention," his first published poem. In 1594 Shakespeare also dedicated to Southampton his Lucrece, in terms of greater intimacy, though no less respect. On December 27, 1595, Edmund Spenser's Colin Clout's Come Home Againe contained a reference which is now generally believed to ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... drunk deeply from some hidden fount of memory. Now she spoke it with readiness, as Oro had done when he addressed the sorcerers, although many of the words she used were not known to me, and the general form of her language appeared archaic, as for instance that of Spenser is compared with modern English. When she saw I did not comprehend her, however, she would stop and cast her sentences in a different shape, till at length I caught her meaning. Now I give the substance of ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... tree as Spenser has thus described is strikingly beautiful: decay in this case looks pleasing. To such an oak Lucan compared ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 369, Saturday, May 9, 1829. • Various
... Chaucer and Spenser, this life of the spirit is not distinctly marked in any of its authors, not excepting even Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose sad fate gave a factitious interest to his writings. It is more noticeable in Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst's ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... as a sort of uncanny land, whose savage recesses were filled with demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana this evil character is attributed to that portion of India lying south of the Vindhyas. The forest of Spenser's Fairy Queen, in which wandering knights meet with manifold beasts and maleficent giants, and do valorous battles against them in the rescue of damsels and the like—such seem to have been the Gondwana woods to the ancient Hindu imagination. It was not distressed damsels, however, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... in London about 1553. He was graduated at Cambridge in 1576, and soon after wrote "The Shepherd's Calendar." Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh were his friends and patrons. In 1598 Spenser was appointed a sheriff in Ireland, and not long afterward in a rebellion his property was destroyed and his child killed. He did not long survive this calamity. His best-known poem ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... chiefs of British song Scorned not such legends to prolong: They gleam through Spenser's elfin dream, And mix in Milton's heavenly theme; And Dryden, in immortal strain, Had raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald king and court Bade him toil on, to make them sport; Demanded for their niggard pay, Fit for their souls, a looser lay, Licentious satire, song, and play; ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... Bunyan is, as D'Israeli has called him, the Spenser of the people, and whether or not his work is the poetry of Puritanism, the best evidence of the merit of the "Pilgrim's Progress" appears, as Dr. Johnson has shrewdly pointed out, in the general and continued ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... dreamed and speculated. Nor are his sarcasms scorching and bitter, but rather humorous and laughable. He shows himself to be a genial and loving companion, not an austere teacher of disagreeable truths. He is not solemn and intense, like Dante; he does not give wings to his fancy, like Spenser; he has not the divine insight of Shakspeare; he is not learned, like Milton; he is not sarcastic, like Pope; he does not rouse the passions, like Byron; he is not meditative, like Wordsworth,—but he paints nature with great accuracy and delicacy, as ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... style and the commencement of the Modern. In Dryden we see the first master of the new: in Milton, whose genius dominates here as Shakespeare's in the former book,—the crown and consummation of the early period. Their splendid Odes are far in advance of any prior attempts, Spenser's excepted: they exhibit the wider and grander range which years and experience and the struggles of the time conferred on Poetry. Poetry now gave expression to political feeling, to religious thought, to a high philosophic statesmanship in writers such as Marvell, Herbert, and Wotton: whilst ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Monthly, and from 1863 to 1872 the North American Review. His prose, beginning with an early volume of Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 1844, has consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Emerson, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle, etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like Witchcraft, New England Two Centuries Ago, My Garden Acquaintance, A Good Word for Winter, Abraham Lincoln, etc., etc. Two ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Fielding as a young but meritorious novice in the fields of romance. In poetry, she was familiar with names as late as Dryden, and had once been seduced into reading "The Rape of the Lock;" but she regarded Spenser as the purest type of her country's literature in this line. Genealogy was her favourite insanity. Those things which are the pride of most genealogists were to her contemptible. Arms and mottoes set her beside herself. Ealfried of Ullathorne had wanted ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the arguments of Dindorf, that [Greek: orges nosouses] means "a mind distempered," and that [Greek: logoi] mean "arguments, reasonings." Boyes, who always shows a poetical appreciation of his author, aptly quotes Spenser's Fairy Queen, b. 2, ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... the mother, whose maiden name was Spence and who traced her Scotch ancestry back to the hero of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, taught her children the good old ballads and the romantic stories in the Fairie Queen, and it was one of the poet's earliest delights to recount the adventures of Spenser's heroes and heroines ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... the old mythology which were most in harmony with Christian doctrines had the best chance of survival; and that, as a poet puts a new physiognomy on an old story without distorting the tradition, as we have seen in our own day the story of Arthur told again, not with the elaborate allegory of Spenser, but with a spiritual transfiguration which makes the "Idylls of the King" truly an epic of the nineteenth century, so I conceive that Beowulf was a genuine growth of that junction in time (define it where we may) when the heathen tales ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... instance the pleasures of the table. I do not speak of great entertainments or life in palaces or great houses, which do not so much vary from one age to another, but of the ordinary life of people like ourselves. Spenser says:— ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... not less like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They are content with truth. They use the positive degree. They seem frigid and phlegmatic to those who have been spiced with the frantic passion and violent coloring of ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... bear to put in a black line. This blaze of benediction, this conflict between lights, has its place in poetry, not in biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance, in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is sometimes almost indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... times. It is sufficient to say that, in his list of Italians, he has omitted Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso; in his list of Spaniards, Lope and Calderon; in his list of French, Pascal, Bossuet, Moliere, Corneille, Racine, and Boileau; and in his list of English, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... friend, Edward Roth—whom James Huneker celebrates in his "Steeplejack"—named Spenser as "the poet of the poets"; but Spenser is too hard to read—even harder than Chaucer, and certainly more involved, while no poets that ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full of a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later, it seemed absurd for the French poets of a certain genre ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... had lent (that is to say given) him money freely, and I do not think that his fiercest enemy can seriously think that he bore Hunt a grudge for having told him, as he himself records, that the "Lays" were not so good as Spenser, whom Macaulay in one of the rare lapses of his memory had unjustly blasphemed, and whom Leigh Hunt adored. To my mind, if there were any doubt about Dickens's intention, or about the fitting in a certain sense of the cap, this testimony of Macaulay's would settle it. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... has rusted what the Poet writ, Worn out his language, and obscured his wit: In vain he jests in his unpolish'd strain, And tries to make his readers laugh in vain. Old Spenser next, warm'd with poetic rage, In ancient tales amused a barb'rous age; But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore, Can charm ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... associated with a particular meaning that although the vocal value is exactly the same, yet the one spelling goes to one man and the other to a different man. "Spenser" would never suggest to a learned man the author of the "Philosophy of Evolution," nor would "Spencer" ever suggest the author of the "Fairie Queen." "Mr. Mil" would never mean "John Stuart Mill," although the words "Mil" and "Mill" are pronounced ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... famous men have not been proof against this insidious form of vanity and pretence. Edmund Spenser was ungenerous enough to "dismiss his known ancestry of small Lancashire gentry and plant himself modestly in the shadow of the newly discovered shield of arms of the noble house of Spencer, 'of which I meanest boast myself to be.'" And Lord Tennyson, whose ultimate ascertainable ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... wheresoe'er it be, Whether in earth laid up in secret store, Or else in heav'n, that no man may it see With sinful eyes, for feare it to deflore, Is perfect Beautie.—SPENSER. ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York, who was Master of Pembroke; Foxe, the great Bishop of Winchester and patron of learning; Ridley; Grindal, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury; Matthew Hutton and Whitgift. Beside these masters Edmund Spenser, the poet Gray, and William Pitt are names of which Pembroke ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... whole. The meagre outline of the Hebrew legend is lost in the splendour and music of Milton's verse. The stern idealism of Geneva is clothed in the gorgeous robes of the Renascence. If we miss something of the free play of Spenser's fancy, and yet more of the imaginative delight in their own creations which gives so exquisite a life to the poetry of the early dramatists, we find in place of these the noblest example which our literature affords of the majesty of ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... directions, yet some few books must have place in every well-balanced library. First always, the Bible, with concordance complete for study purposes, a set of Shakespeare in small, easily handled volumes, a set of encyclopaedias, and a standard dictionary. Then some of the best known poets—Milton, Spenser, Pope, Goldsmith, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, the Brownings, Byron, Homer, Dante, etc., with Longfellow, Riley, and some others of our best-loved American poets—for though we may not care for poetry we cannot afford to deny ourselves ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,—Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,—breathes no quite fresh and in this sense wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green-wood,—her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... in America, which culminated in the Constitution of the United States, had its institutional origin in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth. That wonderful age, which gave to the world not only Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, but also Drake, Frobisher and Raleigh, was the Anglo-Saxon reaction to the Renaissance. The spirit of man had a new birth and was breaking away from the too rigid bonds ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... his life, he dreamed of nothing but fame, and of that only for the sake of the sterling recompense it brings. Friendships not convertible to cash, Coke resolutely foreswore at the commencement of his career, and he was blessed with none at the close of it. Spenser yielded him no delight, Shakespeare no seduction. The study of law began at three in the morning, and, with short intervals of rest, ceased at nine in the evening, at which hour the indefatigable student at last took repose. Fortified by such ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... home of the exiled Orleans family, shows vestiges of the taste of Kent, who always accredited very much of his love for the picturesque to the reading of Spenser. It is not often that the poet of the "Faerie Queene" is mentioned as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... for dollars, dollars, dollars, has subsided, then the American may justly rear his head as an aspirant for historic fame. His land has never yet produced a Shakespeare, a Johnson, a Milton, a Spenser, a Newton, a Bacon, a Locke, a Coke, or a Rennie. The utmost America has yet achieved is a very faint imitation of the least renowned of our great writers, ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... and the corruptions of Italian life, mingled with homesickness for the pleasant sights and quiet air of his native Anjou, inspired the two collections of sonnets which are his best, the Antiquites romaines, translated by Spenser in 1591, ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... him to drive home," she said, with a firm voice, and a smile which if anyone care to understand, let him read Spenser's fortieth sonnet. And so they parted. The coachman took the queer shabby un-London-like man for a fortune teller his lady was in the habit of consulting, and paid homage to his power with the handle ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... have lent the authority of their great names to certain distinct variations from the rigid Petrarchan type. The peculiarity of Spenser's sonnets is that the rime of the octave overflows into the sestet, thus marring the exquisite balance which should subsist between the two parts, and yielding an effect of cloying sweetness. Although the famous stanza-form which ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson |
