"Swinburne" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sketch Book, especially the chapters on Madame Sand and the New Apocalypse and French Dramas and Melodramas. See also De Quincey's Review of Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister. Works, vol. xii.] Yet, in the one case as in the other—thanks, in no small measure, to Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne—genius, in the long run, carried the day. And the same history has been repeated, as the literatures of Russia and of Scandinavia have each in turn been brought within ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... pleasantly. Lord Lansdowne drank to the Bar (Mr. Bowen), Lord Camperdown to—I really forget what: Mr. Green to Literature and Science delivering a most undeserved eulogium on myself, with a more rightly directed one on Arnold, Swinburne, and the old pride of Balliol, Clough: this was cleverly and almost touchingly answered by dear Mat Arnold. Then the Dean of Westminster gave the Fellows and Scholars—and then—twelve o'clock struck. We were, counting from ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... is the old Tennyson. And yonder is the identical Swinburne you used to spout from, too. Lord, Jack, it seems a century since I used to listen by the hour to The Triumph of Time ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... can fairly say I have finished it," she said. "That is, omitting Swinburne—Beowulf to Browning—I rather like the two B's myself. Beowulf to Browning," she repeated, "I think that is the kind of title which might catch one's ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... for I was fond of roaming about the fields, and especially of tracing to their sources the wooded gullies abounding in our Somersetshire country. On such solitary rambles I was always accompanied by a poet, in my pocket. On the occasion I am going to describe, Swinburne in his Poems and Ballads was my ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... close. It has been at once a pride and a pleasure to me to rescue this fine old play from undeserved oblivion. There is but one living poet whose genius could treat worthily the tragical story of Nero's life and death. In his three noble sonnets, "The Emperor's Progress," Mr. Swinburne shows that he has pondered the subject deeply: if ever he should give us a Tragedy of Nero, we may be sure that one more deathless contribution would be added to ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... turns and rends The "good grey" bard. Alack for SWINBURNE'S "friends"! He worshipped once at thy red shine, Revolt, Now thou'rt a mark for his Olympian bolt; But when he rounds on poor barbaric WALT, One can but gasp, and wonder where he'll halt. Coupled with BYRON in one furious "slate"? O poor Manhattan mouther, what a fate! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... Swinburne's personal characteristics Mr. Goose, as was to be expected, writes admirably."—Daily News ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... delight. He knew that he was dicing with Death, but that was the very essence of his ideal; and he knew that if Death won the throw, his ideal was crowned and consummated, for ever safe from the withering touch of time, or accidental soilure. If it had been given to Swinburne to fall, rifle in hand, on, say, the field of Mentana, we should have been the poorer by many splendid verses, but the richer by a heroic life-story. And would his lot have been the less enviable? Nay, surely, much the more. That is the thought which may well bring solace to those who ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... to say much of Shakespeare's Arthur," says Swinburne. "There are one or two figures in the world of his work of which there are no words that would be fit or good to say. Another of these is Cordelia. The place they have in our lives and thoughts is not one for talk. ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... the snow-cold blossom shed, If haply the heart that burned within the rose, The spirit in sense, the life of life be dead? If haply the wind that slays with storming snows Be one with the wind that quickens?' SWINBURNE, A Reminiscence. ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... I confess that I am not in as warm sympathy as any of you"—by singling out Meyers at this point he lent a quietly insulting tone to his remarks—"with the present course. Were it left to me, I should do away with Wordsworth, substituting, possibly, Swinburne. I have sometimes wondered if we weren't underestimating the potential strength of the Freshman's mind by feeding him on too much 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 ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... wounded brother, and finally settled down in a Washington garret to spend his strength as an army hospital nurse. He wrote "Drum Taps" and other magnificent poems about the War, culminating in his threnody on Lincoln's death, "When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed." Swinburne called this "the most sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world." After the war had ended, Whitman stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John Burroughs and W. D. O'Connor. John Hay was a staunch friend. Some of the best known poets and critics of England ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the last century, when the family of Serra had transferred the title to Sybaris to a Genoese family without a name, who received from it forty thousand ducats yearly, and would have received more, if their agents had been more faithful. There the place fades out of history, and you find in your Swinburne, "that the locality has never been thoroughly examined"; in your Smith's Dictionary, that "the whole subject is very obscure, and a careful examination still much needed"; in the Cyclopaedia, that the site of Sybaris is lost. Craven ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... with his parted lips; 'it's too dactylic in rhythm for English verse to go to it. Beranger might have written a lilt for it, as far as mere syllables go, but Beranger to write about Miss Butterfly!—pho, no Frenchman could possibly catch it. Swinburne could fit the metres, I dare say, but he couldn't fit the feeling. It shall be a song without words, unless I write some Italian lines for it myself. Animula, blandula vagula—that's the sort of ring for it, but Latin's mostly too heavy. Io, Hymen, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Swinburne and Tennyson and is very sure he won't have anything but "a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair." Then, of course, there is the "classic profile," the "deep, unfathomable eyes," the "lily-white skin," and "hair like the raven's wing," not to mention the ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the highest meaning, an aesthetic phenomenon in itself, required a wonderful spiritual endowment and an unflinchingly discriminating habit. For Walter Pater started by being above all a writer, and an aesthete in the very narrow sense of twenty years ago: an aesthete of the school of Mr. Swinburne's Essays, and of the type still common on the Continent. The cultivation of sensations, vivid sensations, no matter whether healthful or unhealthful, which that school commended, was, after all, but ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... mediaevalism of the pre-Raphaelites, the book contains shorter pieces—"Flirts in Hades," "Poor Pussy's Nightmare," "The Fool's Paradise, or Love and Life," "A Lost Illusion," "Vers Nonsensiques," "L'Onglay a Parry," "Two Thrones," "A Love-Agony," "A Simple Story," "A Ballad of Blunders" (after Swinburne's "Ballad of Burdens"), and then a story in prose, "The Rise and Fall of the Jack Spratts: A tale of Modern Art and Fashion." All the poetry is in the ballad strain, and by its monotony the reader is put into the right condition to receive a shock from some felicitous twist at the ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... emulation of Fletcher's poem, but far short of it,' and his remarks must not be taken too seriously. Two quotations will serve to illustrate the diversity of opinion among modern critics. They display alike more condescension to particulars and greater weight of judgement. Thus we find Mr. Swinburne, in his very able study of Ben Jonson, not a little disgusted at the introduction of the broader humour and burlesque of the dialect-speaking characters, Maudlin, Lorel, Scathlock, in conjunction with ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... have you turned commercialist, petite soeur? If it is a question of starving, I can always paint another. I do not sell this one, voila tout. If it were only mine, I would have five lines of Swinburne under it for title. They ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... Though Milton and Shakespeare made their grand Soul-Symbols,—by virtue of a cosmic force moving them as it has moved no others in the language,—you cannot find in their works, or in any works of that age, such clear perceptions or statements of spiritual truth as in Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise; nor was the brain-mind of either of those giants of the Middle Period capable of such conscious mystic thought as Wordsworth's. There was an evolution upward and inward; from ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... tone, has enlarged the means of musical expression. This is especially shown in the characteristic use he makes of the orchestra in its lower ranges. As Brahms, for depth of thought, was compared with Browning, so Tchaikowsky may well be likened to such poets as Shelley and Swinburne, so exquisite is his instinct for tonal beauty and for delicacy of shading. At times, to be sure, he fairly riots in gorgeous colors—this being the result of his Slavic blood—but few composers have been able to achieve ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... I admitted contentedly. "I think really, artists—people with the artist's brain—do enjoy everything tremendously. They have such a much wider field of desires, as you say; and fewer limitations. They 'weave the web Desire,' as Swinburne says, 'to ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... D'Annunzio and Pascoli, antithetical in almost all points, may be said to have divided his inheritance in this; Pascoli's Vergilian economy contrasting with the exuberance of D'Annunzio somewhat as with us the classicism of the present poet-laureate with that of Swinburne. In Germany the Parnassian reserve, concentration, and aristocratic exclusiveness was to reappear in the ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... small, he gained the friendship of many of the most illustrious spirits of his time—Essex, Prince Henry, Bacon, Jonson, Webster, among the number—and it has been his good fortune to draw in after years splendid tributes from such successors in the poetic art as Keats and A. C. Swinburne. ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... remarks about the most famous European authors then numbered among living men. If one were asked for the name of the greatest man of letters still living in the world, the possible claimants to the distinction would hardly be more than five in number. If it were a question of poetry alone, Swinburne would have to be named first, with Carducci for a fairly close second. But if we take literature in its larger sense, as including all the manifestations of creative activity in language, and if we insist, ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... the Grecians" came first these Elysian numbers, then through Lucretius, then through Tennyson's own Lucretius, then in Mr Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon:- ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... since the publication of Swinburne's first volume, and it is scarcely to the credit of the English public that we should have had to wait so long for a collected edition of the poems of one of the greatest poets of this or any country. 'It is nothing to me,' Swinburne tells us, with a delicate ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... tongues. Even Swinburne, the musical, is said to have done a French version for the 'Revue des deux mondes'*. A St. Louis magazine, The Western, found relief in a Latin ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... reminded of Swinburne's view of Providence when he said that he never saw an old gentleman give a sixpence to a beggar, but he was straightway run ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... is Gothic. Her heart is of the type created by Mr. Swinburne in the minds of those who do not understand him,—in their minds, for in the flesh the type is not found. Moreover, she resents modernness of every kind, including the steam-engine, the electric telegraph, the continent of North America, and myself. Her political ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... no generation in particular. His interest in the life of the twentieth century, a life so different from that of his own youth and early manhood, was strangely keen and insistent. Sometimes in talking of his great contemporaries, Tennyson, Meredith, Swinburne, Rossetti, Morris, Matthew Arnold, Borrow, there would creep into his voice a note of reminiscent sadness; but it always seemed poetic rather than personal. It may be said that he never really grew up, that his spirit never tired. His ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the old Locri, in the middle ages. Scta. Cyriaca, and by corruption Hieracium, Gerace, (Dissert. Chorographica Italiae Medii AEvi, p. 312.) The dives opum of the Norman times soon lapsed into poverty, since even the church was poor: yet the town still contains 3000 inhabitants, (Swinburne, p. 340.)] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... excuse for my laziness. I hope you will not excuse yourself. My plans are still very uncertain, and it is not likely that anything will happen before Christmas. In the meanwhile, I believe I shall live on here 'between the sandhills and the sea,' as I think Mr. Swinburne hath it. I was pretty nearly slain; my spirit lay down and kicked for three days; I was up at an Angora goat-ranche in the Santa Lucia Mountains, nursed by an old frontiers-man, a mighty hunter of bears, and I scarcely slept, or ate, or thought for four days. Two nights I lay out under a tree ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... claiming, or at best enjoying, but the slighter attention; and their office thus mainly affects us as that of showing in how jostled, how frequently arrested and all but defeated a hand, the torch could still be carried. It is not of course for the countrymen of Byron and of Tennyson and Swinburne, any more than for those of Victor Hugo, to say nothing of those of Edmond Rostand, to forget the occurrence on occasion of high instances in which the dangers all seem denied and only favour and facility recorded; but it would take more of ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... brilliancy. The Victorian Age is usually applied to the whole century, during the better part of which Victoria reigned. The literature of this age is rich with the writings of Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, Edwin Arnold, Jean Ingelow, Owen Meredith, Arthur Hugh Clough, Adelaide Procter, and a ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... of his prose writings will readily see how much literature, and especially poetic literature, occupied his attention. Shakespeare, Dryden, Lessing, Rousseau, Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, Keats, Carlyle, Percival, Thoreau, Swinburne, Chaucer, Emerson, Pope, Gray,—these are the principal subjects of his prose, and the range of topics indicates the catholicity ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... literary age—masters of prose and masters of verse. No prose more winning has ever been written than that of Cardinal Newman; no verse finer, more polished, more melodious has ever been written than that of Lord Tennyson and Mr. Swinburne. ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... Browne. So with my other works: CAIN, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of SORDELLO: ROBIN HOOD, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in MONMOUTH, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first draft of THE KING'S PARDON, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... along the big Anthology which, in its old-blue binding, contrasted so satisfyingly with the mahogany table in the sitting-room. The first thing she read was "Before the Beginning of Years" from "Atalanta in Calydon;" Missy especially adored Swinburne—so liltingly incomprehensible. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... of the nineteenth century welcomed as the ultimate massage of philosophy, will not be ridiculous only because it will be meaningless. But I am unable to think of the men of the future deriving any pleasure from our greatest poet, Browning. On the other hand it is not impossible that the fame of Swinburne will stand higher in the twenty-first century than it does in this opening decade of ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... dull than stupid, and weaker in will than in intellect. In him the hobbledehoy period had been unusually prolonged, and strangers at court were astonished to see a prince of nineteen years of age running after a footman to tickle him while his hands were full of dirty clothes.[Footnote: Swinburne, i. 11.] The clumsy youth grew up into a shy and awkward man, unable to find at will those accents of gracious politeness which are most useful to the great. Yet people who had been struck at first only with ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... nothing so improving as the society of one's equals or superiors. Stimulated into mental activity by her associates in the world in which she now moved, Mary's genius expanded, and ideas but half formed developed into fixed principles. As Swinburne says of Blake, she was born into the church of rebels. Her present experience was her baptism. The times were exciting. The effect of the work of Voltaire and the French philosophers was social upheaval in France. ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... its fountains in and about 1832 continued to impel them till the close of their lives. While the poetic world altered around them, while two generations of poets made new schools of poetry, they remained, for the most part, unaffected by these schools. There is nothing of Arnold and Clough, of Swinburne, Rossetti or Morris, or of any of the others, in Browning or Tennyson. There is nothing even of Mrs. Browning in Browning. What changes took place in them were wrought, first, by the natural growth of their own character; ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Mrs. Dearman, denying himself champagne at dinner-parties, earning opprobrium as a teetotaller, going to bed early like a bread-and-butter flapper, and generally losing all the joys of Life! Been behaving like a backfisch. He read his Swinburne again, and unearthed from the bottom of a trunk some books that dealt with the decadent's joys,—poets of the Flesh, and prosers of the Devil, in his ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... doing equally well afloat during the subsequent three years and a half, qualifying for Gunnery, Torpedo, and Navigating duties, serving for six months aboard a destroyer, and everywhere gaining the esteem and goodwill of my superiors, here was I, Paul Swinburne, at the age of seventeen and a half, an outcast kicked out of the Navy with ignominy and my career ruined, through the machinations of another, ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... that it was irrevocably feminine, even in father's time. Now I'm sure you understand! Well, I'll give you another example. It'll shock you, but I don't care. Suppose Queen Victoria gave a dinner-party, and that the guests had been Leighton, Millais, Swinburne, Rossetti, Meredith, Fitzgerald, etc. Do you suppose that the atmosphere of that dinner would have been artistic? Heavens no! The very chairs on which they sat would have seen to that. So with our house—it must be feminine, and all we can do is to see that ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... fully appreciate. And then, too, if you had once begun to stay, waiting for the great things to happen and the great books to be written, you would never have gone, for there would still have been Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... done the Commons. House, all unconscious of what is in store for it, wantons at play. Innumerable questions on paper. SUMMERS coming up fresh with batch of new conundrums. PATRICK O'BRIEN "having had his attention called" to some verses by SWINBURNE, proposes to read them. House wickedly delighted at prospect of SWINBURNE being haltingly declaimed with North Tipperary accent localised by companionship with the Town Commissioners of Nenagh; SPEAKER thinks it might be funny, but wouldn't be business; so PATRICK: having begun, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... age as Browning's poems voice its optimism. In the fourteen years between Men and Women and The Ring and the Book poets of a new kind appear; William Morris's Defense of Guinevere, The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise, and Swinburne's early poems are alien to the work of Browning in form, subject-matter, and ideals. The fact is, the more definitely we try to place Browning in his literary environment the more distinctly do we perceive that he was sui generis among his contemporaries. He combined in striking fashion the ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... on either hand. Drumley ordered the sort of dinner she liked, and a bottle of champagne and a bottle of fine burgundy to make his favorite drink—champagne and burgundy, half and half. He was running to poetry that evening—Keats and Swinburne. Finally, after some hesitation, he produced a poem by Dowson—"I ran across it today. It's the only thing of his worth while, I believe—and it's so fine that Swinburne must have been sore when he read it because he hadn't ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... of note was a volume of poems, happily entitled Airs from Arcady. It contains verses both grave and gay: one of the cleverest is called "Home, Sweet Home, with Variations." He writes the poem first in the style of Swinburne, then of Bret Harte, then of Austin Dobson, then of Oliver Goldsmith and finally of Walt Whitman. The book also showed his skill in the use of French forms of verse, as ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... of a visit from Milsand, the poet said: "No words can express the love I have for Milsand, increasingly precious as he is." The Benzons were at that time in the hills above Loch Tummel, where Jowett was staying, Swinburne also with the Master of Balliol. Had there been a phonograph to register the conversation of such a trio as Jowett, Browning, and Swinburne, its records ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... statue should be to strike the spirit with a sudden sense of pride as with a thunderbolt. It should lift us with it into the empty and ennobling air. Along the base of every noble monument, whatever else may be written there, runs in invisible letters the lines of Swinburne: ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Shelley placed above Byron and next to Shakspere; he reads a political poem by a modern master, and discovers to his horror that he fails to understand what it is all about. Moreover, this very free critic cannot abide Browning and the later works of Tennyson; nor can he admire Mr. Swinburne. This is dreadful; but worse remains behind. With grief and terror this penitent declares that he cannot tolerate "The Pilgrim's Progress" or "Don Quixote"; and he goes on to say, "How much of Milton seems trash, also Butler, very much of Wordsworth, and all ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... let us kick up what dust we will over 'Imperial ideals,' we must admit, at least, that these ideals are not yet 'accepted of song': they have not inspired poetry in any way adequate to the nobility claimed for them. Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley saluted the Boer War in verse of much truculence, but no quality; and when Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley lacked quality one began to inquire into causes. Mr. Kipling's Absent-minded Beggars, Muddied Oafs, Goths and Huns, invited one to consider ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... growing-pains; but it was not to learn this that she had summoned me. What she wanted was to be assured that he was worth working for, an assurance which I managed to convey by the simple stratagem of remarking that the poems reminded me of Swinburne—and so they did, as well as of Browning, Tennyson, Rossetti, and all the other poets who supply ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... engaged on a "Historia Amoris." There is an interesting passage relating to the names of great writers. Alphabet Jones assures us that they are always "in two syllables with the accent on the first. Oyez: Homer, Sappho, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Hugo, Swinburne ... Balzac, Flaubert, Huysmans, Michelet, Renan." The reader is permitted to ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Drayton's chief attempt in the jewelled or ornamental style appeared in 1595, with the title of Endimion and Phoebe, and was, in a sense, an imitation of Marlowe's Hero and Leander. Hero and Leander is, as Swinburne says, a shrine of Parian marble, illumined from within by a clear flame of passion; while Endimion and Phoebe is rather a curiously wrought tapestry, such as that in Mortimer's Tower, woven in splendid and harmonious colours, wherein, ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... all the more remarkable when we compare his writing on Shakespeare with Swinburne's book published during the same year. Swinburne has only words of contempt for the investigations of the New Shakespeare Society, whom he characterizes as "learned and laborious men who could hear only with their fingers. They will pluck out the heart, not of Hamlet's, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... unsurpassable; yet pervading the whole is the strong, clear atmosphere of romantic drama never allowing the somewhat ample descriptions to predominate the thrilling interest with which the story is charged. Sir Walter Besant regarded it as the "greatest historical novel in the language." Swinburne remarked of it that "a story better conceived, better constructed, or better related, it would be difficult to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... Swinburne's poems show clearly the mental bias of their author, who is described as being peculiar and eccentric. Many of the men of genius who have assisted in making the history of the world have been the victims of epilepsy. Julius Caesar, military leader, statesman, politician, and author, was ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... literary Lucina. FitzGerald, Blake and Wells are all indebted to him for timely aid in the reanimation of offspring, that seemed doomed to survive but for a short time the pangs that gave them birth. Mr. Swinburne and Lord Houghton were also impressed by its merits, and its fame slowly spread. Eight years elapsed, however, before the publication ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... "Dorian Gray" and the "Mystic and Somber Dolores" and the "Belle Dame sans Merci"; for a month was keen on naught else. The world became pale and interesting, and he tried hard to look at Princeton through the satiated eyes of Oscar Wilde and Swinburne—or "Fingal O'Flaherty" and "Algernon Charles," as he called them in precieuse jest. He read enormously every night—Shaw, Chesterton, Barrie, Pinero, Yeats, Synge, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of Browning's obscurity was expelled to the Limbo of Dead Stupidities when Mr. Swinburne, in periods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of Phoebus Apollo's chariot, wrote his famous incidental passage in his "Essay ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Maroni's The Opera. Authors, however, are usually so fond of fanciful ear-catching titles, that every excuse must be made for the cataloguer, who mistakes their meaning, and takes them in their literal signification. Who can reprove too severely the classifier who placed Swinburne's Under the Microscope in his class of Optical Instruments, or treated Ruskin's Notes on the Construction of Sheetfolds as a work on agricultural appliances? A late instance of an amusing misclassification is reported from Germany. In the Orientalische Bibliographie, ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms." Theodore Watts wrote: "Never before these songs were sung, and never since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers." That amazing prodigal of superlatives, the poet Swinburne, speaks of the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... date more than two hundred years after Sappho's death. It is a myth which has begotten some exquisite literature, both in prose and verse, from Ovid's famous epistle to Addison's gracious fantasy and some impassioned and imperishable dithyrambs of Mr. Swinburne; but one need not accept the story as a fact in order to appreciate the beauties which flowered out from ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... "Swinburne's food was Putney!" said Mrs. Mansfield, "and I could mention many great men who scarcely moved from their own firesides and yet whose imagination was nearly always in ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... Norwich of the Taylors and the Gurneys, possessed of as much real intellectual life as London can boast of to-day. What, again, might not be said of the influence upon writers from afar. Read Kingsley's Hereward the Wake, Mr. Swinburne's Midsummer Holiday, Charles Dickens' description of Yarmouth and Goldsmith's poetical description in his Deserted Village, where clearly Houghton was intended. {153} These, and a host of other memories touch the ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... has been called a cantefable—that is to say, it is not only obviously written, like verse romances and fabliaux, for recitation, but it consists partly of prose, partly of verse, the music for the latter being also given. Mr Swinburne, Mr Pater, and, most of all, Mr Lang, have made it unnecessary to tell in any detailed form the story how Aucassin, the son of Count Garin of Beaucaire, fell in love with Nicolette, a Saracen captive, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... humorists. Jowett divided humorists 'into three categories or classes; those who are not worth reading at all; those who are worth reading once, but once only; and those who are worth reading again and again and for ever.' This remark was made to Swinburne, who quotes it in his all too brief Recollections of Professor Jowett. Swinburne says that the starting-point of their discussion was the Biglow Papers, which 'famous and admirable work of American humour' Jowett placed ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... other great Victorian poets Morris was a pipe-smoker, and so was Rossetti. Browning also smoked, but not, I think, a pipe. Swinburne, on the other hand, detested tobacco, and expressed himself on the subject with characteristic extravagance and vehemence—"James I was a knave, a tyrant, a fool, a liar, a coward. But I love him, I worship him, ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... on the ways of Fate Long hours he daily wasted, His food remained upon his plate, 'Twas scarcely touched or tasted: He said the bitter things of love, All lovers, save a few, say, And learned by heart the verses of Swinburne, and A. de Musset! ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... differ like the Kilkenny cats among themselves on many points. All do not believe, with Mr. J. C. Collins, that Will knew Sophocles, Euripides, and AEschylus (but not Aristophanes) as well as Mr. Swinburne did, or knew them at all—for that matter. Mr. Pollard differs very widely from Sir Sidney Lee on points concerning the First Folio and the Quartos: my sympathies are with Mr. Pollard. Few, if any, ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... more rushing lyrical measures. He is infinitely more at home in the beautiful New Sirens, which, for what reason it is difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later, partly at Mr Swinburne's most judicious suggestion. The scheme is trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond all doubt inspiration from Keats) was happier than most poets with that charming but difficult foot. The note is the old one of yearning rather than ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... genuine pupil, was very wide, in the end, it seems to me, much exceeding that of Millais and that of Holman Hunt; but it is a question in which of his two functions—poet or painter—it was most effective. I have heard Swinburne say that but for Rossetti's early poetry he would never have written verses, but this I think must be taken conditionally. Swinburne has the poetic temperament so decided and so individual, and ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... the Arthur Saga, as a whole, peculiarly his own. But others of the Victorian poets have handled detached portions of it. William Morris' "Defence of Guenevere" (1858) anticipated the first group of "Idylls." Swinburne's "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882) dealt at full length, and in a very different spirit, with an epicyclic legend which Tennyson touched incidentally in "The Last Tournament." Matthew Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult" was a third manipulation of the legend, partly in dramatic, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... library. Facing him, six rows of black oak shelves held a fine collection of classical literature; on his left, the lower shelves contained rare editions of the early English dramatists, and the upper ones were given up to poetry, from Chaucer to Swinburne. The right-hand shelves were wholly French, from quaint volumes of troubadours' poetry to Alfred de Musset and De Maupassant. It was here Paul spent most of his time when at ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... women are very tolerant and hopeful. Many of them have changed their beliefs in the last few years. They are changing every day. Those who will not change will die! We always have this assurance, and in this battle for independence, many a woman has found comfort in poor Swinburne's pagan hymn ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... I slept at last, and it was my text and watchword when I awoke in the morning. I forget how well you know your Swinburne, Bunny; but don't you run away with the idea that there was anything else in common between his Faustine and mine. For the last time let me tell you that poor Faustina was the whitest and the ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... with the event of the day and with the horrible tales my shipmates had told, and yet I dare to say, here and now, that I was not afraid. I was a healthy animal, and furthermore, intellectually, I agreed with Swinburne that dead men rise up never. The Bricklayer was dead, and that was the end of it. He would rise up never—at least, never on the deck of the Sophie Sutherland. Even then he was in the ocean depths miles to windward of our leeward drift, and the likelihood was that he was already portioned ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... which we may all verify every day. For instance, I myself (I again take myself as a sort of corpus vile to serve for illustration in a matter where serving for illustration may not by every one be thought agreeable), I myself am properly a Philistine,—Mr. Swinburne would add, the son of a Philistine,—and though, through circumstances which will perhaps one day be known, if ever the affecting history of my conversion comes to be written, I have, for the most part, broken with the ideas and ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... of Mr. Swinburne taking Mr. Carlyle to task, as he recently did, for indelicacy, has an oddity all its own, so far as I am concerned I cannot but concur with this critic in thinking that Carlyle has laid himself open, particularly in his 'Frederick the Great,' to the charge one usually ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... his hands it might have become in French a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, as it is in the original Portuguese. As to the text, without emulating the pedantry of the critic who added a fourth season to Shelley's three, and thereby provoked a splendid outburst of wrath from Swinburne, we may assume that in passages where Vicente appears to have gone out of his way to avoid a required rhyme, this is merely a case of corruption repeated in successive editions. Thus in the Auto Pastoril Portugues, where Catalina minha dama rhymes with toucada we may perhaps substitute ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... clothed with a burning fire, Thou, girt with sorrow of heart, Thou sprung of the seed of the seas As an ear from a seed of corn As a brand plucked forth of a pyre, As a ray shed forth of the moon For division of soul and disease, For a dart and a sting and a thorn? What ailed thee then to be born? SWINBURNE: ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... completed December, 1899, for production by the Thomas Orchestra, is a symphonic poem called "The Song of Life," with this motto from Swinburne: ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... capable of adopting the manners of his leading contemporaries, or that of any poet from Spenser to Shelley or Keats. The quantity of work scarcely distinguishable from that of the worst passages in Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne, seems to be limited only by the supply of stationery at the disposal of practised performers. That which makes the imitations of Pope prominent is partly the extent of his sovereignty; the vast number of writers ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Swinburne does not, to be sure, give us much information, and what there is is mythical, but he uses words that are fairly ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... with an eye to the noble and knightly way in which the legend is conceived and taken up. Mr. Kroeger, who can give it no grace in translation, is a warm partisan in matters of melody and rhythm, appreciating Coleridge and Swinburne. Altogether, he is a sincere and useful interpreter between our public—rather careless of musty poetry—and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... himself, in his other mood, tell you that his art is but sleight of hand, his food enchanter's food, and offer to show you the trick of it,—believe him not. Wait for his prophetic hour; then give yourself to his passion, his joy or pain. "We are in Love's hand to-day!" sings Gautier, in Swinburne's buoyant paraphrase,—and from morn to sunset we are wafted on the violent sea: there is but one love, one May, one flowery strand. Love is eternal, all else unreal and put aside. The vision has ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... witness of its world-wide influence and momentary supremacy over all other arts was the founding of the Revue Wagnerienne, where, united by the same artistic devotion, were found writers and poets such as Verlaine, Mallarme, Swinburne, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Huysmans, Richepin, Catulle Mendes, Edouard Rod, Stuart Merrill, Ephraim Mikhael, etc., and painters like Fantin-Latour, Jacques Blanche, Odilon Redon; and critics like Teodor de Wyzewa, H.S. Chamberlain, Hennequin, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... poets of the nineteenth century were more or less unorthodox; Wordsworth in the years of his highest inspiration was a pantheist; and the greatest of all, Shelley, was a declared atheist. In fearless utterance, in unfaltering zeal against the tyranny of Gods and Governments, Swinburne was like Shelley. His drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865), even though a poet is strictly not answerable for what the persons in his drama say, yet with its denunciation of "the supreme evil, ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... discovery of modern culture is that Scott's prose is commonplace; that the young men at our universities are far too critical to care for his artless sentences and flowing descriptions. They prefer Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Mallock, and the euphuism of young Oxford, just as some people prefer a Dresden shepherdess to the Caryatides of the Erechtheum, pronounce Fielding to be low, and Mozart to be passe. As boys love lollipops, so these juvenile fops love to roll phrases about ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... hindering, seems rather to help mentality, and many geniuses have been epileptic. These talented victims, are less rare than the public suppose, owing to the jealous care with which symptoms of this disease are guarded. Socrates, Julius Caesar, Mahomet, Joan of Arc, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Byron, Swinburne, and Dostoieffsky are but a few among many great names in the world of art, religion and statecraft. Epileptic princes, kings and kinglets who have achieved unenviable notoriety might be named by scores, Wilhelm II being the most ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... to-day, and he has not yet arrived. It shall not be said of me that I was ever wanting in respect to genius as transcendent as his. I must beg of my distinguished guests to await his arrival before going to dinner." [Footnote: Swinburne, vol. I., ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... brilliant group of English writers and artists which included Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Tom Taylor, George Eliot, Swinburne, Sir Walter Besant, Maclise, and Goldwin Smith. In my opinion, he ranks next to Dickens in originality and power. His books are little read to-day; yet he gave to the English stage the comedy "Masks and Faces," which is now as much a classic as Goldsmith's ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... famous classical statues and busts for a few shillings. What can be more appropriate than for Calliope to preside over your case containing Homer and Virgil, Dante and Milton; or that Euterpe should be enthroned above Theocritus and Horace, Shelley and Swinburne? You may carry your fancy on these lines as far as you like, and you may include any figure that pleases you, from the well-known 'Discobolus' (over your case of sporting books!) to the exquisite statue which many still persist in calling the ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... Women and marriage and breaches of marriage appear indeed; but the earlier Graal stories are dominated by the most ascetic virginity-worship, and the earlier Arthur-stories show absolutely nothing of the passion which is the subject of the magnificent overture of Mr. Swinburne's Tristram. Even this story of Tristram himself, afterwards fired and coloured by passion, seems at first to have shown nothing but the mixture of animalism, cruelty, and magic which is characteristic of the Celts.[32] Our magician of a very different ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... of physiognomy," says Swinburne, "will not fail to mark the points of likeness and of difference between the faces of the two friends; both models of noble manhood.... Beaumont the statelier and serener of the two, with clear, thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and strong aquiline ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Byron, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne, Shelley and Keats. I said that six of them were independent, and that the other—the greatest—died like ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... my hat I saluted the dark-eyed donor, but a few paces on I gave them away to a ragged child. Of all flowers that bloom, they were, and still are, the most insupportable to me. What is it the English poet Swinburne says— ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... sound moral, well illustrating Mr. Swinburne's remark that Puritanism has nothing to do with Art, and that the great Puritans and the great artists have never ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... of our ballad-lore the great poets and romancists, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to Wordsworth and Swinburne, and from Gavin Douglas to Burns and Scott and Stevenson, have gone for refreshment and new inspiration, when the world was weary and tame and sunk in the thraldom of the vulgar, the formal, and the commonplace; ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... were complete editions of Landor and Swift, then came two large volumes on Leonardo da Vinci. Raising his eyes, the parson read through the titles of Mr Browning's work. Tennyson was in a cheap seven-and-six edition; then came Swinburne, Pater, Rossetti, Morris, two novels by Rhoda Broughton, Dickens, Thackeray, Fielding, and Smollett; the complete works of Balzac, Gautier's Emaux et Camees, Salammbo, L'Assommoir; add to this Carlyle, Byron, ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... the Book" often, the "Lotus Eaters" not once. Among such students are Mr. Browning's disciples of the Inner Court: I dwell but in the Court of the Gentiles. While we all—all who attempt rhyme—have more or less consciously imitated the manner of Lord Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Rossetti, such imitations of Mr. Browning are uncommonly scarce. He is lucky enough not to have had the seed of his flower stolen and sown ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... criticisms. Mr. Watts-Dunton—who added his mother's name of Dunton to his own in later life—was the son of a solicitor of St. Ives in Huntingdonshire. In early life he was himself a solicitor, which profession he happily abandoned for literature. His friendship with Algernon Charles Swinburne is one of the romances of the Victorian era. His affectionate solicitude doubtless kept that great poet alive for many a year beyond what would otherwise have been his lot. Watts-Dunton was, as we have seen, introduced to Borrow by ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... Mr. Swinburne makes a new list of his own which is very characteristic. No. 3 consists of "Selections from the Bible: comprising Job, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel; the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, the Gospel and the First Epistle ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... Jack, the harum-scarum Irish terrier ere we have done; his own dog Plato went up with him daily to his lectures, and still (like other friends) feels the loss and looks visibly for the reappearance of his master; and Martin, the cat, Fleeming has himself immortalised, to the delight of Mr. Swinburne, in the columns of the SPECTATOR. Indeed there was nothing in which men take interest, in which he took not some; and yet always most in the strong human bonds, ancient as the race and woven of ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the extraordinary nature of Blake's utterance in these latter works should have given rise to the belief that he was merely an inspired idiot—a madman who happened to be able to write good verses. That belief, made finally impossible by Mr. Swinburne's elaborate Essay, is now, happily, nothing more than a curiosity of literary history; and indeed signs are not wanting that the whirligig of Time, which left Blake for so long in the Paradise of Fools, is now about to place him among the Prophets. Anarchy is the most ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Death For the Anniversary of John Keats' Death Silence The Return Fear Anadyomene Galahad in the Castle of the Maidens To an Aeolian Harp To Erinna To Cleis Paris in Spring Madeira from the Sea City Vignettes By the Sea On the Death of Swinburne Triolets Vox Corporis A Ballad of Two Knights Christmas Carol The Faery Forest A Fantasy A Minuet of Mozart's Twilight The Prayer ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... what we know, it would seem simplest to say that the trend of the evolutionary process is towards the increase of internal spontaneity and consciously formed and prosecuted purpose. In his "Songs before Sunrise," Swinburne calls this ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... is no reason why Engels' remarks should affect even the timorous, although it must be remembered that a very able English socialist philosopher is reputed to have damaged his chances irretrievably by an ill-judged quotation from Mr. Swinburne. ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... possible, we sorrow to think, to misuse the Divine gift of artistic inspiration. The poet may devote his genius to animalism, like Byron, or to teach immoral license, like Swinburne; the painter may crowd his canvas with degrading ideas and vulgar representations, and the artificer may be ingenious in the production of forms of ugliness and degrading grotesqueness. Such desecration of great endowments is alike displeasing to God ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles. One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new life into the outworn form. It may almost be called an appalling fact that for at ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... than his influence on Socialism. He represented what was at first the Pre-Raphaelite School in painting, but afterwards a much larger and looser Pre-Raphaelite School in poetry and prose. The word "looser" will not be found unfair if we remember how Swinburne and all the wildest friends of the Rossettis carried this movement forward. They used the mediaeval imagery to blaspheme the mediaeval religion. Ruskin's dark and doubtful decision to accept Catholic art but not ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... "range themselves." For the idea, see "Mem." I. ii. 23; Swinburne, "Songs before Sunrise": Prelude, "Past youth where shoreward ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon
... (Burns, iii. 173) has 'no doubt that this broadside was printed after 1796,' and as it stands the thing is assuredly the work of Burns. The refrain and the metrical structure have been used by Scott (Rokeby, IV. 28), Carlyle, Charles Kingsley (Dolcino to Margaret), and Mr. Swinburne (A Reiver's Neck Verse) ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... ago, Roger North found them "great antiquarians within their own bounds." If to such as these this little book may perhaps bring in a more convenient form the information they seek, and help them to become better acquainted with the county which inspired Swinburne to write in stirring phrases of "Northumberland," and to address the ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... on the publication, in rapid succession, in 1864, of Browning's Dramatis Personae and Mr Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. Both volumes found their most enthusiastic readers at the universities. "All my new cultivators are young men," Browning wrote to Miss Blagden; adding, with a touch of malicious humour, "more than that, I observe that some of my old friends don't like at all the irruption ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... work. The mass of thoroughly competent criticism issued to-day has raised enormously the general tone of the press; but genuine men of letters are seldom employed to welcome, or stifle, a newcomer; though Meredith, and more frequently Swinburne, have on occasion elected to pronounce judgment upon the passing generation; as Mrs. Meynell or Mr. G.K. Chesterton have sometimes said the right thing about their contemporaries. The days when postcard notices from Gladstone secured a record in sales are over; and, from whatever ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... inmost workings, was strong beyond the strength of puny doubts and preconceived prejudice. Therefore, when Isaacs appeared, looking like the sun-god for all his quiet dress of gray and his unobtrusive manner, I felt the "little thrill of pleasure" so aptly compared by Swinburne to the soft touch of a ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... magnificent candour, that "to this generation Browning's poetry is as uninteresting as Shakespeare's Sonnets were to the last century." The most fervent Browningite could have said no more than that. To Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads Froude was conspicuously fair. There was much in them which offended his Puritanism, but he was disgusted with the virulence of the critics, and he allowed Skelton to write in Fraser ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Shelley's published letters we shall find abundant expressions of hostility to and contempt for religion. Those letters may deserve the praise of Matthew Arnold or the censure of Mr. Swinburne; but, in either case, they may be taken as honest documents, written to all sorts of private friends, and never intended for publication. Byron's letters were passed about freely, and largely written for effect; Shelley's were written under ordinary conditions, and he unbosomed ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... affectionately handling the books. He glanced at the titles and the authors' names, read fragments of text, caressing the volumes with his eyes and hands, and, once, recognized a book he had read. For the rest, they were strange books and strange authors. He chanced upon a volume of Swinburne and began reading steadily, forgetful of where he was, his face glowing. Twice he closed the book on his forefinger to look at the name of the author. Swinburne! he would remember that name. That fellow had eyes, and he had certainly seen color and flashing light. But who was Swinburne? ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... kill or otherwise maltreat animals for his pleasure or convenience: his task is to subdue the forces of nature: nature is subservient to him and to his destinies: without man nature is meaningless. Much the same view was held by the ancient Greeks and in a less acute form by the Jews and Romans. Swinburne's line ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of trying to found an Anglo-French Society or League, the members of which should simply engage themselves to do their best on all occasions to soften the harsh feeling between the two nations. I dare say some literary people would join such a league. Swinburne very probably would, and so would you, I fancy, I could get adhesions in the French University and elsewhere. Some influential political Englishmen, such as Bright, might be counted upon. I would have begun the thing long since; but I dread the heavy correspondence it ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... grandfather is reading in the big armchair by the window, and I guarantee that you will surprise him. Here is an interesting play: Light a match, blow it out, and, while the end is still red hot, touch the cook firmly on the back of the neck. If she has been reading Swinburne she will imagine that she has been kissed by a policeman. When she finds out that she hasn't she will be disappointed, and perhaps you will be disappointed, too. Oh, a match is a wonderful thing, even the wooden ones that are made on earth! You may burn a whole city ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... Day. Until after his death it would have been easy to count those who knew even his name in this country and England: as usual in such matters, we preceded the English in our acquaintance with him. The freedom with which Owen Meredith and Mr. Swinburne helped themselves from his poems proves how unfamiliar the general public was with him ten years ago, but his distinction is now so well recognized in that island, so remote from external impressions, that some knowledge of his life and writings ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... Professor Frazer and culture. Next morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazer's optional course in modern poetry, a desultory series of lectures which did not attempt Tennyson and Browning. So Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt Whitman, Swinburne and Rossetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of emotion. The allusiveness was agonizing. But he pulled off his shoes, rested his feet on the foot-board of his bed, drummed with a pair of scissors on his ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... designedly so, of Poe's poetry. A poem to him was simply a crystallized mood, and it is futile for his readers to apply any other test. Yet the influence of this verse has been wide and important, extending to most lyric poets of the last half-century, including such masters as Rossetti and Swinburne. ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... imagined than the ceremony of confession and absolution in accordance with the forms of the Catholic Church? The solemn searching of the heart gives to Mary's character a saintly dignity, as of one already beatified, and invests the whole scene with an incomparable pathos.[122] Swinburne makes his Mary declare, in angry scorn ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... voluminous writer of verse, which he published sumptuously at his own expense. He had a gift for rhyming, and his verse is not entirely without merit. He had been greatly influenced by Swinburne and Robert Browning. He was grossly, but not unintelligently, imitative. As you flip through the pages you may well read a stanza which, if you came across it in a volume of Swinburne's, you would accept without question as the work ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... winged flock of ballades of amazing dexterity. This unknown balladist was Mr. Henley; perhaps he was the first Englishman who ever burst into a double ballade, and his translations of two of Villon's ballades into modern thieves' slang were marvels of dexterity. Mr. Swinburne wrote a serious ballade, but the form, I venture to think, is not 'wholly serious,' of its nature, in modern days; and he did not persevere. Nor did the taste for these trifles long endure. A good ballade ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... wail of Ecclesiastes, "All is vanity and a striving after wind, and there is no profit under the sun." The Preacher and Omar and Swinburne are pathetically human, and we who are also human respond to their finality, to their quizzical indifference and their stinging resentment. We also say, "Vanity of vanities," and bow our heads murmuring "Ilicet," and stretch out our hands to "turn down an empty glass," but all this in twilight ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... consequence. It must be possible to make prophets of them, that is all. A pure artist or philosopher or man of science, one who is concerned with Beauty or Truth but not with its application to contemporary life will not do. Darwin and Swinburne, therefore, the greatest of the English Victorians, were not eligible; but the age chose Carlyle for its select preacher when it might have had Mill. Naturally it preferred his coloured rhetoric and warm sentimentality to Mill's cold reason and white-hot emotion. It chose him because ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... two occasions they had evidently judged to be mere playfulness. I had just got back to bed again when an owl began to screech. That is another sound I used to think attractive—so weird, so mysterious. It is Swinburne, I think, who says that you never get the desired one and the time and the place all right together. If the beloved one is with you, it is the wrong place or at the wrong time; and if the time and the place happen to be right, then it is the ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... an article doubtless in nowise superior to our best products. Leigh Hunt's "Jar of Honey" is mainly distilled from Sicilian history and literature, Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has always been rich in bees. Swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years ago) says the woods on this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are native to the island in this respect, ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... to tie together the rest, and complete the whole as a work of art. After the 16th century original ballades were no more written in English until the latter part of the 19th, when they were re-introduced, almost simultaneously, by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Austin Dobson, Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse and W. E. Henley; but D. G. Rossetti's popular translation of Villon's "Ballade of Fair Ladies" may almost be considered an original poem, especially as it entirely ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... English literature; he spoke with familiarity of Dickens, Thackeray, Shakespeare, twelve of whose plays, by the bye, have been translated into Finnish and performed at the theatre, and he was even acquainted with the works of Rudyard Kipling, Swinburne, Browning, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. With equal aptitude he discussed Daudet and Zola, Tolstoi and Tourgenieff, and, to our astonishment, we found that although he spoke only indifferent German, he could read English, French, German, and Russian ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... Fleay and Mr. Spedding were hard at work on the metrical tests; when Mr. Spedding was subtly undoing the chronological psychology of Dr. Furnivall; when the latter student was on his part undoing in quite another style some of the judgments of Mr. Swinburne; and when Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps was with natural wrath calling on Mr. Browning, as President of the Society, to keep Dr. Furnivall in order, we (then) younger onlookers felt that literary history was verily being made. Our ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson |
