"Dithyrambic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been essentially lyrical. It arose from the dithyrambic chorus that was sung at the festivals of Dionysus. Thespis had introduced the first actor, who, in the pauses of the choral song, related in monologue the adventures of the god or engaged in dialogue with the leader of the chorus. To Aeschylus is due the invention of the second actor. This essentially ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... that Lorand had written to me that he did not wish the elegiac tone of our first gathering to be disturbed by the voice of the stoics of Lankadomb, yet he had invited the whole Epicurean alliance here—a fact which was likely to give a dithyrambic tone ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... the springtide. I am so happy I am afraid. The sense of living fills me with exultation. I want to sing, to dance; I am dithyrambic with delight. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... is represented as a shepherd. [1237][Greek: Atlas mathematikos en Libus aner.—Polueidos de ho dithurambopoios ton Atlanta touton POIMENA Libun phesin.] Atlas the great mathematician, was a person of Libya. The Dithyrambic poet Polueidos says, that Atlas was a Libyan shepherd. There was a tradition that the temple of Ammon in Libya was built by a shepherd, from whom it received its name; [1238][Greek: apo tou hidrusamenou poimenos.] ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... apparently written from Heligoland, which he has inserted in his book on Borne. We quote some passages, not only for their biographic interest as showing a phase of Heine's mental history, but because they are a specimen of his power in that kind of dithyrambic writing which, in less masterly hands, easily ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Streff, You mean to say he wants to marry you?" As the news took possession of her mind Ellie became dithyrambic. "But, my dearest, what a miracle of luck! Of course I always knew he was awfully gone on you: Fred Davenant used to say so, I remember... and even Nelson, who's so stupid about such things, noticed it in Venice.... But then it was so different. No one could possibly ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... work as literary critic Arnold has occupied a high place among the foremost prose writers of the time. His style is in marked contrast to the dithyrambic eloquence of Carlyle, or to Ruskin's pure and radiant coloring. It is a quiet style, restrained, clear, discriminating, incisive, with little glow of ardor or passion. Notwithstanding its scrupulous assumption of urbanity, it is often a merciless style, indescribably ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... we modern Saxons know a trick worth two of that, I think! Then came rather risky dances (under certain circumstances) Which would shock that worthy gentleman, the Licenser of Plays, Corybantian maniac kick—Dionysiac or Bacchic— And the Dithyrambic ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... by his own; but when was man's heart stirred by nature's strongest passion like that of devoted woman? while now the world did not contain one heart that was moved to him by anything stronger than dithyrambic delirium. Who knows? But there was Fletcher looking on the corpse of his wife, and waving over her face the light of the small cruse he held in his hand! Was he moved, as he saw the still, death-bound features, that once could not contain the expression which the leaping heart, with ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... for the reputation of his friend. He had changed of late; he was beginning to know his own mind. He meant to put a stop to this humiliating scene. As the other, regardless of his pleadings, continued to babble dithyrambic nonsense concerning glucose and self-fertilization and artificial manures and inflorescence and Assyrian bas-reliefs and Stilton cheese, he suddenly gripped his arm and pulled him, with a ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... of Man (his Soul, as we call it) with the outer harmony of the Universe. With this conception of "peerless Poesie" in our minds, we turn to Aristotle's Poetics, and it gives us a sensible shock to read on the first page, that "Epic Poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and dithyrambic Poetry, and the greater part of the music of the flute and of the lyre are all, generally speaking, modes of imitation" ([Greek: pasai tynchhanoysin ohysai mimheseis to hynolon]). "What?" we say—"Nothing better than that?"—for "imitation" has a bad name among men and is apt to suggest ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... with a laugh, to the other side of the room, and waved his arms grotesquely, as he continued his dithyrambic eulogy of the colossal idea. I have never seen two minutes produce a greater change in a human countenance. Ten years fell from it. He looked even younger than when he had broken his fiddle over Mr. Pogson's head and received ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... of things wholly different. Produced by a shock or a revelation, as two gases lit will, in a sharp explosion, unite to form a liquid wholly unlike either, so after a great conquest, a battle, the sudden preaching of a creed, these primal literatures appear in an epic or a dithyrambic code of awful law. Their first effort is their mightiest. They come mature. They are allied to that element of the catastrophic which the modern world (taking its general philosophy from its social condition) denies, but which is yet at the limits of all things separate and themselves; accompanies ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... unknown to fame, who, as editor, shall have reprinted a new edition of the work of Henry VIII, "Assertio Septem Sacramentorum"—for instance, Gabriel de Sacconay, precentor of Lyons, and you shall then behold Calvin, under the form of a dithyrambic or congratulatory epistle, without the least regard for delicate ears, throw into the face of the Catholic the most ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... the pure-minded hall of the Home Club at eight, to the less proper good-night kiss on the dark door-step of the Home Club at midnight. But she was careful to make clear that one kiss was all she ever allowed, though she grew dithyrambic over the charming, lonely men with whom she played—a young doctor whose wife was in a madhouse; a clever, restrained, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... with work of his, and the literary world at large looked for its publication with eager and curious interest. At length, in November 1868, the first instalment was published. It was received by the most authoritative part of the press with outspoken, even dithyrambic eulogies, in which the severely judicial Athenaeum took the lead. Confirmed sceptics or deriders, like Edward FitzGerald, rubbed their eyes and tried once again, in vain, to make the old barbarian's verses ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... in the preparations, to light the fire in the salon, give a hand to my wife in the kitchen, and get what was wanted from the grocer. The supper developed into a dithyrambic orgy. When the champagne was drunk, and the punch began to produce its effects, I delivered a fiery speech which so provoked the hilarity of the company that it seemed as though it would never end. I became ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Anaxagoras, being a contraction of selaenoneoaeia, the light (selas) which is ever old and new, and which, as Anaxagoras says, is borrowed from the sun; the name was harmonized into selanaia, a form which is still in use. 'That is a true dithyrambic name.' Meis is so called apo tou meiousthai, from suffering diminution, and astron is from astrape (lightning), which is an improvement of anastrope, that which turns the eyes inside out. 'How do you ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... lightly with these relations, he laughed over them and wept over them, he wrote impassioned and dithyrambic orations upon them. But they were not his real life. His real life was the life he lived with his music and his botany and his love affairs, the life of his dreamy wanderings from refuge to refuge among the woods and chateaux of France; the life of his delicate ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Dionysus the ancient Greek drama had its birth. From that of the winter festival, consisting of the [Greek komos] or band of revellers, chanting the "phallic songs," with ribald dialogue between the leader and his band, sprang "comedy," while from the dithyrambic chorus of the spring festival came "tragedy." For the history of the chorus in Greek drama, with the gradual subordination of the lyrical to the dramatic side in tragedy and its total disappearance in the middle and new comedy, see DRAMA: ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Cadwallon ap Madoc of Powis. He hints, not obscurely, that the real reason why he was passed over for the Bishopric of St. David's in 1186 was that Henry II. feared his natio et cognatio, his nation and his family. He becomes almost dithyrambic in extolling the deeds of his kinsmen in Ireland. "Who are they who penetrated into the fastnesses of the enemy? The Geraldines. Who are they who hold the country in submission? The Geraldines. Who are they whom the foemen dread? The Geraldines. ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... "Don't be dithyrambic, Wharton," said Carstairs. "Besides the change is too sudden. It hasn't been a minute since you were pouring abuse upon our safe ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the mediaeval church to our stake in the Mahometan empire, little boy, we shall positively roll among doubloons, positively roll! Beautiful forest,' he cried, 'farewell! Though called to other scenes, I will not forget thee. Thy name is graven in my heart. Under the influence of prosperity I become dithyrambic, Jean-Marie. Such is the impulse of the natural soul; such was the constitution of primaeval man. And I—well, I will not refuse the credit—I have preserved my youth like a virginity; another, who ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... conclusions did not help me much to estimate the economic results of the Emancipation as a whole. Nor, it must be confessed, was the testimony by any means always unbiassed. Not a few spoke of the great reform in an epic or dithyrambic tone, and among these I easily distinguished two categories: the one desired to prove that the measure was a complete success in every way, and that all classes were benefited by it, not only morally, but also materially; whilst the others strove to represent ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... partly on the second morning after this when they were journeying from St. Mary's Isle to Dumfries. And Mr. Syme adds that next day the poet presented him with one copy of the poem for himself, and a second for Mr. Dalzell. Mr. Carlyle says, "This Dithyrambic was composed on horseback; in riding in the middle of tempests over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet's looks, forebore to speak—judiciously enough,—for a man composing Bruce's address might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... its place in a long line of villas, without so much as a turnip-field to give it an air of seclusion or security. In this vainglorious craving for discomfort there is a kind of naivete which is not without its pathos. One proud lady, whose husband, in the words of a dithyrambic guide-book, "made a fortune from a patent glove-hook," boasts that her mansion has a glass-room on the second floor. Another vain householder deems it sufficient to proclaim that he spent two million dollars upon the villa which shelters him from the storm. In brief, there is scarcely a single ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... spirit than most parasites, and the history of his sojourn in Syracuse gives us an amusing insight into the state of Court life in Sicily 400 years B.C. He was an Athenian dithyrambic poet and musician; and as Dionysius affected literature, he was welcomed at his palace, where he wrote a poem entitled "The Banquet," containing an account of the luxurious style of living there adopted. Philoxenus was probably the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... has passages of freer and more harmonious utterance in some of his most careless prose essays, than can be found in his Nathan from the first line to the last. In the numeris lege solutis he is often snatched beyond himself, and becomes truly dithyrambic; in his pentameters the march of the thought is comparatively hampered and irresolute. His best things are not poetically delicate, but have the tougher fibre of proverbs. Is it not enough, then, to be a great prose-writer? They are as rare as great poets, and if Lessing have the gift to stir and ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... intellectual resources, ignorant especially of law, of political science, and of history, totally lacking in logical power and in precision of statement, with nothing to offset these deficiencies excepting a strange gift of overpowering, dithyrambic eloquence, will find it hard, as he turns over the leaves on which are recorded the debates of the Virginia convention, to understand just how such a person could have made the speeches which are there attributed to Patrick Henry, or how a ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... smattering of the "Odyssey." The magnificent translation made by his friend Zhukovsky had not yet appeared and Gogol, in spite of his ambition to become a historian, was not equipped as a scholar. But it is evident from his dithyrambic letter on the appearance of Zhukovsky's version, forming one of the famous series of letters known as "Correspondence with Friends," that he was better acquainted with the spirit of Homer than any mere scholar could be. That letter, unfortunately unknown to ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... after all, Ellenora," he remarked in his most critical manner. "Presently you will be calling aloud 'Thalatta, Thalatta!' like some dithyrambic Greek ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their cadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read Sir Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and Alfred Kreymborg and others new—chacun ['a] son go[^u]t—I feel that by comparison with Francis Thompson, these poets are not rich. They are poor because they seem to leave out God; that is, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... Redi, tho' he chanted Bacchus in the Tuscan valleys, Never drank the wine he vaunted In his dithyrambic sallies. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... to afford greater scope to their exhibitions—sometimes contracting the contagion of their burlesque. Still, however, the reader will observe, that the tragedy, or goatsong, consisted of two parts—first, the exhibition of the mummers, and, secondly, the dithyrambic chorus, moving in a circle round the altar of Bacchus. It appears on the whole most probable, though it is a question of fierce dispute and great uncertainty, that not only this festive ceremonial, but also its ancient name of tragedy, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... color chants a strange barbaric fitness of dithyrambic chords, and moves processional across the days like some encarnadined durbar, where a huge Ethiopian eunuch in red moon-shaped slippers and an orange turban walks with a glittering scimetar, leading a brace of ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... combined by successive bards for that purpose. The battle-song (Prosnuchadh-catha) was the next in importance. The model of this variety is not to be found in any of the Alcaic or Tyrtaean remains. It was a dithyrambic of the wildest and most passionate enthusiasm, inciting to carnage and fury. Chanted in the hearing of assembled armies, and sometimes sung before the van, it was intended as an incitement to battle, and even calculated to stimulate the courage of the general. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... "I won't grow dithyrambic—not just yet. I was so sure of my man that it seemed quite worth while to tumble out at Avignon—a place I had never inspected—and fool away another spell among Roman remains, and Petrarch and the rival Popes, and the opening scenes of ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... our popular favourite might indeed have believed in the fulfilment of his dream. The Thorwaldsen Gallery of Copenhagen had ever dazzled his imagination. Bond Street was not Paris, certainly, but in the greatest metropolis of the world his memory would be for ever perpetuated. Turning to the dithyrambic utterances of the London Press at the time we can hardly ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate could copy in the cold mosaic of language. The rhythm of alternating dawn and sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible through all the sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain serving- man. It softened his whole otherwise rigid aspect. He worshipped God according to the strict ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... even, in a slight measure, been regardless of her position as a lady, and had only remembered that she was a poetess, and that, as such, it became her well to celebrate the hero, and to bestow on the luminous constellation that was rising over France the glowing dithyrambic ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... sunshine," said Flemming, as he drank. "The wine of the Prince, and the Prince of wines. By the way, did you ever read that brilliant Italian dithyrambic, Redi's Bacchus in Tuscany? an ode which seems to have been poured out of the author's soul, as ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... delirious, lightheaded, incoherent, rambling, doting, wandering; frantic, raving, stark staring mad, stark raving mad, wild-eyed, berserk; delusional, hallucinatory. [behavior somewhat resembling insanity] corybantic^, dithyrambic; rabid, giddy, vertiginous, wild; haggard, mazed; flighty; distracted, distraught; depressed; agitated, hyped up; bewildered &c (uncertain) 475. mad as a March hare, mad as a hatter; of unsound mind &c n.; touched in one's head, wrong ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... death of Von Arnim brought this happiness to an end. Goethe died in the following year, and Germany went into mourning. Then in 1835 Bettina appeared before the world for the first time as an authoress, in 'Goethe's Correspondence with a Child.' The dithyrambic exaltation, the unrestrained but beautiful enthusiasm of the book came like an electric shock. Into an atmosphere of spiritual stagnation, these letters brought a fresh access of vitality and hope. Bettina's old friendly relations with Goethe had been resumed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... language is extremely polished, the purest Atticism reigns in it throughout, and with the greatest dexterity he adapts it to every tone, from the most familiar dialogue up to the high elevation of the Dithyrambic ode. We cannot doubt that he would have been eminently successful in grave poetry, when we see how at times with capricious wantonness he lavishes it only to destroy at the next moment the impression he has made. The elegant choice of the language becomes only the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... should Falsehood do but decease, being ripe, decompose itself, and return to the Father of it?' To whom, alas! I fear, under this inexorable law must in due time revert too many of the fuliginous word-pictures of Mr. Carlyle's own dithyrambic prose ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... epic poetry I have the greatest admiration for Homer.... And as a dithyrambic poet for Melanippides. (4) I admire also Sophocles as a tragedian, Polycleitus as a sculptor, and ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... "Quite dithyrambic," said Dick, "and now that your burst of rhetoric is over let's go on and catch our fish. Will you also use your romantic science of mathematics in fishing? By the way, what has become of that little algebra ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... For Epaminondas, who all the world knows was educated, and lived his whole life, in much poverty, and also Plato, the philosopher, exhibited magnificent shows, the one an entertainment of flute-players the other of dithyrambic singers; Dion, the Syracusan, supplying the expenses of the latter, and Pelopidas those of Epaminondas. For good men do not allow themselves in any inveterate and irreconcilable hostility to receiving presents ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... principally interest me as foils to my husband, who, in the presence of nature, loses all shyness, and moves regally like a king. One afternoon, Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau went with him down the river. Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice—very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... as an escape from perplexity Critical fashion of intimates who know as well as hear Death is our common cloak; but Calamity individualizes Despises hostile elements and goes unpunished Dialogue between Nature and Circumstance Dithyrambic inebriety of narration Dudley was not gifted to read behind words and looks Eminently servile is the tolerated lawbreaker Exuberant anticipatory trustfulness Fell to chatting upon the nothings agreeably and seriously Feminine; coming when she willed and flying when wanted Fire smoothes ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a writer of this kind sometimes writing in a dithyrambic style, as if he were intoxicated; at other times, nay, on the very next page, he will be high-sounding, severe, and deeply learned, prolix to the last degree of dulness, and cutting everything very small, like the late Christian Wolf, only in a modern garment. The ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... twenty-two years of labour to him who is about to become the legislator of worlds; who shall inscribe his name in ineffaceable characters upon the frontispiece of an immortal code; who shall be able to exclaim in dithyrambic language, and without incurring the reproach of any one, "The die is cast; I have written my book; it will be read either in the present age or by posterity, it matters not which; it may well await a reader, since God has waited six thousand years ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... always an explicit thanksgiving for favors received. It may be, as were the dithyrambic festivals of Greece, the riotous overflow of enthusiasm, a joyous, sympathetic exuberance with the vital processes of Nature. Dionysos stood for fertility, life, gladness, all the positive, passionate, and jubilant aspects of Nature. And the well-known satyr choruses, the wine and dance and song ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... is neither prose nor verse, but partakes of the character of both, a sort of irregular, rhymeless verse, without strophic division and exceedingly rich in alliteration, internal rhyme and assonance. This kind of speech, resembling in a way the dithyrambic passages in the Old Testament, was known to the native Irish scholars as rosc and it is usually marked in the manuscripts by the abbreviation R. It was used in short, impetuous outbursts on ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... India is far from answering to the "enchantress" idea which the dithyrambic descriptions of writers who have celebrated its marvels have led Europeans to form. The number of public buildings and monuments at Pondicherry will scarcely bear counting, and when one has visited the more curious ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne |
