"Elegiac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... James's Park. The Canal was formed by Charles II. from several small ponds, and Rosamond's Pond was a sheet of water in the south-west corner of the Park, "long consecrated," as Warburton said, "to disastrous love and elegiac poetry." It is often mentioned as a place of assignation in Restoration plays. Evelyn (Diary, Dec. 1, 1662) describes the "scheets" ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... National Assembly, on spur of the instant, renders such Decret, and 'order to submit and repent,' as he requires; if it will avail any thing. On the other hand, Journalism, through all its throats, gives hoarse outcry, condemnatory, elegiac-applausive. The Forty-eight Sections, lift up voices; sonorous Brewer, or call him now Colonel Santerre, is not silent, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. For, meanwhile, the Nanci Soldiers have sent a Deputation of Ten, furnished with documents ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... comprises altogether 568 verses. Two short poems, of seven and fourteen lines, come first; and the manuscript terminates with an unfinished poem of seven stanzas in a variety of terza rima. The body of the contents consists of 526 elegiac verses, described in the manuscript as 'The twenty-first and last book of the Ocean, to Cynthia.' Archdeacon Hannah, in his Courtly Poets from Ralegh to Montrose, concludes, with some hesitation, that the whole was composed as a sequel, between ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... ideas and avoided the company present: and he withdrew into a little room apart: he stood leaning against the wall in a recess that was half in darkness, behind a curtain of evergreens and flowers, listening to Philomela's lovely voice, with its elegiac warmth, singing The Lime-tree of Schubert: and the pure music called up sad memories. Facing him on the wall was a large mirror which reflected the lights and the life of the next room. He did not see it: he was gazing in upon himself: and the mist of tears ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... keep this up all day, This lyric, elegiac, song, Meseems hath come the time to say Farewell! ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... wrote in prose and in all kinds of verse; but of these only a few hymns and epigrams have come down to our time. Egypt seems to have been the birthplace of the mournful elegy, and Callimachus was the chief of the elegiac poets. He was born at Cyrene; and though, from the language in which he wrote, his thoughts are mostly Greek, yet he did not forget the place of his birth. He calls upon Apollo by the name of Carneus, because, after Sparta and ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... elegiac mood stole over him. He looked on at his own death; he saw the grave dug hastily in the hot sand; he heard the roll of the Dead March, and the rattling of the rifles. In all probability these details would be ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... Ulysses, The Two Voices and Morte d' Arthur. The latter was the seed of the splendid Idylls of the King. Five years later he published The Princess, with its beautiful songs, and three years after In Memoriam the greatest elegiac poem in the language, in which he lamented the fate of Arthur Hallam and poured forth his own grief over this irreparable loss. In the same year he married Miss Emily Sellwood, who made his home a haven of rest and of whom he once ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... with three elegiac couplets headed Titulus Bibliothece, probably placed over the ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... make 'em justly speak, To use a vulgar phrase, as clean's a leek; Or smart Epistles, Fables, Songs you write, All put together handsome trim and tight; Or when your sweetly plaintive muse does sigh, And elegiac strains you happy try; Or when in ode sublime your genius soars, Which guineas brings to Donaldson by scores; Accept the thanks of ME, as quick as sage, Accept sincerest thanks for ev'ry page, For ev'ry page?—for ev'ry single line Of your rich ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... An elegiac, lack-a-daisical, or pentameter verse, consists of four feet and two long syllables, one of which is placed between the second and third foot, and the other at the end of the verse. The two first feet may ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... alcove hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of the pudic goddess. ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... at Oxford was a memorable one. While here he was associated with such men as John Duke Coleridge, John Shairp, Dean Fraser, Dean Church, John Henry Newman, Thomas Hughes, the Froudes, and, closest of all, with Arthur Hugh Clough, whose early death he lamented in his exquisite elegiac poem—Thyrsis. Among this brilliant company Arnold moved with ease, the recognized favorite. Having taken the Newdigate prize for English verse, and also having won a scholarship, he was graduated with honors in ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... "Good-by, Mrs. Somers. Poor Mrs. Somers! It seems too bad to leave you here alone, bowed in an elegiac attitude over ...
— Five O'Clock Tea - Farce • W. D. Howells
... compositions adapted to recitation on the stage—in which are displayed, for instruction and amusement, all the passions, feelings, errors, and virtues of the human race in real life; lyric poetry, or that suited to music, as songs, odes, &c; didactic, or instructive; elegiac, or sentimental, and affecting; satirical, or censorious; epigrammatic, or witty and ludicrous; and pastoral, or ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... witness of the decadence of Spanish art. But his spirit has lived on in Manet and Zuloaga. Decadent he was; a romantic before French romanticism, he yet had borrowed from an earlier France. Some of his gay Fetes Champetres recall the influence of Watteau—a Watteau without the sweet elegiac strain. He has been called a Spanish Hogarth—not a happy simile. Hogarth preaches; Goya never; satirists both, Goya never deepened by a pen stroke the didactic side. His youth was not extraordinary in promise; his father and mother were poor peasants. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... exalted lyrical verse directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with one dignified theme." Spenser's "Epithalamium" or marriage ode, Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," Tennyson's elegiac and encomiastic "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," Lowell's "Harvard Commemoration Ode," are among the most familiar examples of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... laid in Italy, but none of the names, except Damian and Justin, seem to be Italian, but rather made at pleasure; so that I doubt whether the story be really of Italian growth. The adventure of the pear-tree I find in a small collection of Latin fables, written by one Adoiphus, in elegiac verses of his fashion, in the year 1315. . . . Whatever was the real origin of the Tale, the machinery of the fairies, which Chaucer has used so happily, was probably added by himself; and, indeed, I cannot help thinking ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... "Thoreau's Flute," printed in the Atlantic, has been called the most perfect of her poems, with a possible exception of a tender tribute to her mother. Personally, I consider the lines in memory of her mother one of the finest elegiac ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... composition of no fewer than four novels, The Unfortunate Bride, The Dumb Virgin, The Wandering Beauty, The Unhappy Mistake. She was working at high pressure, and 1688 still saw a tremendous literary output. Waller had died 21 October, 1687, at the great age of eighty-one, and her Elegiac Ode ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... (1716-1771), the greatest elegiac poet of the century, was born in London in 1716. His father was a "money-scrivener," as it was called; in other words, he was a stock-broker. His mother's brother was an assistant-master at Eton; and at Eton, under the care of this uncle, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... and his mouth, losing the fulness of youth, was weak and pale. He still talked vaguely of the things he was going to do in the future, but with less conviction; and he was conscious that his friends no longer believed in him: when he had drank two or three glasses of whiskey he was inclined to be elegiac. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Wordsworth and found in the "Lyrical Ballads" "vulgarity, affectation and silliness." He is alarmed, moreover, lest his "childishness, conceit and affectation" spread to other authors. He proposes a poem to be called "Elegiac Stanzas to a Sucking Pig," and of "Alice Fell" he writes that "if the publishing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted." When the "White Doe of Rylstone" was published—no ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... elegiac mood, though he meant to drive away his cares later in the evening by the "Falernian system." He felt the exodus in the air. Another spring drawing to its close—everybody scattering! He was filled, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun"; but the increasing prominence of the mossy cave and hermit's cell, both in descriptive verse and in gardening, was symptomatic. It was a note of the coming romanticism, and of that pensive, elegiac strain which we shall encounter in the work of Gray, Collins, and the Wartons. It marked the withdrawal of the muse from the world's high places into the cool sequestered vale of life. All through the literature of the mid-century, the high-strung ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Beethoven's Sonata in the same key—have you mastered its content? The Preludes are a perfect field for the "prospector"; though Essipoff and Arthur Friedheim played them in a single program. Nor must we overlook the so-called hackneyed valses, the tinkling charm of the one in G-flat, the elegiac quality of the one in B minor. The Barcarolle is only for heroes. So I do not set it down in malice against the student or the everyday virtuosos that he—or she—does not attempt it. The F minor Fantaisie, I am sorry to say, is beginning to be tarnished like the A-flat Ballade, by ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... 9: Twice six.—Ver. 72. These were the 'Dii consentes,' mentioned before, in the note to Book i., l. 172. They are thus enumerated in an Elegiac couplet, more consistent with the rules of prosody than the two lines ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... perceive how and where the influence reveals itself. Of Field, on the other hand, traces are discoverable, and even more distinct ones of Hummel. The idyllic serenity of the former and the Mozartian sweetness of the latter were truly congenial to him; but no less, if not more, so was Spohr's elegiac morbidezza. Chopin's affection for Spohr is proved by several remarks in his letters: thus on one occasion (October 3, 1829) he calls the master's Octet a wonderful work; and on another occasion (September 18, 1830) he says that the Quintet for pianoforte, flute, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... was, it might be soonest attained; and as the manner is, was not unstudied in those authors which are most commended: whereof some were grave orators and historians, whose matter methought I loved indeed, but as my age then was, so I understood them; others were the smooth elegiac poets, whereof the schools are not scarce, whom both for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing, which in imitation I found most easy and most agreeable to nature's part in me, and for their matter, which what it is there be few who know not, I was so allured to read, that no ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... subdivided into sundry more special denominations; the most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satyric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others; some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with; some by the sort of verse they like best to write in; for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... into two classes. First come those which constitute the so-called ELEGIARUM LIBER; viz., the "Elegies" proper, numbered from I. to VII., as they now stand in all editions of Milton, together with the eight little scraps in the same elegiac verse (five of them on the subject of the Gunpowder Plot, and three on the Italian singer Leonora) which some modern editors have preferred to detach from the Elegies, and put under the separate heading of "Epigrams." This is contrary to Milton's intention; ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... memory of William Shenstone, Esquire, In whose verse Were all the natural graces. And in whose manners Was all the amiable simplicity Of pastoral poetry, With the sweet tenderness Of the elegiac. ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... sentimental at another. All sentimental poetry, then, is concerned with the disparity or contrast between reality and the ideal. If the poet is mainly interested in the real, we have, in the broad sense, satire, which may be pathetic or humorous. If he dwells more upon the ideal, we have elegiac poetry—elegiac in the narrower sense, if the ideal is conceived as a distant object of longing, idyllic if it is portrayed as a present reality. The second part of the essay is devoted to a review of the sentimental poets of ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... dialogues, and the use which is made of the local idiom is more restricted. Yet it is not without historic interest. Composed at a time when the Enclosure Acts were robbing the peasant farmer of his rights of common, the poem is an elegiac lament on the part of the Snaith farmer who sees himself suddenly brought to the brink of ruin by the enclosure of Snaith Marsh. To add to his misery, his bride, Susan, has deserted him for the more prosperous rival, Roger. As much of the poem is in ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... 'twill be a rare adventure," commented the other. "Wandering in the country; the beautiful country, where I was reared; away from the madness of courts. Already I hear the wanton breezes sighing in Sapphic softness and the forests' elegiac murmur. Tell me, how ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... have by the next parcel. I thank you for your kind permission with respect to books. I have sent down to you "Elegiac Stanzas" by Bowles; they were given to me, but are altogether unworthy of Bowles. I have sent you Beddoes's Essay on the merits of William Pitt; you may either keep it, and I will get another for myself on your account, ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... by him to the new Sovereign without loss of time, if not indeed, as it would be hardly uncharitable to suppose, prepared beforehand. Even in this "Complaint" (the term was a technical one for an elegiac piece, and was so used by Spenser) there is a certain frank geniality of tone, the natural accompaniment of an easy conscience, which goes some way to redeem the nature of the subject. Still, the theme remains one which only ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar metre. People do, indeed, add the word 'maker' or 'poet' to the name of the metre, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all indiscriminately to the name. Even when ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... Dr. Johnson has called 'metaphysical distresses.' It is striking enough to observe how differently the quiet monasteries of the Carthusian and Trappist brotherhoods affected Matthew Arnold and Robert Louis Stevenson. In his well-known elegiac stanzas Matthew Arnold likens his own state to that of ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... the Elegiac's theme; From thence 'twas used to sing of love's young dream: But who that dainty measure first put out, Grammarians differ, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... weak drops Be shed for him. The virgin in her bloom Cut off, the joyous youth, and darling child, These are the tombs that claim the tender tear And elegiac songs. But Adams calls For other notes of gratulation high; That now he wanders thro' those endless worlds He here so well descried; and, wondering, talks And hymns their Author with his glad compeers. Columbia's boast! whether with angels thou Sittest in dread discourse, or fellow blest Who ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... incalculable loss to English letters by Thomas Nash, the worthiest English precursor of Swift in vivid, pure, and passionate prose, embodying the most terrible and splendid qualities of a personal and social satirist; a man gifted also with some fair faculty of elegiac and even lyric verse, but in nowise qualified to put on the buskin left behind him by the "famous gracer of tragedians," as Marlowe had already been designated by their common friend Greene from among the worthiest of his fellows. In this somewhat thin-spun and evidently hasty play ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... elegiac,' interrupted Logan. 'I know. Still, I am rather sorry for people's people. The unruly affections simply poison the lives of parents and guardians, aye, and of the children too. The aged are now so hasty and imprudent. What would not ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... that, if he had bestowed more leisure, he might have rendered the whole of Goethe's masterpiece in its original measure, at least as agreeably as the Faust has been presented to us hitherto. Mr Coleridge's felicity, both in the Elegiac metre and a slight variation of the Hendecasyllabic, is ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... something that the artist wants. The young lover whom Kohl knew, like the lover of Bombyca in Theocritus, believed in having an image of himself and an image of the beloved. Into the heart of the female image he thrust magic powders, and he said that this was common, lovers adding songs, "partly elegiac, partly malicious, and almost criminal forms ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... said about the title. I have not interpreted the term lyric so rigidly as to exclude sonnets, ballads, elegiac verse, or even pieces of almost pure description. If I had held to the strictest sense of lyric, this book would never have been compiled; for I suspect nothing will strike the reader more forcibly than the fact that, despite the excellence of the poems included, ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... equal if not greater progress in the early ages of Grecian history. Hesiod lived B.C. 735; and lyric poetry flourished in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, especially the elegiac form, or songs for the dead. Epic poetry was of still earlier date, as seen in the Homeric poems. The AEolian and Ionic Greeks of Asia were early noted for celebrated poets. Alcaeus and Sappho lived on the Isle of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... of the feminine gender was more capable than Mademoiselle Sophie Gamard of formulating the elegiac nature of ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... Elegiac Stanzas on the Death of Sir Peter Parker, Bart. First published, Morning Chronicle, October 7, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Shakespeare's Othello. Caroline puts on the air of a martyr; her submission is positively killing. On every occasion she assassinates Adolphe with a "Just as you like!" uttered in tones whose sweetness is something fearful. No elegiac poet could compete with Caroline, who utters elegy upon elegy: elegy in action, elegy in speech: her smile is elegiac, her silence is elegiac, her gestures are elegiac. Here are a few examples, wherein every household will find some of ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... closely resemble Shakespeare's account of the funereal functions fulfilled by the same four birds in his contribution to Chester's volume. This resemblance suggests that Shakespeare's poem may be a fanciful adaptation of Roydon's elegiac conceits without ulterior significance. Shakespeare's concluding 'Threnos' is imitated in metre and phraseology by Fletcher in his Mad Lover in the song 'The Lover's ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... to an improvised song;" "In genuine prose all words should be printed in italics;" "Catholicism is naive Christianity; Protestantism is sentimental." The sheer whimsicality of phrase seems to be at times its own excuse for being, as in an explanation of certain elegiac poems as "the sensation of misery in the contemplation of the silliness of the relations of banality to craziness;" but there are many sentences which go deep below the surface—none better remembered, perhaps, than the dictum, "The ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and penalty. Nor is it only in the higher walks of tragedy, with its pomp and circumstances of action, that the poet here serves us. His humbler minstrelsy has soothed many an English heart from the tale of "Lycidas" to the elegiac verse of Tennyson. George Herbert still speaks to this generation as two centuries ago he spoke to his own. His quaint verses gather new beauties from time as they come to us redolent with the prayers and aspirations of many successions of the wives, mothers and daughters of England and America; ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... with thoughts of "literature in all its branches." Experts and pedagogues (chiefly pedagogues) have, for the purpose of convenience, split literature up into divisions and sub-divisions—such as prose and poetry; or imaginative, philosophic, historical; or elegiac, heroic, lyric; or religious and profane, etc., ad infinitum. But the greater truth is that literature is all one—and indivisible. The idea of the unity of literature should be well planted and fostered in the head. All literature is the expression of feeling, of passion, ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... a dismal shed of a station, a bewildering wilderness of tracks, and an adjacent cemetery, thickly populated (according to a local legend) with the bodies of people who have died of old age while waiting for their trains. This elegiac locality was visited, many years ago, by the Honorable E.J. Phelps, once ambassador of the United States to the court of St. James's. He was allotted several hours for the contemplation of the cemetery; and his consequent meditations moved him to the composition of a poem, in four stanzas, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... telegram which announced Mr. Poland's death was received, he tried to comfort her by words that were so peculiarly elegant and sombre, that, in spite of Laura's wishes to think otherwise, they struck her like an elegiac address that had been carefully prearranged and studied; and when the tidings of poor little Bertha's death came, it would occur to Laura that Mr. Beaumont had thought his first little address so perfect that he could do no better than to repeat ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... successive literary productions of ancient India. As in Greece there is an epic age of literature, where we should look in vain for prose or dramatic poetry; as in that country we never meet with real elegiac poetry before the end of the eighth century, nor with iambics before the same date; as even in more modern times rhymed heroic poetry appears in England with the Norman conquest, and in Germany the Minnesaenger rise and set with the Swabian dynasty—so, only in a much ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... reflective lyric prompted by the death of some one. Tennyson's In Memoriam is a collection of elegiac lyrics. ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Hiero died in 467, the year of the Seven against Thebes; but after 458, when the Oresteia was exhibited at Athens, we find the poet again in Sicily for the last time. In 456 he died, and was buried at Gela; and on his tomb was placed an epitaph in two elegiac couplets saying: "Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian, who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela; of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak, or the long-haired Persian who knows ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... obstinate, it is very variable, and time often prevails when arguments have failed. Queen Mary conferred upon both those plays the honour of her presence; and when she died soon after, Congreve testified his gratitude by a despicable effusion of elegiac pastoral, a composition in which all is unnatural ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... plucked these elegiac blooms, There where he rests 'mid comrades fit and few, And thence I bring this growth of classic tombs, An offering, friend, to you— You who have loved like me his simple themes, Loved his sincere large accent nobly plain, And loved the land whose mountains ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... the matter?" asked Sophie. "Are you in your elegiac mood? You look as I imagine Victor Hugo when he has not made up his mind about the ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... of the conventional pastoral did not, indeed, pass altogether unnoticed in their own day, for early in the sixteenth century Teofilo Folengo composed his Zanitonella in macaronic verse. It consists of eclogues and poems in hexameter and elegiac metre ridiculing polite pastoralism through contrast with the crudities of actual rusticity. In the same manner Berni travestied the courtly pastoral of vernacular writers in his realistic pictures of village love. But though the satirist might find ample scope for his wit ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... most diversified character. The beeches with their smooth white bark twisted their tops together. Ash trees softly curved their bluish branches. In the tufts of the hornbeams rose up holly stiff as bronze. Then came a row of thin birches, bent into elegiac attitudes; and the pine-trees, symmetrical as organ pipes, seemed to be singing a song as they swayed to and fro. There were gigantic oaks with knotted forms, which had been violently shaken, stretched themselves out from the soil and pressed close against each other, and with firm trunks resembling ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... as peculiar 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
... Monota, [poems]. Elegiac Ode and other Poems. Under the Empire, [novel]. Arms and the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... earl of Kent died in 1523, and as Barclay speaks of himself in the preface as advanced in age, the date of publication may be assigned to close upon that year. It is a translation, in the ballad stanza, of the Latin elegiac poem of Dominicus Mancinus, De quatuor virtutibus, first published in 1516, and, as appears from the title, was executed while Barclay was a monk of Ely, at "the desire of the righte worshipfull Syr Giles Alington, Knight." From the address to his patron it would seem that the Knight had ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... was in earnest. She believed in one emotion at a time. It offended her to have Davidge suggest that the funeral baked meats of her tragedy should coldly furnish forth a wedding breakfast. She wanted to revel awhile in her elegiac humor and pay full honor to her sorrow, full penalty for her guilt. She put aside his amorous impatience and ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... deriving his inspiration direct from the national heart, Chopin did what Schumann, Schubert, and Weber did in Germany, what Rossini did in Italy, and shares with them a freshness of melodic power to be derived from no other source. Rather tender and elegiac than vigorous, the deep sadness underlying the most sparkling forms of his work is most notable. One can at times almost recognize the requiem of a nation in the passionate melancholy on whose dark background his fancy weaves such beautiful ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... gentleman." As theologian he wrote a treatise on The Conversion of St. Paul which, a hundred years later, was described as being "still regarded as one of the subsidiary bulwarks of Christianity." As poet he won the praise of Gray for his tender and elegiac verse. Thomson sang of his ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... feeling. To our thought, the associations connected with the return of the herds from the fields at sunset are best fitted to awaken that quiet, reflective state of mind which is most congenial to the mood of the elegiac poet. To another, these associations may be of such a character as to produce a directly ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... won, that are modern and Christian in essence and entirely foreign to the pagan story. On this point Tegnr: "Another peculiarity common to the people of the North is a certain disposition for melancholy and heaviness of spirit common to all deeper characters. Like some elegiac key-note, its sound pervades all our old national melodies, and generally whatever is expressive in our annals, for it is found in the depths of the nation's heart. I have somewhere or other said of Bellman, the most national of ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... a Collection of Epic, Lyric, Elegiac, and Sententious Writings. The Talmud, Book ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... the book, for the page grew a little dim as he finished this elegiac sentence, and sighed to think how much more keenly he felt its truth than when it was written,—than on that memorable morning when he saw the advertisement in all the papers, "This day published, 'Thoughts on the Universe.' ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... thousands of the youth wished for somebody to begin, but did not dare to stir first for fear of the law, counterfeited a distraction, and by his own family it was spread about the city that he was mad. He then secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... photography. Meantime an unctuous orthoepist applied a homeopathic restorative to the retina of an objurgatory spaniel (named Daniel) and tried to perfect the construction of a behemoth which had got mired in pygmean slough, while listening to the elegiac soughing of ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... to Juliet; "a most estimable young person, the daughter of my father's chamberlain. She is rather given to singing ballads of an elegiac nature," added the prince, reflectingly, "but our madcap Romeo will cure her of that. Methinks I see ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the language and the style of such better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches of Catherine and of Rosamond.' But the difference between these speeches is very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentations and meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the best speeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine splendour of language, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... capable of writing excellent poetry, but he seems to have cultivated this talent too little. The English verses prefixed to his book, which possess beautiful imagery, and great sweetness of versification, have been frequently published. His Latin elegiac verses addressed to his book, shew a very agreeable turn for ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... also poured forth his elegiac strains upon the fate of the widowed bridegroom, on which subject, after a long and querulous effusion, the poet arrives at the sound conclusion, that if Baldoon had walked on foot, which it seems was his general custom, he would have escaped perishing ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... these we hear the elegiac strain of the antique world, wherein remorseless fate held dominion over human efforts and destiny. Like other great writers who are touched with humorous melancholy, he falls often into the moralising vein; he stops his narrative to address his reader with some ironical observation, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... world as his own answer to the doubts and questionings of men. This universal human interest, together with its exquisite form and melody, makes the poem, in popular favor at least, the supreme threnody, or elegiac poem, of our literature; though Milton's Lycidas is, from the critical view point, undoubtedly a ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... lacking however from his "Impromptu," and it makes his "Elegie" a masterly work, possibly his best in the smaller lines. This piece is altogether elegiac in spirit, intense in its sombrest depths, impatient with wild outcries,—like Chopin's "Funeral March,"—and working up to an immense passion at the end. This subsides in ravishingly liquid arpeggios,—"melodious ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... absolutely typical examples of what is thought by journalists to be fitting material for poetry. Yet by common consent, these tragic occurrences did not awaken our numerous poets to any really remarkable effort, lyrical or elegiac. No ode or threnody could equal in vibrating passion Captain Scott's last testament. These are matters in which the fullness of a wholly sincere statement in prose does not require, does not even admit, the introduction of the symbol. The impact of the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... in the last paragraph was his article 'The Death of Jean,' his last serious writing, and one of the world's most beautiful examples of elegiac prose.—[Harper's Magazine, Dec., 1910,] and later in the volume, 'What Is Man and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... inconsistencies of unsuccessful passion, the wanderings of a mind diseased, and a prey to irresistible desire, he has portrayed more touchingly and truthfully than any French poet before him, or even perhaps after him. Generally speaking, he was more inclined to the elegiac and the idyllic, than to the heroic. I will not say that he would never have elevated himself to more serious and dignified conceptions than are to be found in his Britannicus and Mithridate; but here we must distinguish between that which his subject suggested, and what he ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... invitation to come and share his home, commemorated the poet's death and the world's loss in Adonais, which ranks with Milton's Lycidas, Tennyson's In Memoriam and Emerson's Threnody among the great elegiac poems of our literature. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... signed 'Loving Father and 3 Sisters.' But the actual authorship rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or mortuary or memorial ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... now follows the jolly little counter-theme in connection with the leading theme, and while the continued treatment of the working out seems simple, it is in fact extremely rich, and well managed for intensifying the elegiac character of the opening subject. Abundance of melodic life meets us in every one of the orchestral voices, and the richness of detail is like that of one of the old cathedrals, where the mighty mass of the whole is no less significant to the distant observer than the patient ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... subjects, or which were supposed to be the product of the same (or a similar) faculty, irrespective of the date of composition. Thus one group was entitled "Poems of the Fancy," another "Poems of the Imagination," a third "Poems proceeding from Sentiment and Reflection," a fourth "Epitaphs and Elegiac Pieces," again "Poems on the Naming of Places," "Memorials of Tours," "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," "Miscellaneous Sonnets," etc. The principle which guided him in this was obvious enough. It was, in some respects, a most natural arrangement; and, in now adopting ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... works which have come down to us: three dramas, two epics, one elegiac poem, and one descriptive poem. Many other works, including even an astronomical treatise, have been attributed to him; they are certainly not his. Perhaps there was more than one author who bore the name Kalidasa; perhaps certain later writers ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... went round and round in his brain. And then, in a sudden burst of clearness, he understood what it meant for him to say this. It meant that the farce of friendship, at which he had played, was at an end; it meant that he loved her—not as hitherto, with a touch of elegiac resignation—but with a violence that made him afraid. If seemed incredible to him now that he had spent two months in close fellowship with her: it was ludicrous, inhuman. For he now saw, that his ultimate desire had been neither to help her ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... pavilion, naming it House of Lamentations; and on Mondays and Thursdays he devoted himself to the business of the state and ordering the affairs of his levies and lieges; and the rest of the week he was wont to spend in the House of Lamentations, mourning for his son and bewailing him with elegiac verses,[FN324] of which the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... (No. 13, p. 203.) asks, "Is there any published edition of the hexameter poem by Lactantius, which is said to have suggested the idea of the Anglo-Saxon Lay of the Phoenix?" This poem is not in hexameter, but in elegiac verse; and though, on account of its brevity, we could not expect that it would have been separately published, it is to be found very commonly at the end of the works of Lactantius; for example, in three editions before me, Basil. 1524, Lugd. ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... been arranged and celebrated than a score of the most brilliant suitors expressed, in prose and in verse, their regret at having lost beyond recall Mademoiselle de Tonnai-Charente. Such elegiac effusions seemed to me unspeakably ridiculous; they should have explained matters earlier, while the lists were still open. For persons of this sort I conceived aversion, who were actually so clumsy as to dare to tell me that they ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... auditory; all he felt was the fate of his poor heroine, the pitiful farm-drudge, sunk in hopeless wrong and misery. He read in his very best manner, with abundant feeling and full conviction, and for a moment his hearers felt with him. Then came a last elegiac paragraph, and here Abner's voice grew husky, his throat filled, he coughed, and as he laid aside his last sheet and turned to rise a quick pain darted through his chest; he coughed again and involuntarily raised his hand against his breast, and the acute and sudden pang was signalled ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... served her as a home. It was completed before Whitsunday, and I then deliberated on setting myself to seek after employment of a more remunerative kind, with just a little of the feeling to which we owe one of the best-known elegiac poems in the language—the "Man was made to Mourn" of Burns. "There is nothing that gives me a more mortifying picture of human life," said the poet, "than a man seeking work." The required work, however, came direct in my way without solicitation, and exactly at the proper time. I was engaged ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... "the wild and wandering cries, confusions of a wasted youth" forgotten in the song of adoration, which is in reality the epilogue of the elegiac drama. We can almost imagine its coming after the closing glory of the bridal hymn which sings to its ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... suburban residence is charming. To the serious poet, and writer of elegiac verses, the aspect of Nature, viewed from my veranda, is suggestive. I myself have experienced moments when the "sad mechanic exercise" of verse would have been of infinite relief. The following stanzas, by a young friend who has been stopping with me for the benefit ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... faint, is on all our literary forms, except perhaps one. Epic, lyric, elegiac, dramatic, didactic, poetry, history, biography, rhetoric and oratory, the epigram, the essay, the sermon, the novel, letter writing and literary criticism are all Greek by origin, and in nearly every case their name betrays their source. Rome raises a doubtful claim ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... literature which has come down to us is of later date than the commencement of the Second Punic War, and consists almost exclusively of works fashioned on Greek models. The Latin metres, heroic, elegiac, lyric, and dramatic, are of Greek origin. The best Latin epic poetry is the feeble echo of the Iliad and Odyssey. The best Latin eclogues are imitations of Theocritus. The plan of the most finished didactic poem in the Latin tongue was ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and inspiration. The "Credo," as if built on a rock, should sound as steadfast as the dogma itself; a mystic and ecstatic joy should pervade the "Sanctus;" the "Agnus Dei" (as well as the "Miserere" in the "Gloria") should be accentuated, in a tender and deeply elegiac manner, by the most fervent sympathy with the Passion of Christ; and the "Dona nobis pacem," expressive of reconciliation and full of faith, should float away like sweet-smelling incense. The Church composer is both preacher and priest, and what the word fails ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... heed his civil remonstrance, the bow-wow became still more earnest in its expostulatory accents. B[o]w (long) w[)o]w (short). "Why such haste?" Then he tried his eloquence upon us; and while reiterating his canine accidente in his own way at the horses now close at hand, his voice assumes an elegiac whine as he turns to supplicate, in a tone that none accustomed to Italian beggars can mistake; "non abbandonatemi," being plainly the purport of its most dolorous and plaintive accents. We hesitate, the carriage draws up, down go the steps, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... may be found in the flourishing cycle of stories which, while Bret Harte was celebrating California, grew up about the life of Southern plantations before the war. The mood of most of these was of course elegiac and the motive was to show how much splendor had perished in the downfall of the old regime. Over and over they repeated the same themes: how an irascible planter refuses to allow his daughter to marry the youth of her choice and how true love finds a way; how a beguiling Southern maiden ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... some stanzas about an echo repeating a cuckoo's voice.... Then we have Elegiac stanzas "to the spade of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... here meant, is the celebrated poet of Ceos, the perfecter of Elegiac poetry among the Greeks. He flourished about the time of the Persian war. Besides his poetry, he is said to have been the inventor of some method of aiding the memory. He died at the court of ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... Elegiac poetry has an honorable place in Roman literature. To this school belongs Ovid, [Footnote: Born B.C. 43. Died A.D. 18.] whose "Metamorphoses" will always retain their interest. He, with that self- conscious ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... evoked enthusiasm. He pressed Lucy in his arms, he left her, he came back, he seemed desperate; he had outbursts of rage, then elegiac gurglings of infinite sweetness, and the notes escaped from his bare neck full of sobs and kisses. Emma leant forward to see him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails. She was filling her heart with ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... long would he stay, And long lock'd in silence his tongue; Then he humm'd an elegiac lay, Or a Psalm penitential he sung: But if with his Friends he regal'd, His Mirth, as his Griefs, knew no bounds; In no Tale of Mark Sargent he sail'd, Nor ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... what they say: Know not, yet know, the fire's tongue And the rain's elegiac song, And the white language of the spray, And all the wind meant yesterday— Yea! wiser he, when the day ends, Who shared it ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... retiring-rooms, and a small but valuable library of choice manuscripts by Callinus, the Elegiac poet; Batalus, the musician; Dion, Andron, Delias, and Daphnus, the philosophers; with works by Phavorinus, Zenodotus, Menander, and ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... verse, and one form of verse or many): this art has no name up to the present (i.e. there is no name to cover mimes and dialogues and any similar imitation made in iambics, elegiacs, &c. Commonly people attach the 'making' to the metre and say 'elegiac-makers', 'hexameter-makers,' giving them a common class-name by their metre, as if it was not their imitation that makes ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... Shakespeare's Town. Up and Down the Avon. Rambles in Arden. The Stratford Fountain. Bosworth Field. The Home of Dr. Johnson. From London to Edinburgh. Into the Highlands. Highland Beauties. The Heart of Scotland. Sir Walter Scott. Elegiac Memorials. Scottish Pictures. Imperial Ruins. The Land ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... of loyalty and lewdness; Outdone by none in rhyming well, Although he never learn'd to spell. Two bordering wits contend for glory; And one is Whig, and one is Tory: And this, for epics claims the bays, And that, for elegiac lays: Some famed for numbers soft and smooth, By lovers spoke in Punch's booth; And some as justly fame extols For lofty lines in Smithfield drolls. Bavius[16] in Wapping gains renown, And Maevius[16] reigns o'er Kentish ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... mild and plaintive as the ballads sung amid the mists of Scotland. They are pallid as young girls carried to their bier by the dance or by love; they are eminently elegiac and they breathe all the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... Jewish wit springs from a lively appreciation of what is ingenious. A serious beginning suddenly and unexpectedly takes a merry, jocose turn, producing in Heine's elegiac passages the discordant endings so shocking to sensitive natures. But it is an injustice to the poet to attribute these rapid transitions to an artist's vain fancy. His satire is directed against ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... pointed, and we have described Interchange of Labour as the fundamental condition which enables us to travel it. It is now clear that the conception of popular culture is not, after all, represented by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catchwords with which we are wont to console ourselves in our elegiac orations, but that by it is meant a clearly ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland; read his Ethic as a despairing elegiac poem, which in fact it is, and tell me if you do not hear, beneath the disemburdened and seemingly serene propositions more geometrico, the lugubrious echo of the prophetic psalms. It is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair. And when ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... condition of honorable gentlemen opposite. We all know the paper circulated among us before Parliament met, on which the speech of the honorable member from Maidstone commented this evening. I quite sympathize with him; it was one of the most interesting contributions to our elegiac literature I have heard for some time. But is it in this house only that we find these indications of the want of maturity in our views upon this subject? Our tables are filled at this moment with propositions ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... as he had resented the misrepresentation which had cost him his daughter, was not a man to do anything which might give any opening for gossip; he repressed his wife's tendency to become elegiac on her daughter's account, and treated Mark in public as before. But on occasions when he dined there en famille, and sat alone with his father-in-law over dessert, there was no attempt to conceal ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... natural propriety, and should be adhered to. It may sometimes seem doubtful to which of two categories a poem belongs; whether this or that poem is to be called, for instance, narrative or lyric, lyric or elegiac. But there is to be found in every good poem a strain, a predominant note, which determines the poem as belonging to one of these kinds rather than the other; and here is the best proof of the value of the classification, and of the advantage of adhering to it. Wordsworth's ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... experience, and it is highly probable that Caturras and Gaspar, pieces as witty as anything in Bocage but free from Bocage's coarse impiety, will always interest literary students. But it is as the singer of love that Joao de Deus will delight posterity as he delighted his own generation. The elegiac music of Rachel and of Marina, the melancholy of Adeus and of Remoinho, the tenderness and sincerity of Meu casta lirio, of Lagrima celeste, of Descalca and a score more songs are distinguished ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... of starting his story "in the middle of things." In the first part he creates the atmosphere of the uncanny, introduces the more important characters, and presents a striking situation. Part Second, the most admired, is elegiac in nature. It pleases by its simple melancholy. This part and the dramatic tableau of Part Three explain the cause of the duel with which Part One begins. Part Four resumes the thread of the narration where it was ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... which are attributed to him have, on the whole, a marked similarity of manner. Their characteristics have been well summed up as "creative originality, predominantly elegiac tone, graceful form and movement, antique but lucid style;"[A] to which may be added the intensity of their devotion, the passion of Divine love that glows in them all. They correspond, too, with the circumstances of his life as given in the historical books. The early ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... versed in British literature, in a note of his usual length and learning, has confuted the arguments of Scriblerus. In support of the present reading, he quotes a passage from a poem written about the same period with our author's, by the celebrated Johannes Pastor[*], intituled "An Elegiac Epistle to the Turnkey of Newgate," wherein the gentleman declares, that rather indeed in compliance with an old custom, than to gratify any particular will of ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... reproduced, nor with a more distinct revelation of a new spirit, than in this poem. It is retrospective and contemplative, but it is also full of the buoyancy of youth, of the consciousness of poetic skill, and of blithe anticipation. Its tender reminiscence and occasional fond elegiac strain are but clouds of the morning. Its literary form is exquisite, and its general impression is that of bright, elastic, confident power. It was by no means, however, a first work, nor was the poet unknown in his own home. But the "Metrical Essay" introduced him to a larger public, while ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... not be supposed that the predominant note in Tuckerman's poetry is elegiac; rather is it a note of tender, wistful, and scrupulously accurate contemplation of the New England countryside, mingled with spiritual speculation. But as the volume closed with the elegiac poems, and as thereafter no more poems were published, it may be surmised that the poet's will ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton |
