"Poetry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... king to perish to save your other children," said Albert de Gondi. "Do, then, as the great signors of Constantinople do,—divert the anger and amuse the caprices of the present king. He loves art and poetry and hunting, also a little girl he saw at Orleans; there's ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... conterminous nations there will be nothing better than a peace where each sleeps on its arms,—which is but an Armed Peace. Such for weary years has been the condition of nations. Is Germany determined to prolong the awful curse? Will her most enlightened people, with poetry, music, literature, philosophy, science, and religion as constant ministers, to whom has been opened in rarest degree the whole book of knowledge, persevere in a brutal policy belonging to another age, and utterly alien to that superior ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who has no small share of a very pleasant conscious humour, yet sometimes rises to such heights of unconscious humour, that Buffon's puny labour may well have been invisible to him. Dr. Darwin wrote a great deal of poetry, some of which was about the common pump. Miss Seward tells us, that he "illustrated this familiar object with a picture of Maternal Beauty administering sustenance to her infant." Buffon could not have done ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... unpublished sources. Materials for such a work have not been found lacking. European authors abound with allusions to tobacco; more especially is it true of English writers, who have celebrated its virtues in poetry and song. All along the highways and by-paths of our literature we encounter much that pertains to this "queen of plants." Considered in what light it may, tobacco must be regarded as the most astonishing of the productions of nature, since it has, in the short period ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... in the blood of the lamb," which was considerably simpler—except for the matter of its making one "whiter than snow." He was doubtful of this result, unless it was only poetry-writing which doesn't mean everything it says. He meant to try this sometime, when he could get a lamb, both as a means of grace and as a ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Then there's smaller rugs, and one of 'em has a dog on it, with real glass eyes; golly, but they shine! And a table in the middle with a lamp on it, glass lamp, with a red shade; and a Bible, and Cap'n Cook's voyages, and Longfellow's poems. Mother was a great hand for poetry—that is, the boy's mother, ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... collecting eggs. They were very successful, and, to their great delight, managed to secure some rather rare specimens. When they had tired themselves with this pursuit, they lay on the summit of one of the cliffs which formed the sides of Avon Glen, and Wright, who was very fond of poetry, read Vernon a canto of ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... that this was my experience with the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar when I found it in another form, and in justice to him I cannot wish that it should be otherwise with his readers here. Still, it will legitimately interest those who like to know the causes, or, if these may not be known, the sources, of things, to learn that the ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... just these habits of the gipsy which I have described, shocking to the moralist and sanitarian and disgusting to the person of delicate stomach, it may be, which please me, rather than the romance and poetry which the scholar-gipsy enthusiasts are fond of reading into him. He is to me a wild, untameable animal of curious habits, and interests me as a naturalist accordingly. It may be objected that being a naturalist occupied with the appearance of things, I must inevitably miss ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... stream, for I remember one of the most effective allusions he made to it in one of the most admirable speeches I ever listened to. But, notwithstanding that allusion, I would still appeal to the poetry of his constitution, and I know it abounds in that quality. I am sure that he could not have looked without emotion on that immortal scene. I still can remember that olive-covered plain, that sunset ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... like them better than feelings. She produced what she knew of William Pepper. She told Helen that he always called on Sundays when they were at home; he knew about a great many things—about mathematics, history, Greek, zoology, economics, and the Icelandic Sagas. He had turned Persian poetry into English prose, and English prose into Greek iambics; he was an authority upon coins; and—one other thing—oh yes, she thought it ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... deal of history; she likes it; she likes all the sensible books in the attic, and I like the rest, particularly poetry and fairy tales. ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... exclaimed. "And what a beautiful set of changes, like real poetry! The stamen in a flower, and growth, and a ray of sunlight are all ...
— Every Girl's Book • George F. Butler
... his wife. It is in allusion to her that he records the observation of a female critic, as he calls her, in Gay's "Life;" and the lady of great beauty and elegance, mentioned in the criticisms upon Pope's epitaphs, was Miss Molly Aston. The person spoken of in his strictures upon Young's poetry is the writer of these anecdotes, to whom he likewise addressed the following verses when he was in the Isle of Skye with Mr. Boswell. The letters written in his journey, I used to tell him, were better than the printed book; and he was not displeased at my having taken the pains to copy ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... mother correcting the idleness and faults of careless and thoughtless children with tenderness."—p. 95. I think the criticism which he makes upon this Life is one of the most wanton passages in his pamphlet. The Life is beautifully written, full of poetry, and, as I have said, bears on its very surface the profession of a legendary ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... a clique. Several of them are personally unknown to the others, but they are united by certain common principles, arrived at independently. These principles are not new; they have fallen into desuetude. They are the essentials of all great poetry, indeed of all great literature, and they ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... the imputation of vanity, select for them a place in the Temple of Poetry, he would endeavour to class them in that niche which is appropriated for the reception of the light ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... engaged in amassing knowledge of this kind in all its fullness and power, he did not despise the humbler accomplishments. He was tolerably fond of poetry and rhetoric, as is shown by the invariable and pure elegance, mingled with dignity, of all his speeches and letters. And he likewise studied the varied history of our own state and of foreign countries. To all these accomplishments was added a very tolerable degree ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... country." I never shall forget the sort of pleasure; it soothed, it "rapt my" willing not my "imprisoned soul in elysium," and I was so happy to feel I could again follow a rational chain of ideas, and comprehend the words of the beautiful poetry, to which music added such a charm and force. She sang, "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms," and "Farewell, but whenever you welcome the hour," and "Oh, Nanny, wilt thou gang wi' me?" and "Vive Henri Quatre!" which I love for the sake of Mrs. Henry Hamilton, and for the sake of Lady ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... important element unrepresented in the construction of her theory—namely, the degree of capability which a mind may possess of sympathy with any given class of feelings. The blossom of the mind, whether it flower in poetry, music, or any other art, must be the exponent of the nature and condition of that whose blossom it is. No mind, therefore, incapable of sympathising with the feelings whence it springs, can interpret the music of another. And Euphra ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... and those who had come to see him felt rebuked. His trouble was too real to be easily comforted, too deep to be an amusing spectacle. The papers of the day recorded the strange scene of the captive Osceola at the play in poetry ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... Louis XII, was taken prisoner in the battle of Agincourt (1415) and passed the next twenty-five years of his life in captivity in England. In this long leisure he developed his talent for poetry, and on his return to France he made his residence at Blois a gathering-point for men of letters. His poetical work marks the utmost attainment in outward grace of expression in the treatment of conventional subjects in the traditional ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... praise (from another’s lip) of any human being, excepting that of Mrs. Thrale, was not a caustic on his spirit; and this, whether their virtues or abilities were the subject of encomium.” His opinions of poetry were, she thought, “so absurd and inconsistent with each other, that, though almost any of his dogmas may be clearly and easily confronted, yet the attempt is but combating an hydra-headed monster . . . Johnson’s ‘Lives of the Poets,’ and all the records of his own life ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... Indian day school half a mile from her home, and two years in the Central School of the city of Brantford, was the extent of her educational training. But, besides this, she acquired a wide general knowledge, having been through childhood and early girlhood a great reader, especially of poetry. Before she was twelve years old she had read Scott, Longfellow, Byron, Shakespeare, and such books as Addison's "Spectator," Foster's Essays ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... some German poetry, while his schoolmates looked up at him in wonder and admiration. This was just what Horace enjoyed; and he ...
— Captain Horace • Sophie May
... thing to strike us—paradoxical as it may sound to say so—about the Athenian 'Old Comedy' is its modernness. Of its very nature, satiric drama comes later than Epic and Lyric poetry, Tragedy or History; Aristophanes follows Homer and Simonides, Sophocles and Thucydides. Of its essence, it is free from many of the conventions and restraining influences of earlier forms of literature, and enjoys much ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... contains the following expressions: "mewling and puking," "whining schoolboy," "satchel," "sighing like furnace," "round belly," "spectacles on nose," "shrunk shank," "sans [without] teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." Would you believe the passage is poetry?—that its total effect is one of poetic elevation? Read the Seven Ages of Man (Appendix 4). Is it poetry? How does Shakespeare reconcile the general poetic tone with such ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... glossier enamel, than a more superficial, trivial nature. He was ever deeply thoughtful, and capable of profounder moods of meditation than the lightly-moved children of the South. Sighs, as from the boughs of Yggdrasil, ever breathed through his poetry from of old. He was a smith, an artificer, and a delver in mines from the beginning. The old Teutonic Pan was far more musical and awe-inspiring than his Grecian counterpart The Noon-spirit of the North was more wild than that of the South. How all the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... number of short pieces of verse—those first flutterings of the bird before it has strength to leave the nest—but even the conception of many poetical projects which time and study were hereafter to mature into masterpieces. The short and fugitive essays in poetry to which we have just alluded, appeared in a literary journal at various periods, and under anonymous signatures—a circumstance to be deplored, as it has deprived us of the means of examining how far these slight attempts, composed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... this time Mr Whittlestaff had encountered the greatest sorrow of his life. Even the lost fellowship, even the rejected poetry, had not caused him such misery as this. He had loved a young lady, and had been accepted;—and then the young lady had jilted him. At this time of his life he was about thirty; and as to the outside world, he was absolutely dumfounded ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... she said. "We have none of Mr. Scott's works at present. There is a demand among some people for Mr. Scott I believe, but," here she frowned slightly, "I do not think you are old enough for poetry. It is too romantic, and—it lingers in the memory. I have not read him myself though I hear he is clever—in a way. I would not say that I object to Mr. Scott, but I do not recommend him ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... and I have often thought so," said Aunt Harriet, moving alongside with stately sweeps of black skirts, "that you have shown absolutely no literary taste. As you know, I have often written poetry, of course not for publication, and my friends have been so good ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the power of a single impression and a clear, quick getaway. She left him dazed by the fortune which heaped upon him literary classics in a dozen forms—fiction, essays, history, poetry, short stories, criticism, fable, and the like; she laughed at her own quick liking for the serious-minded, self-deprecatory, old-young man whose big innocent eyes displayed a soul enamoured by the spirited intelligence ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... "what consideration! You will be bursting into unpremeditated poetry about the dark ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... of aspiration, Of feeling, poetry—of godlike spark Of all that appertains to my big nose, (He turns him by the shoulders, suiting the action to the word): As. . .what my boot will ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... poem is based on an actual occurrence. A lad, nursed back to life, rejoins the hard-pressed Southern troops and is killed in the first battle. Ticknor (1822-1874) was a Georgian. By profession a physician, his love of poetry led to the production of some of the finest lyrics of the South. Among these the best known are "Little Giffen" and "The Virginians of ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... bent, petitioned for a "book about Abraham Lincoln that will tell things to put in a composition on him." And a girl, at whose school no Christmas play was apparently to be given, asked for "a piece of poetry to say at school just before Christmas." For these two, as for all who preceded or followed them, the ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... from recitation to public speaking. Lastly, oral reading is the best method of bringing out and conveying to others and to oneself all that a piece of literature expresses. For example, the voice is needed to bring out the musical effects of poetry. The following ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... before her—who could sufficiently admire? And let it be remembered that in the Hindu mind the interval between admiration and adoration is exceedingly small. Yet, while it is the dawn which has evoked the truest poetry, she has not retained the highest place ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... into the nursery tales of subsequent ages," and Max Mueller, in his "Chips from a German Workshop," says: "The gods of ancient mythology were changed into the demigods and heroes of ancient epic poetry, and these demigods again became at a later age the principal characters of ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... to Rule 13. In humorous poetry, when a word is divided at the end of a line, the detached syllable at the beginning of the next line should ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... pedantic old Puritan wrote, we might have suppressed him. Still, there is no knowing what women and children will not read. While MILTON'S lines certainly measure generally about the same length, it is preposterous to call by the name of poetry what could be written in prose with so little modification. It is true that the same objection might be applied to HOMER and SHAKSPEARE. The former has the advantage of being written in Greek, so that very few people can read it. SHAKSPEARE has a popularity that is partly ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... forthcoming as rapidly as the thirstiest throats could desire. The conviviality was at its height, and numerous toasts had been given, among which the health of the traveller, the prosperity of the art which he cultivated, and of the land of poetry and song to which he was proceeding, had not been forgotten. Indeed, it was becoming difficult to find any thing to toast, but the thirst of the party was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... tolerably successful in the first verse, and that I have not only gotten the sense of the author, but that alliteration, which, as you may perhaps be aware, is one of the most peculiar features of Welsh poetry. In the ode to which I allude the poet complains of the barbarity of his mistress, Morfydd, and what an unthankful task it is to be the poet of a beauty so proud and disdainful, which sentiment I ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... favorable to polite literature as to the sciences. Charles, though fond of wit, though possessed himself of a considerable share of it, though his taste in conversation seems to have been sound and just, served rather to corrupt than improve the poetry and eloquence of his time. When the theatres were opened at the restoration, and freedom was again given to pleasantry and ingenuity, men, after so long an abstinence, fed on these delicacies with less taste than avidity, and the coarsest and most irregular species of wit was received ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... London Gazette of May 23.; Particulars of Another Letter from the Fleet published by authority; Burchett; Burnet, ii. 93.; Life of James, ii. 493, 494.; Narcissus Luttrell's Diary; Memoires de Berwick. See also the contemporary ballad on the battle one of the best specimens of English street poetry, and the Advice to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... its power at home, the wealth and the strength which this divine gift confers upon its possessor. Fame, and that too after death, was all which hitherto the poets had promised themselves from this art. It seems to have been left to Wither to discover that poetry was a present possession, as well as a rich reversion, and that the Muse has a promise of both lives,—of this, and of that which was to ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... awakened since then, but indeed it is seldom now that she is allowed to slip into such slumber. We walked home and I said some poems on the way; she heard. I think she heard in the same way as a flower feels the touch of a bee. No words had she, no poetry of words to give back. She had not awakened to articulateness. She had no thoughts; she breathed out beauty. She understood no thoughts; she breathed ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... and Donatello, who are represented in this church, were essentially pictorial, preferring low to high relief, and relief in general to detached figures. Their style, like the style of Boiardo in poetry, of Botticelli in painting, is specific to Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century. Mediaeval standards of taste were giving way to classical, Christian sentiment to Pagan; yet the imitation of the antique had not been carried ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... to weigh in the matter, for there came to me tutors, aged men who might have found better employment, to instruct me in the use of the lute, and on this instrument I must learn to strum. Others there were also, who taught me letters, poetry, and art, as they were understood among the Aztecs, and all this knowledge I was glad of. Still I remembered the words of the preacher which tell us that he who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow, and moreover I could see little use in ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... study precisely what my boy was doing out of doors? Had my thoughts any more chance of coming to life by being submerged in rhyme than his hair by soaking in water? I burned my elegy and took a course of Edwards on the Will. People do not make poetry; it is made out of them by a process for which I do not find myself fitted. Nevertheless, the writing of verses is a good rhetorical exercitation, as teaching us what to shun most carefully in prose. For prose bewitched is like window-glass ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... cheaper, and more procurable than they now are; the library—if the term may be applied to their collection—of such people, generally only comprising one or two plays, and perhaps a novel—sometimes also Don Quixote's adventures, which, with a volume of poetry, is about the average amount of learning and amusement on their book-shelves. But should the owner be a military man, he probably has, in addition to these, some Spanish standard book, equivalent to our "Dundas's Principles," ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... has none of your aunt's joy in poetry. When I read to her Wordsworth's 'Brougham Castle,' he said that he had never heard ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... Jeff, in wrath, "let me knock something else into their heads. You can't do it by facts. There aren't many facts just now that aren't shameful. Why can't you let me do it by poetry?" ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... can express what it is which the designer must evince, beyond clear reasoning, to give the highest interest to his architecture. He must have taken an interest in it himself. That seems a little thing to say, but much lies in it. As Matthew Arnold has said of poetry: ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... wood was in front of me. I couldn't see any cow anywhere, but I still heard her. It all seemed quite natural. I would wander into the wood; most likely I should meet her there, and she would be smoking a pipe. In all probability she would know some poetry. ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... want it to be about Nan any more than I could help—I used to have a temperature, you know—puzzled them, doctor, nurse, all of you. Nan, that was! I knew it, though the rest of you hadn't the sense. Well, I made my mind run away from it. I said I'd think about poetry, my long poem. I'd lie there and say it over to myself, and see if the rest of it wouldn't come." He laughed a little, though not bitterly. He was frankly amused. "What do you think? I couldn't even remember the confounded thing. But I could other things: the verse I despised. Wasn't ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... surprised at his ignorance of the classics; any schoolboy ought to know that caput is the Latin for hat, and Bootes for boots. But lately I have abandoned the classics, and have given up my soul to poetry." ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... girls on board from Chicago and a queer Southern girl who paints pictures and sings and writes poetry, and who is traveling with an odd married woman who is an invalid and who like everyone else on board has apparently spent all her life away from home. I have spent my odd time in writing the story I told Dad the night before I sailed and I think it in some ways the best, quite the ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... you were better than that odious, swearing, crazy General Lee, who was second in command!" cries Lady Warrington. "And I am certain Mr. Washington never could write poetry and tragedies as you can! What did the General ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of a theory of mine namely, that the most important events in our lives proceed often from the most trifling causes. My epistle was nothing better than a number of lines of poetry more or less well written, and the being I had delineated was certainly not to be found, as he surpassed by far all human perfections, but a woman's heart travels so quickly and so far! Mdlle. X. C. V. took the thing ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to pay much attention. In 1776, the father, with a newspaper in his hand, came to stimulate him, by showing the advertisement of a prize offered by the Society of Leyden, and decreed to the author of a piece of poetry, signed with these words, "An Author 18 years old," who was invited to make himself known. "You ought to blush, idler," said old Bilderdyk to his son. "Here is a boy only of your age, and though so young, is the pride and happiness of his parents; and you——." "It is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... the Romany (1874). For a time Borrow had a house in London in Hereford Square, where his wife died in 1869. He died himself at Oulton in August 1881, leaving behind him, so it is frequently asserted, many manuscript volumes, including treatises on Celtic poetry, on Welsh and Cornish and Manx literature, as well as translations from the Norse and Russ and the jest-books of Turkey. Some, at all events, of these works were advertised as 'ready ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... know anything about it," she cried. "It sounds like poetry. But I believe it. It has to be, for it has been. I have heard it aforetime, when skin-clad men sang in fire-circles that pressed back the ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... hard. "Mother said I mustn't tell you about the priest crewing about his cut off ear," she said thoughtfully, "but I know another verse about St. Peter, it's easier to merember than the other one, 'cause it's poetry." ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... respected by all who had the pleasure of his acquaintance—that is to say, by all who visited Tattersall's more than once. He was not in the least emblematic like the old fox, but a man of sound sense, with no poetry, of an extremely good nature, and full of anecdote. You might follow his advice, and it would be well with you; or you might follow your opinion in opposition to his and take your chance. His name was Hill—Harry Hill they familiarly ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... to remind the reader that the Angel is mentioned as expressly in Samuel as in Chronicles[51]. Also, to ask what 'the Bedouin host' could have been doing in Egypt previous to the Exode?) "The passage of the Red Sea may be interpreted with the latitude of poetry." (Ibid.) "Moses would gladly have founded a free religious society, ... but the rudeness or hardness of his people's heart compelled him to a sacerdotal system and formal tablets of stone." (p. 62.) Nay, Abraham's ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... severe for elementary manuals. On the other hand, to show the practical applicability of Logic to the arguments and proofs of actual life, or even of the concrete sciences, merely symbolic illustration may be not only useless but even misleading. When we speak of politics, or poetry, or species, or the weather, the terms that must be used can rarely have the distinctness and isolation of X and Y; so that the perfunctory use of symbolic illustration makes argument and proof appear to be much simpler and easier matters than they really are. Our belief ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... a poetry book, that Ezry had ter home, The awful fuss a feller made about a crow, that come And pestered him about ter death and made him sick and sore, By settin' on his mantel-piece and hollerin' "Nevermore!" But, say, I'd ruther have the crow, ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... insensibility to this character, and even an open denial of it, among us now which is one of the most curious errors of modernism,—the peculiar and judicial blindness of an age which, having long practised art and poetry for the sake of pleasure only, has become incapable of reading their language when they were both didactic; and also, having been itself accustomed to a professedly didactic teaching, which yet, for private interests, studiously avoids ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... study with bull-dog tenacity for three years, I should be able to learn something. Then the selection of a school was the next problem. By nature, there is no branch of study whatever which appeals to my taste. Nix on languages or literature! The new poetry was all Greek to me; I could not make out one single line of twenty. Since I detested every kind of study, any kind of study should have been the same to me. Thinking thus, I happened to pass front of a school of physics, ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... reflections begin again, and I copy no more diary. Mrs. Brewton liked my names for the twins. "They'll pronounce it Loyo'la," she said, "and that sounds right lovely." Later she sent me her paper for the Golden Daughters. It is full of poetry and sentiment and all the things I have missed. She wrote that if she had been sure the agent had helped Aqua Marine to swallow the ring, she would have let them smash his boxes. And I think she was a little in love with Shot-gun Smith. But what a pity we shall soon have no more Mrs. Brewtons! ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... of adventure, poetry, history, and mythology she had read with her mother had quickened her mind, sharpened her intuition, had made her temperament still more sensitive—and her heart less peaceful. In her was almost every note of human feeling: ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... under proper circumstances and environment, he'd have been just as happy—often happier. Choice is a mystery, constancy a gamble, discontent the one best bet. It isn't pleasant; it isn't nice fiction and delightful romance; it isn't poetry or precept as it is popularly inculcated; it's the brutal truth about the average man.... And I'm going to find Stephanie. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... year by year he must fill those accursed bags, to please his master and buy the right of living on his land in sordid wretchedness. Yet nature is eternally young, beautiful, and generous. She pours forth poetry and beauty on all creatures and all plants that are ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... are fond of the learned, too; and as for poetry, why, your house is literally eloquent with AEschylus and Homer, the epic and ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... rose the great height of Ben Grief, with his gaunt face gashed here by glowering groups of conifers, there by burns that ran down to the River Nagar like tears down a wrinkled old face. Marcella had read in poetry books about burns that sang and laughing waters that clattered to the sea for all the world like happy children running home from school. But the waters on Ben Grief neither laughed nor sang. Sometimes they ran violently, as though Ben Grief were in a rage of passionate weeping; sometimes ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... name, pretty, but sort of soft and mushy. She had big blue eyes and a baby face, and her principal cargo was poetry. She had a deckload of it, and she'd heave it overboard every time the wind changed. She was forever ordering the ocean to "roll on," but she didn't mean it; I had her out sailing once when the bay was a little mite rugged, and I know. She was just out of a convent ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... dull, industrious. They set out for the goal of fame with equal opportunities. Before they died the brilliant one was detected in seventy languages as the author of but two or three books of fiction and poetry, while the other was honoured in the Bureau of Statistics of his native land as the compiler of sixteen volumes of tabulated information ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... little bit richer in knowledge, than we find it, these poor little lives of ours, such as they are, and that's not much—will not have been lived in vain. Of course, as you know, I'm just a common, low-down materialist who can't rise to the poetry of things as you can with this gorgeous ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... she won't abandon YOU. Poetry and art are the breath of life to her. It IS poetry ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... may live without poetry, music and art; We may live without conscience, and live without heart; We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... at eight, with what we called "first school." Prayers, lasting about five minutes, took place in the large school-room. These were read by a "gown-boy" monitor. The lessons at first school consisted entirely of repetition—repeating Latin poetry, and occasionally prose. As each boy finished his repetition—the boys being taken up in the order in which they were numbered the previous day—he left the school and went to breakfast. Breakfast consisted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... A Tale of Jerusalem The Sphinx Hop Frog The Man of the Crowd Never Bet the Devill Your Head Thou Art the Man Why the Little Frenchman Wears his Hand in a Sling Bon-Bon Some words with a Mummy The Poetic Principle Old English Poetry ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... pensier, dolce mio foco, Fredda una lingua, e duo begli occhi chiusi Rimaner dopo noi pien' di faville. The sentiment is different in all three; but the form of expression here adopted by Gray closely resembles that of the Father of English Poetry, although in Gray's time it was no doubt far more elegant to quote Petrarch ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... some saint. Presently they introduced antiphonal singing and in the end dialogue and action. By the middle of the fourteenth century the laud came to be called "Divozione." After being written in a number of meters it finally adhered to the ottava rima, the stanza generally used in the popular poetry of the fifteenth century. It was the custom to sing these dramatic lauds or "Divozioni" in the oratories. Every fraternity had a collection of such lauds and that they were performed with much detail is ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the grasshopper's, he takes the lead In summer luxury; he has never done With his delights, for when tired out with fun He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never: On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever; And seems to one in drowsiness half lost The grasshopper's among some ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... a fashion of their own. This is the modern church, no longer built with living stones, that is, by Christians established in a living faith, and so formed of love. Go to Rome and through all Christendom, in the houses of the great prelates and the great lords, nothing is thought of but poetry and the art ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... singing and speaking tones are produced by the vocal organs in the same way, are focused precisely alike, have the same resonance, and are delivered in the same manner. It has been said that speech differs from song as walking from dancing. Speech may be called the prose, and song the poetry of vocalization. ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... well pleased with the conversation of our young barrister, that, at parting, he gave Alfred an invitation to his house. The conversation had been very different from what might have been expected: metaphysics, belles-lettres, poetry, plays, criticism—what a range of ideas, far from Coke and Selden, was gone over this evening in the course of a few hours! Alfred had reason to be more and more convinced of the truth of his father's favourite doctrine, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... librarians know well as one of their most troublesome foes. It appeared that some unknown persons, who combined a love of the beautiful in language with a barbaric ignorance of it in conduct, were accustomed to slash out with their penknives favorite passages of poetry for preservation, treating in this matter newspapers and books alike. It was found difficult to keep whole the volumes of Tennyson and Longfellow. But a more frequent and injurious practice was the cutting out of plates from illustrated books. This ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... star. But the more he felt this glittering desolation in the moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like a great fire. Even the common things he carried with him—the food and the brandy and the loaded pistol—took on exactly that concrete and material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey or a bun with him to bed. The sword-stick and the brandy-flask, though in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the expressions of his own more healthy ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... haravecs, or poets, who selected the most brilliant incidents for their songs or ballads, which were chanted at the royal festivals and at the table of the Inca. *8 In this manner, a body of traditional minstrelsy grew up, like the British and Spanish ballad poetry, by means of which the name of many a rude chieftain, that might have perished for want of a chronicler, has been borne down the tide of rustic melody to ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... tenderness, and the purity of their domestic relations. The whole story of the Odyssey is founded on the faithful wedded love of Odysseus and Penelope, and the contrasted example of Agamemnon and his demon wife is repeatedly held up to scorn and abhorrence. The world's poetry affords no nobler scene than the parting of Hector and Andromache in the Iliad, nor has the ideal of perfect marriage ever found grander expression than in the words addressed by Odysseus to Nausicaae: "There is nothing mightier and nobler than when ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... these deceptive chimeras after which she had run, love, passion, poetry, were already hers; she had held them in her hands and she had not been able to perceive it. But what ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... assigned to the latter, the true Beethovenian Allegro, whereas the older Mozartian Allegro was distinguished as showing a naive character. I have adopted the expressions "sentimental" and "naive" from Schiller's well-known essay upon "sentimental and naive poetry." ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... and for the rest of the time there was no hope of getting a sensible answer from her or Wali Dad. When the one stopped, the other began to quote Persian poetry with a triple pun in every other line. Some of it was not strictly proper, but it was all very funny, and it only came to an end when a fat person in black, with gold pince-nez, sent up his name to Lalun, and Wali Dad dragged me into the twinkling night to walk in a big rose-garden and ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... mine, and she understood him infinitely better than I. "Suppose, now," I said "that Snarley had been able to express himself after the manner of superlative people like you and me, what would have come of it?" "Art," said Mrs. Abel, "and most probably poetry. He's just a mass of intuitions!" "What a pity they are inarticulate!" I answered, repeating the appropriate commonplace. "But they are not inarticulate," said Mrs. Abel. "Snarley has found a medium of expression which gives him perfect satisfaction." "Then the poems ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... dinna ken whether it was the poetry of the day or the great biscuit he had just spread wi' jam that moved him! At any rate there was no doot at a' as to what moved a great wasp that flew in through the window just then. It wanted that jam biscuit, and ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... that mutual admiration - or rather mutual hero-worship - which is so strong among the members of secluded families who have much ability and little culture. Even the extremes admired each other. Hob, who had as much poetry as the tongs, professed to find pleasure in Dand's verses; Clem, who had no more religion than Claverhouse, nourished a heartfelt, at least an open-mouthed, admiration of Gib's prayers; and Dandie followed with relish the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 1717) Thomas Purney rushed into critical discussions with the breathlessness of one impatient to reveal his opinions, and, after touching on a variety of significant topics, cut himself short with the promise of a future extensive treatise on pastoral poetry. In 1933 Mr. H.O. White, unable to discover the treatise, was forced to conclude that it probably had never appeared (The Works of Thomas Purney, ed. H.O. White, Oxford, 1933, p. 111), although it had been advertised at the conclusion of Purney's ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... woman in the world than Geraldine, nestled under her husband's plaid, in the big roomy porch, and looking out at the starlight? Even practical, prosaic people have their moments of poetry, when the inner meaning of things seems suddenly revealed to them, when their outer self drops off and their vision is purged and purified; and Geraldine, listening to the tinkling beck below, and inhaling the cool fragrance of the Scotch twilight, creeps nearer to her husband ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... angrily round at her beloved books and drawings; for they spoke a message to her which they had never spoken before, of self-centred ambition. 'Yes,' she said aloud to herself, 'I have been selfish, utterly! Art, poetry, science—I believe, after all, that I have only loved them for my own sake, not for theirs, because they would make me something, feed my conceit of my own talents. How infinitely more glorious to find my work-field and my prize, not in ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... work out the details of this extension of a political reaction into a universal reaction in philosophy and poetry. Any one may easily think out for himself what consequences in act and thought, as well as in government, would be likely to flow, for example, from one of the most permanently admirable sides of Burke's teaching—his respect for the collective ...
— Burke • John Morley
... are lyric. In the usual sense. They are not much different from poetry that praises gardens. The content is the distress of love, death, universal longing. The impulse to formulate them in the "cynical" vein (like cabaret songs) may, for example, might have arisen from the wish to feel superior. Most of the eighty poems are insignificant. They ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... go far from home. Canoeing thus became the great summer recreation and amusement. And for the upper part of the body there is no better exercise. The result was that Rachel and Winnie were both skillful and fearless canoeists, and very much enjoyed this, which has well been called "the poetry ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... scheming republics there.[K] In the first years of his literary career Schlegel devoted himself chiefly to classical literature; and between 1794 and 1797 published several works on Greek and Roman poetry and philosophy, the substance of which was afterwards concentrated into the four first lectures on the history of literature. About this time he appears to have lived chiefly by his literary exertions—a method ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... matter-of-fact in their motives; but they had both a sort of humorous fondness for sentimentality. They liked to play with the romantic, from the safe vantage-ground of their real practicality, and to divine the poetry of the commonplace. Their peculiar point of view separated them from most other people, with whom their means of self-comparison were not so good since their marriage as before. Then they had travelled and seen much of the world, and they had formed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... It is younger than many people who are now alive. Among the wise men of Greece and Rome, few knew its existence, and none put it to any practical use. The wisest knew that a piece of amber, when rubbed, will attract feathery substances. But they regarded this as poetry rather than science. There was a pretty legend among the Phoenicians that the pieces of amber were the petrified tears of maidens who had thrown themselves into the sea because of unrequited love, and each bead of amber was highly prized. It was worn as an amulet and a symbol of purity. Not for ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... folklore, represent the well-known tale in India—through the Persian—of Bahrâmgor and Dilârâm. Bahrâmgor was said to have been killed while hunting the wild ass (gor), by jumping into a pool after it, when both quarry and huntsman disappeared for ever. He is said to be the father of Persian poetry. ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... part," said young Rudolph, "I go for the theory of the beautiful. If ever I marry, it is to find an asylum for ideality. I don't want to make a culinary marriage or a business partnership. I want a being whom I can keep in a sphere of poetry and beauty, out of the dust ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... Harold; and when at last Maude returned, and wrote to Jerrie of failing health, and wakeful nights, and lonely days, and her longing for the time when Jerrie would be home, and be with her, and read to her, or recite bits of poetry, as she had been wont to do, Jerrie trampled every jealous, selfish thought under her feet, and in her letters to Harold urged him to see Maude as often as possible, and read to her whenever she wished him to ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... celebration of Venus's birthday," said Marjorie absently. It occurred to her Logan would have been worse shocked if he could have heard her offhand summing-up of his pet poem than he had been by her attitude about going back to New York with him. But she had more important things on her mind than Latin poetry. When Peggy met her she was on her way to go off and ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... is permissible to accept as "parable or poetry or legend" such stories as that of an ass speaking with a man's voice, of waters standing in a solid heap, of witches and a variety of apparitions, and to judge for ourselves of such questions as the personality ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... difference in temperaments. Most men, I fancy, would have enjoyed a talk with a civil engineer upon that ledge. I should have liked to have Shelley there, myself! It's the difference between poetry and horse-power, dithyrambics and dynamos, Keats and Kipling! What is the energy exerted by the Great Falls of the Missouri? How many horse-power did Shelley fling into the creation of his West Wind? How many foot-pounds did the boy heart of Chatterton beat before it broke? Something may ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... find yourself for the first time, upon some unshadowed day, in the delightful West Indian city of St. Pierre,—supposing that you own the sense of poetry, the recollections of a student,—there is apt to steal upon your fancy an impression of having seen it all before, ever so long ago,—you cannot tell where. The sensation of some happy dream you ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... happened to die in the midst of their transports, occasioned by the final conquest of Canada, their good humour garnished his character with a prodigality of encomiums. A thousand pens were drawn to paint the beauties and sublimity of his character, in poetry as well as prose. They extolled him above Alexander in courage and heroism, above Augustus in liberality, Titus in clemency, Antoninus in piety and benevolence, Solomon in wisdom, and Saint Edward in devotion. Such ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... weakness and his strength were in it. She saw his vanity, his exaggeration; but also his sincerity, his manliness, his simple delight in simple things. Scenery on a large scale stirred a strain of rude poetry in him this was akin to the first rhythmic utterances of man. To be sure, the thing had its faults; for poor Vincent had been anxious that his book should be recognised as the work of a scholar and a gentleman. At times a spirit of unbridled ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... reporter had come to him and said: "Mr. Choate, I have Depew's speech carefully prepared, with the applause and laughter already in. I want yours." Of course, no reporter had been to either of us. Mr. Choate had in his speech an unusual thing for him, a long piece of poetry. When my turn came to reply I said: "The reporter came to me, as Mr. Choate has said, and made the remark: 'I already have Choate's speech. It has in it a good deal of poetry.' I asked the reporter: ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... cared little for scholastic puzzles and they gave themselves to the study of the beauties of Latin poetry and to the newly opened mine of the literature of Greece. They delighted in Virgil and Lucian, and still more in Homer ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... up all the fingers of one hand, and the thumb of the other, "besides this." The last number denoted his betrothed, whom, with the poetry and truth of nature, he described by laying his hand on his ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... of Louis XIV. to be surprised. His majesty was astonished in his turn. D'Artagnan, with his quick glance, appreciated what was passing in the heart of his master. He did not allow him time to put any questions. He related, with that poetry, that picturesqueness, which perhaps he alone possessed at that period, the evasion of Fouquet, the pursuit, the furious race, and, lastly, the inimitable generosity of the surintendant, who might have fled ten times over, who might have killed the adversary ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... bargain, I suppose," said he, "even if it happens to be rather an iniquitous one," and having enunciated this principle, on which he had often insisted in public, he took up a volume of poetry. ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... is the Commedia. Any attempt to explain it, by narrowing that interest to politics, philosophy, the moral life, or theology itself, must prove inadequate. Theology strikes the keynote; but history, natural and metaphysical science, poetry, and art, each in their turn join in the harmony, independent, yet ministering to the whole. If from the poem itself we could be for a single moment in doubt of the reality and dominant place of religion in it, the plain-spoken prose of the Convito ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Poetry is the natural language of cosmic consciousness. "The music of the spheres" is a literal expression, as all who have ever glimpsed the beauties of ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... by the imagination, thought and will were superadded to the occult quality, and every form of nature had its appropriate Spirit, to be controlled or conciliated by an appropriate ceremonial. This was entitled its SUBSTANTIAL FORM. Thus, physic became a sort of dull poetry, and the art of medicine (for physiology could scarcely be said to exist) was a system of magic, blended with traditional empiricism. Thus the forms of thought proceeded to act in their own emptiness, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... descended to breakfast without any further adventure, except that another pupil, Mademoiselle Rosalie, a frolicsome blonde, handed Ethel on the sly a piece of poetry in English, which she pretended she could not read herself but which might perhaps interest ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... her in broader interests than family life. She felt she had duties in the Church and the State as well as the home. The time most wives and mothers spend in gaiety and embroidery, she spent in reading and committing to memory choice thoughts in poetry and prose. The money others spent in filling their homes with bric-a-brac she spent in books, and the result proves the superior ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... selection of my last Shakespearean revival at the Princess's Theatre, I have been actuated by a desire to present some of the finest poetry of our great dramatic master, interwoven with a subject illustrating a most memorable era in English history. No play appears to be better adapted for this two-fold purpose than that which treats of Shakespeare's favorite hero, and England's favorite king—Henry ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... the machinery of this present age, is not to see poetry in the life of the age. It is not to believe ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... one-half cents a copy. They satirize politicians with good humor, and their cartoons are based upon current events. There are several literary weeklies, monthlies, and other periodicals, for Swedes are great readers and, unlike the Americans, have not lost their taste for poetry. A poet enjoys a much higher position and larger income from his writings in Sweden ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... a number of poets and, regarding poets, I agree with a very clever woman I know who declares that poetry is the most personal of the arts and who further says that it is manifestly inadequate to talk about a poet's work without giving a sample of his poetry. So, generally, I shall quote one of the shorter poems or a passage from a ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... wrote a history of the events. In the reign of Akbar, Bayazid Ansari, called Pir-i-Roshan, "the Saint of Light,'' the founder of an heretical sect, wrote in Pushtu; as did his chief antagonist, a famous Afghan saint called Akhund Darweza. The literature is richest in poetry. Abdur Rahman (17th century) is the best known poet. Another very popular poet is Khushal Khan, the warlike chief of the Khattaks in the time of Aurangzeb. Many other members of his family were poets also. Ahmad ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... country, but I'm not sure whether I shouldn't have preferred to turn out more like my mamma. You're so complete, somehow—as Frenchwomen are, at their best. I often think of you as a kind of pocket combination of Somebody's Hundred Best Books: Romance, Practical Common Sense, Poetry, Wit, Wisdom, Fancy ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... and her smile was like a clear bright streak in the clouds, through which, after the tempest had passed away, one almost fancies Paradise is opening. "But," she added, "there are other passions stirring in a high-born heart. Love is poetry; but the life of the heart is pride. Comte, I was born upon a throne, I am proud and jealous of my rank. Why does the king gather such unworthy ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... France, on the contrary, was now reduced from its palmy state of almost European sovereignty to one of the deepest misery; and its monarch, in his old age, found little left of his former power but those records of poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture which tell posterity of his magnificence, and the splendor of which throw his faults and his ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... pretty genius to poetry, and great skill in music, both which talents she now exercised in such works as suited the place and company she was in.—The hymns and anthems she composed were not only the admiration of that convent, but also of several others to whom they were shown, and she ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... her daily life, pointed out to her the broad fields of literary enjoyment and excellence, and inevitably associated his own image with all the new and varied occupations with which her now busy days were filled. The poetry she read he brought to her; the songs she sang were of his selection. His mind and taste, his observations and reflections, were all written over every page she read, over every hour of her life. She had been on a desert ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... had lately become a very frequent treat, namely a pause before a certain tempting store of second-hand books. She had never had money enough to buy anything except the necessary school books, and, being a great lover of poetry, she always seized with avidity on anything that was to be found outside the book shop. Sometimes she would carry away a verse of Swinburne, which would ring in her ears for days and days; sometimes she would read ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... useful in cultivating the habit of profound thought, and yet, to his greater credit, it must be said that he not infrequently performed a deal of subtle cogitation. In this he pleased Mr. Cinch, who was by no means all a man of beef and brawn. Mr. Cinch had read a considerable quantity of poetry and was a subscriber to a scientific periodical. He had a decided tendency toward occult speculation, and had reached that point in his orthodoxy where he believed there were a good many more things that we don't know than ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... abstruse sense which the goddess Maya inspires. Plato, Epicharmos, and some other ancient philosophers refer it to the presence of divinity. "It is the divinity which stirs within us." In poetry it gives an inner sense to the outward word, and in common minds it degenerates into delusion or second sight. Maya is an Indian deity, and personates the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... numerous to frequently trouble the thinker with the problem of heredity. Whence came that irresistible impulse towards poetry in Ovid which showed itself from his earliest youth and in the end overcame the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Dials! the region of song and poetry—first effusions and last dying speeches: hallowed by the names of Catnac and of Pitts, names that will entwine themselves with costermongers and barrel-organs, when penny magazines shall have superseded penny yards of song, and capital ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... passions, Mr. Prescott, perhaps smiling is the word," he said. "Such a peace as that appeals to me. I am not fond of war and I know that you are not. I feel it particularly to-night. There is poetry in the heavens so calm ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... sentimental. For Walpole, with all his cleverness, is a man one cannot love; and as for the bibliographical Duke, he evidently thought more of a rare edition or a unique copy than of all the charms of wit, poetry, or eloquence. I suspect that a splendid binding would please him more than a splendid passage. Whereas Johnson (he was never without a book in his pocket to read at by-times when he had nothing else to do) had a scholar's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Old Roman Lusitania, but with a wider stretch on the North, and a narrower stretch on the East. So the Portuguese are "Lusians," "Lusitanians," etc., in poetry. Cf. Camoens, Lusiads.] ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... Paterson and Henry Lawson were writing for the Sydney 'Bulletin' in 1892 when Lawson suggested a 'duel' of poetry to increase the number of poems they could sell to the paper. It was apparently entered into in all fun, though there are reports that Lawson was bitter about it later. 'In Defence of the Bush', included in this selection, was one of Paterson's ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... he informed me, 'France would have been Provencal and not Provence French, and then things would have gone differently altogether.' But all Languedoc is as proud of its language as Wales. A youth who took me at Agen to see the shop and house of the 'barber-bard' was clearly of the opinion that the poetry of Lamartine and Victor Hugo would have been as fine as the poetry of Jasmin had they been so fortunate as to use his mother-tongue. 'The French language was a kind of Gallic patois mixed with German, while the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... a liberal pursuit of knowledge and a genuine freedom of thought was raised, encouraged, and pushed forward by example, by commendation, and by authority." These were the words of Bishop Lowth, whose great work on /The Poetry of the Hebrews/ was delivered as lectures for the Chair of ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... awaiting a capable writer there can be no question. There, ready to his hand, are the beauty of those islands of mid-ocean, the grandeur of their Alps and fiords, the strangeness of the volcanic districts, the lavishness, yet grace, of the forests; the mixture of quaintness, poetry, and ferocity in the Maori, and the gallant drama of their struggle against our overwhelming strength; the adventures of the gold-seekers and other pioneers; the high aims of the colony's founders, and the venturesome democratic experiments ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... translated, for when you have changed the succession and order of the sounds, the mantra ceases to be a mantra. If you translate the words, you may have a very beautiful prayer, but not a mantra. Your translation may be beautiful inspired poetry, but it is not a living mantra. It will no longer harmonise the vibrations of the surrounding sheaths, and thus enable the consciousness to become still. The poetry, the inspired prayer, these are ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... we can acquire more knowledge; that is, we can develop further any faculty which we loved and strove after during life, provided it is concerned with abstract and ideal things, such as music, painting, poetry, &c.[40] ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... of the country. The little deformed man, however, took it as a proof that he had failed to interest them; and this sorely taxed his sensitive nature. I ought also not to forget to mention that the speaker was twice interrupted by the major, who begged that he would state the exact quality of poetry written by his friend, the poet. The audience took this interruption very good naturedly, while the speaker gratified the major's curiosity by reciting a number of verses written by him. The major then said he was fully satisfied that this Mr. Crabbe must have been a great ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... logical mazes, was the introduction of logic into every subject whatever, so far, that is, as this was done. Before I was at Oriel, I recollect an acquaintance saying to me that "the Oriel Common Room stank of Logic." One is not at all pleased when poetry, or eloquence, or devotion, is considered as if chiefly intended to feed syllogisms. Now, in saying all this, I am saying nothing against the deep piety and earnestness which were characteristics of this second phase of ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Lemuel's house. She had there met one or two gentlemen who had written very fine things about her in the papers; and certain highly distinguished people had been good enough to send her cards of invitation; and she had once or twice been persuaded to read some piece of dramatic poetry at Mr. Lemuel's afternoon parties; and she even suggested that Mr. Lemuel had almost as much as said that he would like to paint her portrait. Mr. Lemuel had also offered her, but she had refused to accept, a small but ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... great satisfaction. Matters must be going on well, she thought, if Ronald had already begun to speak of sentiment. She never thought that his heart and mind were with Dora while he spoke—pretty Dora, who cried over his poetry, and devoutly believed in the ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... and felt the throbbing of their hearts, will always carry in their inmost souls a chord that has never been touched, and in their work an indefinable quality will be lacking, a something in the stroke of the brush, a mysterious element that we call poetry. The swaggerers, so puffed up by self-conceit that they are confident over-soon of their success, can never be taken for men of talent save by fools. From this point of view, if youthful modesty is the measure of youthful ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... agreed with her. He, as well as she, chose the books and his taste was admirable. Its inclusion of an unobtrusive care for girlhood did not preclude the exercise of the intellect. An early developed passion for reading led the child far and wide. Fiction, history, poetry, biography, opened up vistas to a naturally quick and eager mind. Mademoiselle found her a clever pupil and an affection-inspiring little being even ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... honour of their Gods, are found among all people who have either religion or verse. There is scarcely any pagan poetry, ancient or modern, in which allusions to the national mythology are not so frequent as to constitute the most copious materials, as well as the most brilliant embellishments. The poets of Persia and Arabia, in like manner, have adorned their gorgeous strains with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... nothing more sorrowful than the story of Chatterton's genius, misdirected, and, as it were, preparing its own doom. The lawyer's apprentice, who had this rare gift of poetry, was to know only broken hopes and unfulfilled desires, and soon to fall beyond the reach of help, of ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... home the audiences and spectators of these three great men's work abroad, there is nothing, or next to nothing, else at all. The spirit of the Epistle to the Pisos, which acted on the Tragedians in verse, which acted on Boileau in criticism and poetry, was heavier on the novelist than on any of them. Take sufficient generosity, magnanimity, adoration, bravery, courtesy, and so forth, associate the mixture with handsome flesh and royal blood, clothe the body thus formed with brilliant ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... educational value of the arts which were its manifestation through and to man, or how this was to be applied. The things were there, everywhere at hand; the temples and churches, the painting and the sculpture and the works of handicraft; the music and poetry and drama, the ceremonial and costume of daily life, both secular and religious, the very cities in which men congregated and the villages in which they were dispersed. Beauty, in all its concrete ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... France is unvirtuous enough, God knows, yet there is a sunshiny smile on her lips that cheers the heart. Italy is also unvirtuous, yet her voice is full of bird-like melody, and her face is a dream of perfect poetry! But England unvirtuous will be like a cautiously calculating, somewhat shrewish matron, possessed of unnatural and unbecoming friskiness, without either laugh, or song, or smile—her one god, Gold, and her one commandment, the ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... surprise to me that astronomy was an unknown science in Mizora, as neither sun, moon, nor stars were visible there. "The moon's pale beams" never afford material for a blank line in poetry; neither do scientific discussions rage on the formation of Saturn's rings, or the spots on the sun. They knew they occupied a hollow sphere, bounded North and South by impassible oceans. Light was a property of the atmosphere. A circle of burning mist shot forth long streamers of light from ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... had spent two hours of a precious Saturday afternoon learning poetry, for she had failed miserably in the last literature test; Josephine had been her companion in disgrace, and had even had to spend a precious Friday evening "in durance vile" ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... complete Milton he could not be content. He would like to have Masson's Life too in 6 vols. (with index), and he is apt to consider the great Puritan's prose still finer than his poetry, and will often take down the Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of high latitudes; but he has a corner in his heart for that evil living and mendacious bravo, but most perfect artist, Benvenuto ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren |
