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More "Homeric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... long kept away from the war," and, by implication, that I have now returned to it; even I, the great hero Achilles; for he is the taunting speaker. Had it not been for my absence, he intimates, the Trojans had not gained so many and great victories. We must leave our correspondent to apply this Homeric verse to the Protestant dark ages of the Georgian era, and to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... existence. I myself have known what it is to carry a brain that never rests in a body that is always tired. I have defied its infirmities, and forced it to do my bidding. You have no such hindrance, if we may judge by your aspect and habits. You deal with horses like a Homeric hero. No wild Indian could handle his bark canoe more dexterously or more vigorously than we have seen you handling yours. There must be some reason for your seclusion which curiosity has not reached, and into which it is not the province of curiosity to inquire. But in the irresistible ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... preceding poor Tom's doomed appearance before the magistrate, Dame Bakewell had an interview with Austin, who went to Raynham immediately, and sought Adrian's counsel upon what was to be done. Homeric laughter and nothing else could be got out of Adrian when he heard of the doings of these desperate boys: how they had entered Dame Bakewell's smallest of retail shops, and purchased tea, sugar, candles, and comfits of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... classes the school master does not work for the parent, but against the parent. Modern education means handing down the customs of the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority. Instead of their Christlike charity, their Shakespearean laughter and their high Homeric reverence for the dead, the poor have imposed on them mere pedantic copies of the prejudices of the remote rich. They must think a bathroom a necessity because to the lucky it is a luxury; they must swing Swedish clubs ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... classical Hercules born anew, accomplishing similar feats, and lured to a similar treacherous doom. Thus the cardinal virtue of the play is a Herculean energy of movement and of speech which borrows something of epic quality from the Homeric translations on which Chapman was simultaneously engaged, and thereby links Bussy D'Ambois to ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... From Homeric warfare to subterranean conflict of modern trenches is a far cry, and Ares, God of Battles, may well yawn at the entertainment with which the Demon of War is providing him. But the spectator of this grim "revue" lacks something of the patience of its creator, and our Mephistopheles, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... the king avoids taking the property of mortal sinners, men are born in due time and are long-lived. And the crops of the husbandmen spring up, each as it was sown, and the children die not, and no misshaped offspring is born." In Homeric Greece kings and chiefs were spoken of as sacred or divine; their houses, too, were divine and their chariots sacred; and it was thought that the reign of a good king caused the black earth to bring forth wheat and barley, the trees to be loaded with ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of such materials as pearl-shell and tortoiseshell may throw light upon the Homeric quotation "caught fish with the horn of the ox." In those far-off days, bronze wire rope, similar in design to the steel rope which is of common use in the present time, was employed. Ancient Greeks, though they anticipated one of the necessities of trade nowadays, depended upon fish-hooks resembling ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... attack on Adarama was received on this same afternoon. It appeared that the Arabs had been repulsed by the Abyssinian irregulars raised by Colonel Parsons. Glowing details were forthcoming, but I do not propose to recount the Homeric struggles of the 'friendlies.' Little in them is worthy of ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... never lived even imaginatively in the world he depicts. His belief is an artifice and a sham, and he cannot impose upon us with his pretense. But once we have accepted the artist's postulates, then we are prepared to follow him in his conclusions. In the Homeric world, we shall not balk at the intercourse between gods and men; in mediaeval painting and drama, we shall accept miracle; in Alice in Wonderland, we shall accept any dream-like enchantment. But we demand that the conclusions shall follow from the premises, that the whole be consistent. We ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... praise, and mostly without even that reward of a "tot" of grog so sweet to the simple-minded sailorman. Ah, yes, to be sure we were heroes, and I too (though now soft and self-conscious) played an Homeric part upon the yard, was bold, and afraid, and "funked" it with any god-smitten, panic-driven half-god by Scamander's banks, or the windy walls of Troy. Now I know what it was, and can see the grey wash of ocean, and the grey wash of white-faced ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... are about to commence their Homeric repast, Borlasse and the others ride up. Dismounting and striding in among the tents, the chief glances inquiringly around, his glance soon changing to disappointment. What he looks for is not there! "Quantrell and Bosley," he asks, "ain't they ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... wasn't the book. It was the Galactic reaction to the book. Already feeling inferior because of the stand-offish attitude of the beings from the stars, the Homeric laughter of those same beings had been too much. It would have been bad enough if that laughter had been generated by one of the Galactics. To have had it generated by an Earthman made it that much worse. Against an Earthman, their rage ...
— A World by the Tale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to fight with unflinching courage. When their rifles were emptied they used them as clubs and struggled on till overwhelmed by numbers. Near the western wall of the fort stood Travis, in the corner near the church stood Crockett, both fighting like Homeric heroes. Old Betsy had done an ample share of work that fatal night. Now, used as a club, it added nobly to its record. The two heroes at length fell, but around each was a ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of phonetic laws as they worked in pre- Homeric Greece. But these laws, as they apply to common ordinary words, need not, we are told, be applied so strictly to proper names, as of gods and heroes. These are a kind of comets, and their changes cannot be calculated ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... folklorist that, in a certain country, when anyone sneezes, people say 'Good luck to you,' the student cannot say a priori what country you refer to, what race you have in your thoughts. It may be Florida, as Florida was when first discovered; it may be Zululand, or West Africa, or ancient Rome, or Homeric Greece, or Palestine. In all these, and many other regions, the sneeze was welcomed as an auspicious omen. The little superstition is as widely distributed as the flint arrow-heads. Just as the object and use of the arrow-heads ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... parts of the Iliad in admirable style. No one, however, has yet equalled old Chapman—certainly not Pope nor Cowper. The most successful translation into a modern language is unquestionably the German one by Voss. Mure and Grote have written the ablest dissertations in English upon the Homeric controversy, but they are not poets, and could not if they would translate ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... words, and the social ideas and conditions, of the age of chivalry. He looked back to the fashions and ideas of the Middle Ages, as Pindar sought his materials in the legends and customs of the Homeric times, and created a revival of the spirit of the age of the Heroes in an age of tyrants and incipient democracies.[132:3] The age of chivalry, in Spenser's day far distant, had yet left two survivals, one real, the other formal. The real survival was the spirit of armed adventure, which was ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... strike out a new path. The story of his intimacy with Herodotus is probably due to the fact that he imitated him and had recourse to his history for the incidents of his poem. The Perseis was at first highly successful and was said to have been read, together with the Homeric poems, at the Panathenaea, but later critics reversed this favourable judgment. Aristotle (Topica, viii. 1) calls Choerilus's comparisons far-fetched and obscure, and the Alexandrians displaced him by Antimachus in the canon of epic poets. The ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... road, with graphic and untiring forefinger, he undertook to describe his travels in Greece, whither he had been sent on some learned enterprise by the Minister of Education, and had carried an imagination already prepossessed and dazzled with Homeric visions. He told his story well and with detail, combining the recollections of the scholar with the impressions of an artist. The pediment of the Parthenon, the oleanders of the Ilissus, the stream "that runs in rain-time," the naked peak of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... plaid. One was his, the other mine, which he had seen lying round, and naturally took for his own, thrusting it into his pocket, where it found its twin-brother from the same workshop. In memory of which event we exchanged boxes, like two Homeric heroes. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... thread with their fine beards—and, judging from mural sculptures, curling tongs must have been in considerable demand with them. In ancient Greece the beard was universally worn, and it is related of Zoilus, the founder of the anti-Homeric school, that he shaved the crown of his head, in order that all the virtue should go to the nourishment of his beard. Persius could not think of a more complimentary epithet to apply to Socrates than that of "Magistrum Barbatum," or Bearded Master—the notion being that the beard was the symbol ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... of these famous pictures, all admirably drawn, and excellent likenesses. Mr. Muntz is depicted in No. 643, under the title of "A Brummagem M.P." The historical stick, the baggy trousers, and the flowing and Homeric beard, are graphically represented. The reason given for his carrying the stick was quite amusing. It was stated that the then Marquis of Waterford had made a wager that he would shave Muntz, and that Muntz carried the stick to prevent that larkish young nobleman ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... like now?" inquired the colonel, after listening to the sergeant major's report of the Homeric combat. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... in a foreign land: of the daisies in the yard at home, of the dandelions on the lawn, of his pet pig: things too sacred to repeat here. And he told me that the great event on the Front now is the Autumn glory of the trees. Then he departed, and as he went he broke into deep-throated, Homeric laughter, and I—I understood: he was mocking Death. Even thus does laughter yap at the heels of that dishonoured king ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... to some of the meanest and unworthiest qualities that can infest a woman's soul, one is exasperated almost beyond endurance. At least I am, for I am offended in my strongest instincts. Think of employing stately Homeric words and measure in describing a belle's toilet table with its rouge-pots, false hair, and other abominations! Much worse is it, in my estimation, that the features of a goddess should tell us only of such moral vermin as vanity, ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... bit of it; they are capital, and you are a regular genius, as we all agree," cut in the Homeric Miss Cutter. ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... did over and over again, with unflagging vehemence, with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers and thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; she calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in this tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is tortured to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. La recherche du terme vivant, sa mise ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... war are next considered—that of sacking a town taken by assault, and of blockading a town defended, not by the inhabitants, but by a military garrison—are next examined;—in both these cases the penalty falls upon the innocent. The Homeric description of a town taken by assault, is still applicable to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... and a long nose, the tip of which moved when she spoke. You would never have given her credit for such influence as she claimed in the world's affairs. Only her Homeric laughter, and a pair of lorgnettes, reminded you ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... literary men up there, and began to hope there might be some corner for his own historical works. So he caps him with another Homeric verse, explaining that he ...
— Apocolocyntosis • Lucius Seneca
... there was something saltatorial and jerky about all the dancing I saw both among the men and women. It is the custom at some of their gatherings, after the hunting season is over, for the men to indulge in a kind of terpsichorean performance, at the same time relating in Homeric style the heroic deeds they have done. At other times the women do all the dancing. Being stripped to the waist they are more decollete than our beauties at the German, and the men take the part of spectators only in this ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... some such historical Trojan war as this, our answer must be, that as the possibility of it cannot be denied, so neither can the reality of it be affirmed. We possess nothing but the ancient epic itself, without any independent evidence: had it been an age of records, indeed, the Homeric epic, in its exquisite and unsuspecting simplicity, would probably never have come into existence. Whoever, therefore, ventures to dissect Homer, Arctinus, and Lesches, and to pick out certain portions as matters of fact, while he sets aside the rest as fiction, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... the driver. And as he whipped up the horses again, his Homeric laughter mingling with the curses of the man in the ditch, she sank back trembling and gasping. It was her first experience of the vileness of man, for the men of her day respected the women of their own class unless met half ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... paper, "Phoenician Elements in the Homeric Poems." Most seductive title! Such a popular touch about it! Think I shall have it printed as a "leaflet" for distribution among Workmen's Clubs and Radical Associations. Might conciliate those ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... of religious ceremonial, and the Sibylline books, which had hitherto been, in theory at least, merely an alternative method of religious procedure permitted to exist alongside of the older and more conservative forms, became now the order of the day. Like a Homeric picture in which the quarrels of the gods in Olympus run parallel to the battles of Greeks and Trojans on the plains of Troy, so every victory which Rome won over Hannibal on the field of battle was bought at the price of a victory of Greek gods over Roman gods in the field of religion; ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... Reality? This is not a question of literary excellence; it is a question of the sense of life. And—oddly enough—it is a question to which the intellect has no answer. The life in each of us takes hold of it and answers it empirically. The normal man is Homeric, though he is not aware of the fact. Especially is the American Homeric; naif, spontaneous, at home with fact, implicitly denying the Beyond. Is he right? This whole continent, the prairies, the mountains and the coast, the trams and trolleys, the sky-scrapers, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... handled with gravity and freedom: if we sometimes encounter episodes which provoke a smile or excite our repugnance, we must take into account the rudeness of the age with which they deal, and remember that the men and gods of the later Homeric epic are not a whit behind the heroes of Babylonian story in coarseness. The recognition of divine omnipotence, and the keenly felt afflictions of the soul, awakened in the Chaldaean psalmist feelings of adoration and penitence which still find, in spite of the differences ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the people are loyal to their country and lovingly call it "The Maid of the North." They lead pastoral lives and their customs are much like those of the Homeric age. Story-telling is much appreciated by all classes. There are wandering minstrels who gain their livelihood by going from house to house to recite the stories in prose and poetry which they have learned by heart. Spindle and distaff are used in spinning the wool ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... who had not laughed much for some time, felt that his mouth was twitching raider his yellow beard, and presently his great shoulders began to move, and his chest heaved, and his handsome head went back, and at last it came out, a mighty peal of Homeric laughter that echoed and rolled down the pier and rang clear and full, up to the Marchesa's terrace. And it chanced that Beatrice was there, and she looked down and saw that it was Ruggiero. Then she sighed ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... of jokes and puns upon hats and heads, and hair and hair-oil, etc. In the midst of Homeric laughter a knock resounded, and was heard, in spite of an uproar ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... when he found himself in the congenial company of Trelawny, Williams, Medwin, or the Gisbornes, he was simply happy; and nothing could be further from the truth than to paint him as habitually sunk in gloom. On the contrary, we hear quite as much about his high spirits, his "Homeric laughter," his playfulness with children, his readiness to join in the amusements of his chosen circle, and his incomparable conversation, as we do about his solitary broodings, and the seasons when pain or bitter memories over-cast ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... and each man presented a rounded development of muscular power, which would have done credit to any of the homeric heroes; but there was a look of grand intelligence and refinement in Petroff's countenance, which would probably have enlisted the sympathies of the villagers even if he ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... character and personality. Most of what they said makes dry reading to-day, but we shall occasionally find passages, like Patrick Henry's apotheosis of liberty, which speak to the ear of all time and which have in them something of a Homeric ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... had not the chance bullet of the duel killed the young wife when reconciliation with her husband appeared probable. But a book so vital in spirit, with such lyric interludes, lofty heights of wisdom, homeric humor, dramatic moments and profound emotions, can well afford lapses from perfect form, awkwardnesses of art. There are places where philosophy checks movement or manner obscures thought; but one overlooks all such, remembering Richard and Lucy meeting by the river; Richard's ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... into a knot in the center of the inclosure. Then the brazen sun looked down upon a Homeric struggle. Bulger, brawny warrior of the iron hook, swung his musket like a flail, every now and again shooting forth his more sinister weapon with terrible effect. Desmond, slim and athletic, dashed in upon the enemy with his half pike as they recoiled before Bulger's whirling musket. The rest, ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... contracted ominously; a lurid flash shot out from under his black, bent brows, and there came on his lip that peculiar smile that we fancy on the face of Homeric heroes—more fell, and cruel, and terrible than even their own frown—just before they leveled the spear. He laid his broad hand, corded across with a net-work of tangled sinews, on the table before him, and the stout oak creaked ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... voluminous. Homeric salvos shook the air. And never one of the fire-eaters upon the steps lived long enough to live down the hateful cry of that day, "HEAD HIM OFF!" which was to become a catch-word on the streets, a taunt more stinging than any ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... zealously, the visiting of the Pantheon, because he was eager to let this follow immediately after the impression of Saint Peter's church. They went thither. How simply and grandly the hall opens! Eight yellow columns sustain its brow, and majestically as the head of the Homeric Jupiter its temple arches itself. It is the Rotunda or Pantheon. "O the pigmies," cried Albano, "who would fain give us new temples! Raise the old ones higher out of the rubbish, and then you have built enough!" [7] They stepped in. There rose round about them a holy, simple, free world-structure, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... do not agree. How can they tell the same things in the same way, since the sources of each are so different? Nor, with only myths for warp and woof, is it at all surprising that we have nothing more than Homeric exaggerations when the fanciful ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... to older ages, known to us only by what lawyers call REAL evidence—the evidence of things. Before history began, there was at least as much progress in the military art as there has been since. The Roman legionaries or Homeric Greeks were about as superior to the men of the shell mounds and the flint implements as we are superior to them. There has been a constant acquisition of military strength by man since we know anything of him, either by the documents ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... when applied to a majesty so divine!—the skin rivaling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant, and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, "hyacinthine!" I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose—and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... boat and its burden were out of sight, and the water ran as smoothly as if it were troubled with no such secret, Lagardere turned, and, gathering up the garments of his antagonist as a Homeric hero would have collected his fallen enemy's armor, rolled them into as small a bundle as possible, and, putting them under his arm, made his way cautiously back ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... have discovered the indulgence of a native humour. Some of them were drinking deep, wrangling, jesting, laughing in loud discord over their cups. At another table rose the deep voice of a singer, chanting one of those antique airs known but to these degraded sons of the Homeric Achaean, and probably in its origin going beyond the date of the Tale of Troy; a song of gross and rustic buffoonery, but ever and anon charged with some image or thought worthy of that language of the universal Muses. ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... possesses a suspense that is unusual, and is a series of surprises with one grand surprise to the robbers at their feast as its climax. The Donkey is a noble hero who breathes a spirit of courage like that of the fine Homeric heroes. His achievement of a home is a mastery that pleases children. And the message of the tale, which after all, is its chief worth—that there ought to be room in the world for the aged and the ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... what he called "the inevitable reaction," unaware of the fact that certain people do not suffer from reactions and too engrossed in mineralogy to have learnt, from a study of other sciences, that Angelina was one of them. She had passed that stage, with Homeric laughter, long before his appearance on ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... original. To Fielding's robust and masculine genius, says Mr Austin Dobson, "the strange conjunction of purity and precaution in Richardson's heroine was a thing unnatural and a theme for inextinguishable Homeric laughter." To Thackeray's sympathetic imagination the feud was the inevitable outcome of the difference between the two men. Fielding, he says "couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... Elkins as the best practical joke he had ever heard of; and Cornish suggested that for a man to stop in Homeric laughter on Broadway might be pleasant for him, but was embarrassing to his companions. By this time Cornish himself was better-natured. Jim took charge of our movements, and commanded us to a dinner with him, in the nature of a celebration, with a ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... occupied himself principally with the site of Troy. Well versed in the Iliad, he sought for, and believed he identified, the various localities mentioned in the Homeric poem. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... moral offences capable of being rationally judged or even excused as unintentional, but as monstrous and inhuman pollutions, the last limit of imaginable horror: all these things take us back to dark regions of pre-classical and even pre-homeric belief. We have no right to suppose that Sophocles thought of the involuntary parricide and metrogamy as the people in his play do. Indeed, considering the general tone of his contemporaries and friends, we ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... but surely into the swifter waters. Still others, lining up on either side of one of the great brown tree trunks, carried it bodily to its appointed place. From one end of the rear to the other, shouts, calls, warnings, and jokes flew back and forth. Once or twice a vast roar of Homeric laughter went up as some unfortunate slipped and soused into the water. When the current slacked, and the logs hesitated in their run, the entire crew hastened, bobbing from log to log, down river to see about it. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... huddled together in the corners, others slipped out at the rear. The committee congratulated themselves on having had the self-denial to exclude ladies. Mr. Gladstone's satellites hurried the old man off and into his carriage, though the fight promised to become Homeric. Grodman stood at the side of the platform secretly more amused than ever, concerning himself no more with Denzil Cantercot, who was already strengthening his nerves at the bar upstairs. The police about the hall blew their whistles, and ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... lies beyond the bounds of actual experience, was extremely limited, but when life was singularly fresh, vivid, and expansive. The only poems of Homer we possess are the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," for the Homeric hymns and other productions lose all title to stand in line with these wonderful works, by reason of conflict in a multitude of particulars with the witness of the text, as well as of their poetical inferiority. They evidently belong to the period that follows the great migration into Asia Minor, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... significance by the perceiving, the imagining, and the sense of a flowing symbolism in Nature, which our own time brings to them. To make Homer alive to this age,—what an expenditure of imagination, of pure feeling and penetration does it demand! Let the Homeric heart or genius die out of mankind, and from that moment the "Iliad" is but dissonance, the long melodious roll of its echoes becomes a jarring chop of noises. What chiefly makes Homer great is the vast ideal breadth of relationship in which he establishes human beings. But he in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... tree. He remembered his mother's music, and hoped to be a musician: he recollected his father's drawings, and certain seductive landscapes and seascapes by painters whom he had heard called "the Norwich men," and he wished to be an artist: then reminiscences of the Homeric lines he loved, of haunting verse-melodies, moved him most ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... attack had not ceased, and some of the white men were still firing, most of them lay for a little while at rest to take fresh breath and strength for the landing. Henry looked back at them, and spontaneously some scene from the old Homeric battles that Paul told about came to his mind. He knew these men as they lay panting against the sides of the boats, the light from the bonfire tinting their faces to crimson hues. This gallant fellow ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Grecian civilization was that it sprung, like Minerva, full armed from the brow of Zeus. It seemed to have no tangible beginning. The fabled kings and heroes of the Homeric Age, with their palaces and strongholds, were said to have been humanized sun-myths; their deeds but songs woven by wandering minstrels to win their meed of bread. Yet there has always been a suspicion among scholars that this view was wrong. The more we study the moral aspects ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Homeric figure, of the remote countryside in which I was born, had the true Spirit of Democracy and shed its light abroad in the Senate of the United States and the Capitol at Albany. He carried the candle of the Lord. It led him to a height of self-forgetfulness ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... Italy and Turks in Turkey, consumes more malt liquor than they drink of all other liquors. The intellectual race that has produced Kant, Goethe and Helmholtz, Bismarck, Moltke, Mommsen, and Richard Wagner in a century, swallows Homeric draughts of beer at breakfast, dinner and supper. That other nations do not follow their example, and laugh at their potations is of little consequence. Even if the Germans do not to some extent owe their national characteristics ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... and freedom are essentials to human happiness; in the lands which Aphrodite rose from the waves to govern, as the Seasons, hand in hand, stood to welcome her on the shores, Nature is all sufficient. (Homeric Hymn.) ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... is a specimen of composition handed down by tradition, but not a tradition itself. It is an unwritten record—as much a record in form and nature as a written document, but differing from a written document in the manner of its transmission to posterity. Many a good judge believes that the Homeric poems are older than the art of writing, and, consequently, that they were handed down to posterity orally. Yet no one would say that the Iliad and ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... ancient order, though the shifting of the trade was a slow matter and the glory of the old did not pass over to the new at once, but lingered still in mighty fleets of rafts and keel-boats and in the Homeric carousals of some ten thousand of the half-horse, half-alligator breed that nightly gathered in New Orleans. Broad-horns and mud-sills they were called in derision. A strange race of aquatic pioneers, jeans and leather clad, the rifle and the setting-pole equally theirs, they ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... is startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day, or perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred and fifty years after the event. That the single authorship of the Homeric poems should be doubted is not so strange, for Homer is almost prehistoric. But Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the time of his death the first English colony in {109} America was already nine years old. The important known facts of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... infectious and reckless ardor, whose wisdom is no child of slow prudence. We love Achilles more than Diomedes, and Ulysses not at all. But these are standards left over from a ruder state of society: we should have passed by this time the Homeric stage of mind—should have heroes suited to our age. Nay, we have erected different standards, and do make a different choice, when we see in any man fulfillment of our real ideals. Let a modern instance serve as test. Could any man hesitate to say that Abraham Lincoln was more human than ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... only increased. He wished to make some remark, but he did not know himself what he wanted to say. Topandy, however, burst into a Homeric laugh, in which he quite ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... lives would moments so full of sweetness and splendor come to them. They were all the sweeter because blended with the homely duties that fell to Antonia's hands. As she went about ordering the breakfast, and giving to the table a festal air, Dare thought of the old Homeric heroes, and the daughters of the kings who ministered to their wants. The bravest of them had done no greater deeds of personal valor than had been done by the little band of American pioneers and hunters with whom he had fought the last four days. The princes among them ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... fight, and the miraculous intervention of the angel. He has, on the other hand, inserted the barbaric incident of the fight with trees. He has eliminated, that is to say, the tender and the religious elements from the story and made it simply the narrative of a Homeric combat, with more than a touch of the grotesque. Nevertheless, he has retained the characteristic incident of the chivalrous behaviour of Roland in sending for a new sword for his enemy and in giving him ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... lived in the time of Roman domination and partly because he was in far closer sympathy with the masters of practical affairs than with artists in stone like Phidias or artists in thought like Plato. The true explanation of Shakespeare's caricatures of Greek life, whether Homeric or Athenian, is to be found in the fact that he was not only entirely ignorant of it but prejudiced against it. And this prejudice in him had an obvious root. Chapman had just translated and published the first books of his Iliad, and Chapman was the poet whom ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... I have read of a man who, being by his ignorance of Greek compelled to gratify his curiosity with the Latin printed on the opposite page, declared that from the rude simplicity of the lines literally rendered he formed nobler ideas of the Homeric majesty than from the laboured elegance of polished versions. Those literal translations were always at hand, and from them he could easily obtain his author's sense with sufficient certainty and among the readers of Homer the number is very small of those ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... tragedy, as the product of a more cultivated age, these characteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. The Homeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narratives unconsciously transmuted by the highest art. Tragedy, on the contrary, has no extraneous elements. It implies a conscious effort of the spirit, made for its own sake, to re-create ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... of the habitual haunting of great battlefields is to be found in Philostratus's Heroica, which represents the spirits of the Homeric heroes as still closely connected with Troy and its neighbourhood. How far the stories are based on local tradition it is impossible to say; they are told by a vine-dresser, who declares that he lives under the ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... also who held the General Armstrong against a British squadron through that moonlit night in Fayal Roads, inflicting heavier losses than were suffered in any naval action of the war. It is a story Homeric, almost incredible in its details and so often repeated that it can be only touched upon in this brief chronicle. The leader was a kindly featured man who wore a tall hat, side-whiskers, and a tail coat. His portrait ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... spiritual as well as of its intellectual outlook. This is the case even where poetry is imitative, for imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence. Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even though it be shackled by rules of traditional prosody, and has adopted the system of rhyme devised by writers in another language, whose words seem naturally to bourgeon into assonant terminations. But Japanese poetry ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... long to tell how warrior rode against warrior with levelled lances, and how this one was struck through the breast and that one through the arm, and so on in true Homeric style. The battle was a series of duels, like those fought on the plain of Troy. But at length the Tarquin band, under the lead of Titus, charged so fiercely that the Romans began to give way, many of their bravest ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... art. Who does not recall the great part played in literary history by the criticism of the verisimilar? For example, the fault found with the Jerusalem Delivered, based upon the history of the Crusades, or of the Homeric poems, upon that of the verisimilitude of the costume ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... distinctly recognize the same free and powerful poetical spirit, to which we may safely apply the Homeric lines on Proteus: ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... terrible picture, certainly, but (unless perhaps it is to be taken allegorically) downright impious, and overstepping the bounds of decency. It seems to me that the strange medley of wounds, quarrels, revenges, tears, bonds, and other woes which makes up the Homeric tradition of the gods was designed by its author to degrade his deities, as far as possible, into men, and exalt his men into deities—or rather, his gods are worse off than his human characters, since we, when we are unhappy, have a haven from ills in death, while the gods, according to him, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... moment she had got her "second wind," and as he tried to get her up she gave such a yell that he dropped her again, and bolted, stopping his ears; bolted over a teakettle which had been thrown down, and fell prostrate, resounding like an Homeric hero, on to a heap of kitchen utensils, at the feet of Alice, who had come in to come see what the noise ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... springing to his feet, after he had completed his Homeric repast, "this chile feels strong enuf to face the devil hisself, an' tharfor he needn't be backward 'bout the encounterin' o' a angel. So hyar goes to find out Frank Hamersley, an' how he's farin'. Anyhow, I'll take the deer along in case thar mout be a scarcity o' eetables, though I reck'n ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... his theory that all the accounts of pigmy tribes were based upon the mistakes of travellers who had taken apes for men. Nor was he without followers in his opinion; amongst whom here need only be mentioned Buffon, who in his Histoire des Oiseaux explains the Homeric tale much as Tyson had done. The discoveries, however, of this century have, as all know, re-established in their essential details the accounts of the older writers, and in doing so have demolished the theories of Tyson and Buffon. We now know, not merely that there are pigmy races ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... has been said, the natural topographical advantages of Southern Chile made the wars here the grimmest and fiercest of all those waged throughout the Continent. The mere names of Caupolican and Lautaro suffice to recall a galaxy of Homeric feats. The deeds of the two deserve a ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... historical compiler. He describes the natives as hospitable and civilized. They mined tin, which was bought by traders and carried through Gaul to the south-east, and may, as suggested here, have been used in their armour by the warriors during the Homeric ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... the works of Homer. He ought not to have left in so many combats; they were as like one another and as tedious as those in the Iliad, besides being much noisier, at least we are not told that the Homeric heroes were accompanied by a muscular pianist, fully armed, and by the incessant stamping of clogged boots. Nevertheless the majority of the audience enjoyed the fights, for no ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... if there is any sadder image of human fate than the great Homeric story. The main features in the character of Achilles are its intense desire of justice, and its tenderness of affection. And in that bitter song of the Iliad, this man, though aided continually by the wisest of the gods, and burning with the desire of justice in his heart, ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... give their number sepulcher; But from that hill-crest waved the glorious locks Of Victory. And round its bloody spurs, Taken and lost with fierce vicissitude, Serried and splendid, swept and tempested Long-haired dragoons, together with the might Of the Homeric foot, delirious With fury; and the horses with their teeth Tore one another, or, tossing wild their manes, Fled with their helpless riders up the crags, By strait and imminent paths of rock, till down, Like angels thunder-smitten, to the depths ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... supreme have been turned into farms by the irrigator's ditch or by the dry-farmer's plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada we may find the cowboy, it is true, even today: but he is no longer the Homeric figure that once dominated the plains. In what we say as to his trade, therefore, or his fashion in the practice of it, we speak in terms of thirty or forty years ago, when wire was unknown, when the round-up still ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... shall secure recreation and in what form he shall take it depends largely upon individual conditions. Mr. Gladstone found recreation not only in tree-cutting but in Homeric studies; Lord Salisbury finds it in chemistry; Washington found it in hunting; Wordsworth in walking; Carlyle in talking and smoking; Mr. Balfour finds it in golf, and Mr. Cleveland in fishing. Any pursuit ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... for play places and play leaders. But all this was written in 1826, when for ten years Froebel had been experimenting with boys of all ages. At Keilhau play of all kinds had an honoured place. We read of excursions for all kinds of purposes, of Indian games out of Fenimore Cooper, and of "Homeric battles." It was "part of Froebel's plan to have us work with spade and pick-axe," and every boy had his own piece of ground where he might do what he pleased. Ebers, being literary, constructed in his plot a bed of heather on which he lay and read or made verses. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... alive!" cried the old Homeric hero of Janina, leaping with joy; and his words, passing from mouth to mouth, spread yet more terror amid Kursheed's soldiers, already overwhelmed by the horrible spectacle passing ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... an invitation to work, shovels were made fast along the coamings of the hatch. The six men took these, and with shouts dropped down upon the grain. And then began a period of Homeric toil. The fireman and the coal-trimmer set the pace, and with a fine contempt for the unhandiness of amateurs did not fail to give a display of their utmost. Kettle and Dayton-Philipps gamely kept level with ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... Chaucer's poem), may be said to belong to the second cycle of modern versions of the tale of Troy divine. Already their earlier predecessors had gone far astray from Homer, of whom they only know by hearsay, relying for their facts on late Latin epitomes, which freely mutilated and perverted the Homeric narrative in favour of the Trojans—the supposed ancestors of half the nations of Europe. Accordingly, Chaucer, in a well-known passage in his "House of Fame," regrets, with sublime coolness, how "one said that Homer" ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... he a distinctive literature, a distinctive art? Nature never was more lavish to any people in beautiful landscape from the quiet rural scenery of the maritime provinces, Quebec and Ontario, to the far-flung epic of the fenceless prairies and the Homeric grandeur of the mountains. Why are quiet rural beauty and illimitable freedom and lofty splendor not reflected in poem and novel and ballad and picture? The Canadian may answer—We go in more for athletics than aesthetics: we are living literature, not writing it. In our snow-covered prairies ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... a Homeric narration of his hog-raising experience. In spite of herself the content of his talk interested her. And as for the effect upon her of his singular enthusiasm, it was deep and compelling. The little-boned Berkshire razorback hogs grew so large and fat and heavy that their bones broke ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... of the Autolycus sort. It is a weakness which she seems to share with party scribes and Colonial politicians. If she had any classic leanings, which she has not, her favourite deity would be Mercury, the "winking Cyllenian Argophont" of the Homeric Hymn, the "little cradled rogue," the Apollo-cheating babe, "the lord of those who swindle, house-break, sheep-steal and shop-lift," under whom Autolycus prided himself upon having been "littered." Autolycus's complacent self-gratulation, "How bless'd ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... scholastic. He approves the plot of Clarissa in terms of the Iliad, but judges subtle and complex characters by an over-simplified standard of decorum and censures Lovelace as an intricate combination of Achilles and Ulysses! His unnecessary labors to show that Richardson is not really Homeric illustrate the sterile application of epic canons to the novel that vitiates much ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... the Greeks of the Homeric age: something better than the Sandwich or Tonga islanders when they were visited by Captain Cook. Inferior to the former in arts, in polity, and, above all, in their domestic institutions; superior to the latter ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... steps again. When he got out into the road, his small cycling friend had vanished. Charteris was conscious of a feeling of envy towards her. She was doing the journey comfortably on a bicycle. He would have to walk it. Walk it! He didn't believe he could. The strangers' mile, followed by the Homeric combat with the two Hooligans and that ghastly sprint to wind up with, had left him decidedly unfit for further feats of pedestrianism. And it was eight miles to Stapleton, if it was a yard, and another mile from Stapleton to St Austin's. ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... leukolene parthene Mousa]) of Empedocles; the "long countless Time" ([Greek: makros kanarithmetos Chronos]), or "babbling Echo" ([Greek: athyrostomos Acho]) of Sophocles; the "son, the subject of many prayers" ([Greek: polyeuchetos uios]) and countless other expressions of the Homeric Hymns; the "blooming Love with his pinions of gold" ([Greek: ho d' amphithales Eros chrysopteros henias]) of Aristophanes; "the eagle, messenger of wide-ruling Zeus, the lord of Thunder" ([Greek: aietos, euryanaktos angelos Zenos ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... great lumbering wheels were covered by matting arched upon bent saplings, and had within a depth of clean rice-straw on which at night mattresses were spread. Beneath each yoke went a pair of milk-white oxen with large mild eyes and pendulous dewlaps, great beasts of a fine Homeric dignity and worthy of Nausicaa's wain. They swung along with a leisurely rolling gait; and if their silent feet moved too slowly, the sleepy brown-skinned driver, crouching on the pole between them, would shame them into speed by scornful words about their ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... would seem to have been in prehistoric Greece a period of fully established mother-right. Ancient Attic traditions are filled with recollections of female supremacy. Women in the Homeric legends hold a position and enjoy a freedom wholly at variance with a patriarchal subjection. Not infrequently the husband owes to his wife his rank and his wealth; always the wife possesses a dignified place and much influence. ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... permission to retire. He galloped off in the direction of the column, and I slowly pursued my way to my quarters. Yet I could not resist many a halt, to gaze on the singular beauty of the bursts of flame which lighted the landscape. More than once, it reminded me of the famous Homeric description of the Trojan bivouac by the ships. All the images were the same, except that, for the sea, we had the endless meadows of Champagne, and, for the ships, the remote tents of the enemy. We had the fire, the exulting troops, the carouse, the picketed horses, the shouts and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... to his friendly nature, and to the kindness afterwards to pass between us for many years, the whole aspect of the publisher when I first saw him. His abundant hair, and his full "beard as broad as ony spade," that flowed from his throat in Homeric curls, were touched with the first frost. He had a fine color, and his eyes, as keen as they were kind, twinkled restlessly above the wholesome russet-red of his cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotch ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and in religious service, of this faith, are so many and so beautiful, that I hope some day to gather at least a few of them into a separate body of evidence respecting the power of Athena, and of its relations to the ethical conception of the Homeric poems, or, rather, to their ethical nature; for they are not conceived didactically, but are didactic in their essence, as all good art is. There is an increasing insensibility to this character, and even an open denial of it, among us now which ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... argument ready, and etiquette was waived. "Time!" she repeated, and then the two battering-rams, revolving their fists country-fashion, engaged. Half-forgotten Homeric phrases began to flit from a faraway schoolroom back into the little teacher's mind and she began to be consoled for the absence of gloves—those tough old ancients had used gauges of iron and steel. The two boys were evenly matched. After a few thundering ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... or the European Greeks were first to blame in the matter. Professor Murray prefers to believe in a myth growing out of the strife of light and darkness in the sky: but the rape of beautiful girls by seafaring rovers was evidently common enough in those times, so why should not the Homeric version be right? We can always be sure that the old poems represent accurately life, manners, and character; and from the analogy of those legends whose origin is known, we may fairly infer that the root of a famous ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... organic matter, was more like a draught of wonderfully pure air than water; and after tasting, Marius was told many mysterious circumstances concerning it, by one and another of the bystanders:—he who drank often thereof might well think he had tasted of the Homeric lotus, so great became his desire to remain always on that spot: carried to other places, it was almost indefinitely conservative of its fine qualities: nay! a few drops of it would amend other water; and it flowed not only with unvarying abundance but with a volume so oddly rhythmical that the ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... chain of days is one: The seas are still Homeric seas; Thy skies shall glow with Pindar's sun, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... this elder poetry were writers of verses,[4] yet there is no instance of any attempt to alter or supersede the originals. Nor could any attempt have succeeded. There are specimens which exist, independent of those collected by Macpherson, which present a peculiarity of form, and a Homeric consistency of imagery, distinct from every ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to a meal that was barbaric in its simplicity and abundance, for men live and eat in Homeric fashion in the Northwest, and when the green tea was finished and the officer pushed the whisky across, his guest laughed as he ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... me to confess that Fougas got drunk at dessert. He had drunk and eaten like a Homeric hero, and talked more fluently than Cicero in his best days. The fumes of wine, spices, and eloquence mounted into his brain. He became familiar, spoke affectionately to some and rudely to others, and poured ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... finished this Homeric narrative, Master Maloney fixed an expressionless eye on the ceiling, ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... younger she was able to rise on her own merits." Was ever so exquisitely funny and unexpected a turn given to the dull word "merits"? Another perfect thing from this diverting piece, followed also by Homeric cachinnations, was the mock-serious apophthegm: "If a cloud is going to support a lady of substantial proportions, you must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... 1839 and 1842, the "Homeric Ballads," from thirteen to sixteen, appeared in Fraser's Magazine. Will any correspondent favour me with specific references to the numbers or months in which they were published? I may add, that I shall esteem it as a very great favour to receive authentic reference to any articles contributed ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... spear. They were hard drinkers, no doubt, as they were hard toilers, and the "ale-feast" was the centre of their social life. But coarse as the revel might seem to modern eyes, the scene within the timbered hall which rose in the midst of their villages was often Homeric in its simplicity and dignity. Queen or Eorl's wife with a train of maidens bore ale-bowl or mead-bowl round the hall from the high settle of King or Ealdorman in the midst to the mead benches ranged around its walls, while the gleeman sang the hero-songs of his race. Dress and arms showed ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... learn to trust each other." Later on Odysseus has his adventure with the Sirens, who are always "casting a spell of penetrating song, sitting within a meadow," in order to decoy passing sailors. Charybdis is another divine Homeric female who lures men to ruin. The island nymph Calypso rescues Odysseus and keeps him a prisoner to her charms, until after seven years he begins to shed tears and long for home "because the nymph pleased him no more." Nor does the human Nausicaea manifest ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... bears us along in swelling and limitless billows. Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean. The Homeric Hexameter. SCHILLER. Trans. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... us with more awful lustre;—the view which he took was—that Achilles, and Achilles only, in the Grecian poetry, was a great idea—an idealised creation; and we remember that in this respect he compared the Homeric Achilles with the Angelica of Ariosto. Her only he regarded as an idealisation in the Orlando Furioso. And certainly in the luxury and excess of her all-conquering beauty, which drew after her from 'ultimate Cathay' ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... his ignorance of Greek, compelled to gratify his curiosity with the Latin printed on the opposite page, declared that from the rude simplicity of the lines literally rendered, he formed nobler ideas of the Homeric majesty, than from the laboured elegance ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... sea-slang is so poetical; there is a word for everything and every act, and a thing and an act for every word. Seamen must speak quick and bold, but also with utmost precision. They cannot reef and brace other than in a Homeric dialect—therefore,—(Steamboat bell rings.) But I must say ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... His brother-in-law broke into Homeric laughter. "Ho, ho," he cried. "Now I see. You are afraid that I'll come to Prague, that I'll visit you and cry out to your fashionable circle: 'I, Ferdinand Lassalle, the pernicious demagogue of all your journals, Governmental and Progressive ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... billbrokers, that are in excess now, then were scarce. Still the affair, though not mercenary, was illiberal in a higher sense of art; and no anecdote shows more pointedly Pope's sense of the mechanic fashion, in which his own previous share of the Homeric labor had been executed. It was disgraceful enough, and needs no exaggeration. Let it, therefore, be reported truly: Pope personally translated one-half of the 'Odyssey'—a dozen books he turned out of his own oven: and, if you add the Batrachomyomachia, his dozen was a baker's ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... take up an enfilading position as the Harrisons advanced to break in the door. A threatening shout from the ambuscaded partisans caused them to hurriedly fall back towards the rear of the barn. There was a pause, and then began the usual Homeric chaff,—with this Western difference that it was cunningly intended to draw ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... him; and that the watch would be all the closer in the absence of his betrothed No, he did not want to dawdle away a week (off duty) at Hale Castle. Never before had he so yearned for the rough freedom of Major Seaman's shooting-quarters, the noisy mirth of those rude Homeric feasts, half dinner, half supper, so welcome after a long day's sport, with a quiet rubber, perhaps, to finish with, and a brew of punch after a recondite recipe of the Major's, which he was facetiously declared to bear tattooed above the region of his heart. Mr. Fairfax had been two months at Hale ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... there is no saying how the deadly combat might have ended, had not a lamp been broken overhead, the oil of which drenched both the warriors. This intervention of the superior gods was just as successful as a Homeric cloud; the fray ceased; Goldsmith and his friend withdrew; and ultimately an action for assault was compromised by Goldsmith's paying fifty pounds to a charity. Then the howl of the journals arose. Their prerogative had been assailed. ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... and allegory.... Hesiod's gods are thus not only the animated parts of the world, but also the other things of nature personified and deified, or abusively called gods and goddesses."[163] The same is true both of the Orphic and Homeric gods. "Their generation of the gods is the same with the generation or creation of the world, both of them having, in all probability, derived it from the Mosaic ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... The Homeric ghosts gibbered because they were ghosts; the Burgundian ghosts because they were confined to the Stygian coast, and could not cross the stream. For once the "classical allusions" are forced ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... his hopes they remembered him. In their memory he had grown into a Homeric man, a demi-god. He had only to declare himself. . ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Also Canada—Halifax, Quebec, Montreal. Over at the other end of the room are the Southern cities, Atlanta, New Orleans, St. Augustine—with some of the old Spanish houses still standing. Do you know it strikes me there is something Homeric, something epic, about a map desk. You can turn to any building in any city on the continent, at a moment's notice. I can show you the Old South Church, or Fraunce's Tavern in New York where Washington bade his generals good-by, or Montcalm's headquarters ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Chapman failed. It is simply, I believe, impossible to render Homer into English verse; because, for one reason among many, it is impossible to preserve the pomp of sound, which invests with grandeur his most common words. How can any skill represent the rhythm of Homeric Greek in a language which—to take the first verse which comes to hand—transforms 'boos megaloio boeien,' into 'great ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... Highways;" cried Tomlinson; and then helping himself to the wine, while he employed his legs in removing the supine forms of Scarlet Jem and Long Ned, he continued the Homeric quotation, with a pompous and ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... native drawl lent flavour to your wit; Your arrows lingered but they always hit; Homeric mirth around the circle ran, But left no wound upon the ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... Parliament, Homer has always been a great favourite with our statesmen and, indeed, may be said to be almost a factor in our political life. For as the cross-benches form a refuge for those who have no minds to make up, so those who cannot make up their minds always take to Homeric studies. Many of our leaders have sulked in their tents with Achilles after some violent political crisis and, enraged at the fickleness of fortune, more than one has given up to poetry what was obviously meant for party. It would ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... and referred his works, mischievous as they might prove incidentally, to divine inspiration. Poetic madness, like madness in prophecy or love, bursts the body of things to escape from it into some ideal; and even the Homeric world, though no model for a rational state, was a cheerful heroic vision, congenial to many early impulses and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... be as worn out in three months as a pair of old boots," said the poet, smiling. "But stay, you shall not come from Havre to Paris to see Canalis without carrying something back with you. Warrior!" (Canalis had the form and action of an Homeric hero) "learn this from the poet: Every noble sentiment in man is a poem so exclusively individual that his nearest friend, his other self, cares nothing for it. It is a treasure which is his alone, ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... pleasures in being there was the opportunity of buying sweets! "They can't have too much of them," said one of the officers, and the idea that those hard fellows, whose Homeric fighting qualities had been proved, should be enthusiastic for lollipops seemed to me an amusing touch of character. For tough as they were, and keen as they were, those Australian soldiers were but grown-up children with a wonderful ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... and tradition, the idea is originally, I believe, Platonic; certainly not Homeric. Egyptian possibly—but I have read nothing yet of the recent discoveries in Egypt. Not, however, quite liking to leave the matter in the complete emptiness of my own resources, I have appealed to my general investigator, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... at the behest of the Homeric Jove himself, half a dozen Irises started up to carry the ruler's message; but again Miss Pew's mighty tones resounded in the ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... their aprons are accurately adjusted. The mere presence or possession of the article gives the required sense of self-respect, of human dignity, of sexual desirability. Thus it is that to unclothe a person, is to humiliate him; this was so even in Homeric times, for we may recall the threat of Ulysses ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... from Dr. Schliemann (interesting but fishy) about his excavations there in the far-off Homeric area, I notice cities, ruins, &c., as he digs them out of their graves, are certain to be in layers—that is to say, upon the foundation of an old concern, very far down indeed, is always another city or set of ruins, and upon that another superadded—and sometimes upon that ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... bigamist and a wrecker, and had another son, whom, in honour of the Manxland Parliament, he christened MICHAEL MOONKEYS, and left him to be cared for by old ADAM, whose daughter's name was GREEBA. STIFFUN, as I have said, was a wrecker, a wrecker on strictly Homeric principles, but a wrecker, nevertheless. When storm-winds blew, he was a pitcher and tosser on the ocean, but, like other pitchers, he went to the bad once too often, and got broken on the rocks. Then came KANE WADE, and CHALSE, and MYLCHREEST, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... of youth to studious exertion, it is common to repeat the Homeric maxim, "to supplant every one else, and stand out first". The stimulating effect is undoubted; it is strong rhetorical brandy. Yet only one man can be first, and the exhortation is given ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... streets, of which there are forty, are all built in straight lines, and chiefly at right angles with each other. In them are several fountains, round which picturesque groups of women are continually collected, employed with Homeric industry in the task of washing linen. The churches are ugly, their style is a miserable caricature of Roman architecture, the interiors are incumbered by dirty and dark chapels, filled up with wood carvings. The principal church ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... promontory, at the northern end of the spacious bay of Navarino, lies the little town of Pylos, generally believed to have been the home of the Homeric Nestor. Since the conquest of Messenia by the Spartans, the town had remained in ruins, and the country for some distance round was a desert. The natural advantages of the adjacent coast had already caught the keen eye of Demosthenes, and he had formed the plan of raising a ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... Harsnett, Bishop, the exposer of Darrell. Hartley, exorcist, friend of Darrell. Haudicquer, genealogist. Hlot, poet. Hemmerlin, Felix, satirist. Heron, Robert, voluminous author. Histriomastix. Homeric victims. Huss, John, reformer and ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... expression only to some of the meanest and unworthiest qualities that can infest a woman's soul, one is exasperated almost beyond endurance. At least I am, for I am offended in my strongest instincts. Think of employing stately Homeric words and measure in describing a belle's toilet table with its rouge-pots, false hair, and other abominations! Much worse is it, in my estimation, that the features of a goddess should tell us only of such moral vermin as vanity, silliness, and the egotism of a poor little self that thinks of nothing, ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... his mother Aasta was of the kindest and proudest, and is lovingly described by Snorro. A pretty idyllic, or epic piece, of Norse Homeric type: How Aasta, hearing of her son's advent, set all her maids and menials to work at the top of their speed; despatched a runner to the harvest-field, where her husband Sigurd was, to warn him to come home and dress. How Sigurd ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... had he before so gazed upon a woman. Her countenance was extraordinarily fine, her nose and forehead nobly formed, the eyebrows dark, and in the dark-blue eyes lay something pensive, yet happy: one might employ the Homeric expression, "smiling through tears," to describe this look. She announced that the carriage ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... freethinker, who indulged in bold and independent speculations, and suffered much persecution for his ridicule of the Homeric deities. He flourished at the time of our history and lived to a great age, far on into the fifth century. We have quoted some fragments of his writings above. He committed his speculations also ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... which remains to us of Hellenic gastronomy is associated with cannibalism. It is the story of Pelops—an episode almost pre-Homeric, where a certain rudimentary knowledge of dressing flesh, and even of disguising its real nature, is implied in the tale, as it descends to us; and the next in order of times is perhaps the familiar passage in the Odyssey, recounting ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... flowers have scarcely a place in the Veda. Wreaths of flowers, of course, are used as decorations, but the separate flowers and their beauty are not yet appreciated. That lesson was first learned later by the Hindus when surrounded by another flora. Amongst the Homeric Greeks, too, in spite of their extensive gardening and different flowers, not a trace of horticulture is yet to be found." It seems probable that the first Malis were not included among the regular cultivators of the village but were a lower group permitted to take up the small ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... above; it was good to be within doors, and to dry one's coat by the peat embers. We insisted on our hostess partaking of supper, which we served up to her in bed; then Sandie and I, the girl and the man, set ourselves down by the table and stretched forth our hands, in the Homeric phrase, 'to the good ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... In the Homeric poems a somewhat vague tradition seems to come down of the achievements of one of the European peoples in that ancient cycle. Sometime then Greece had her last Pre-periclean age of greatness. What form it took, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... inquiry, the more brilliant is the light thrown upon that brief day of Athenian greatness, and the more wonderful and admirable does it all seem. To see this glorious community overthrown, shorn of half its virtue (to use the Homeric phrase), and thrust down into an inferior position in the world, is a mournful spectacle indeed. And the book which sets before us, so impartially yet so eloquently, the innumerable petty misunderstandings and contemptible jealousies which brought about this ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... boys and girls to read for themselves. So much of the Homeric spirit is retained and it is so well done that it will be very suggestive in organizing and preparing stories from ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... by side of Homeric and Vergilian study it is easy to see the reflection of two currents of contrasted sentiment which are telling on the world around us. A cry for simpler living and simpler thinking, a revolt against the social and intellectual perplexities in which modern life ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... Flore, the windows of which looked on the corner of the Pont Royal and on the gate into the Tuileries gardens. From these windows the quaintest sights were to be seen, not the least entertaining of which were the Homeric struggles of the sentries of the National Guard, absolute slaves to their orders, to prevent dogs which were not led by a string from following their owners into the Tuileries gardens, in which struggles the bold city guard, in spite of prodigies ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... tower-scene, where Helen comes into the presence of Priam and the old Trojans, displays one of the most beautiful pictures anywhere to be seen. Priam's speech[254] on that occasion is a striking proof of the courtesy and delicacy of the Homeric age, or, at ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... maintain an antithesis between the poetry of the people and the consciously artistic poetry of the schools. Wilhelm Grimm, the less didactic of the two famous brothers, said that the ballad says nothing unnecessary or unreal, and despises external adornment. Ferdinand Wolf, the great critic of the Homeric question, said the ballad must be naive, objective, not sentimental, lively and erratic in its narrative, without ornamentation, ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... the fall of the empire. With the rich accumulation of ages, the Romans were familiar. They knew nothing indeed of the solitary grandeur of the Jewish muse, or the mythological myths of the Ante-Homeric songsters; but they possessed the Iliad and the Odyssey, with their wonderful truthfulness, and clear portraiture of character, their absence of all affectation, their serenity and cheerfulness, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... "Written with Homeric vigor and heroic inspiration. It is graphic, picturesque, and dramatically effective ... shows us Mr. Henty at his best and brightest. The adventures will hold a boy enthralled as he rushes through them with breathless interest 'from ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... were supposed to be the words, and the social ideas and conditions, of the age of chivalry. He looked back to the fashions and ideas of the Middle Ages, as Pindar sought his materials in the legends and customs of the Homeric times, and created a revival of the spirit of the age of the Heroes in an age of tyrants and incipient democracies.[132:3] The age of chivalry, in Spenser's day far distant, had yet left two survivals, one real, the other formal. The real survival ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... who, being supplied with the Great Architect's plan, were permitted to settle the details among themselves. Accepting this doctrine, the conception of royal laws and plebeian laws, and of those more than Homeric contests in which the big laws "wreck" the little ones, becomes quite intelligible. And, in fact, the honour of the paternity of those remarkable ideas which come into full flower in the preacher's discourse must, so far as my imperfect knowledge goes, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Northern Mississippi Valley. Not merely their history and habits, but their legends, their folk lore, and the wonderful poetic glow so rich and fine that he threw over everything. There was something almost Homeric in his description of the great young Wyandot chieftain Timmendiquas or White Lightning, whom he acclaimed as the finest type of savage man ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with the poetry of Homer may be futile, but their contents may be compared without reference to their poetical qualities; and there is no question that the life depicted has many things in common with Homeric life, and agrees with Homer in ignorance of the peculiar ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... so full of sweetness and splendor come to them. They were all the sweeter because blended with the homely duties that fell to Antonia's hands. As she went about ordering the breakfast, and giving to the table a festal air, Dare thought of the old Homeric heroes, and the daughters of the kings who ministered to their wants. The bravest of them had done no greater deeds of personal valor than had been done by the little band of American pioneers and hunters with whom he had fought the last four days. The princes ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... more like a draught of wonderfully pure air than water; and after tasting, Marius was told many mysterious circumstances concerning it, by one and another of the bystanders:—he who drank often thereof might well think he had tasted of the Homeric lotus, so great became his desire to remain always on that spot: carried to other places, it was almost indefinitely conservative of its fine qualities: nay! a few drops of it would amend other water; and it flowed not only with unvarying abundance but with a volume ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... luxuries in his commissary, among them dried apples, with which he filled a camp-pail one day and put them on to boil. They subsequently got to be about a foot deep all over the camp, while Furguson stood around and regarded the black-magic of the thing with overpowering emotions and Homeric tongue. Furguson was a good genius, big and gentle, and a woodsman root and branch. The Abwees had intended their days in the wilderness to be happy singing flights of time, but with grease and paste in one's stomach what may not ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... occasionally; and perhaps by Cowper in his "Crazy Kate," and in parts of his translation, such as the speeches of Hecuba and Andromache. I long to know your opinion of that translation. The Odyssey especially is surely very Homeric. What nobler than the appearance of Phoebus at the beginning of the Iliad—the lines ending with "Dread sounding, bounding ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... the anchorite, "and there thou wilt find a weed. Pluck it, place it in a reed, and inhale the smoke, as you put fire to it. This will be to you wife, mother, father and brother," continued the holy man, in Homeric strain, "and above all, will be a wise counsellor, and teach thy soul wisdom ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... different mind. He dissents from M. Reville's views respecting the proper estimation of the pentateuchal traditions, no less than he does from his interpretation of those Homeric myths which have been the object of his own special study. In the latter case, Mr. Gladstone tells M. Reville that he is wrong on his own authority, to which, in such a matter, all will pay due respect: in the former, he affirms himself to be "wholly destitute of that kind of knowledge which ...
— The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature - Essay #4 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... without costume, and that one had to be carried away from the conventional dress of the Dublin streets, and had to be made to feel that the characters in "The Racing Lug" were primitive fishermen, and the people of "Connla" and "Deirdre" the people of Ireland's Homeric age. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... great favourite with our statesmen and, indeed, may be said to be almost a factor in our political life. For as the cross-benches form a refuge for those who have no minds to make up, so those who cannot make up their minds always take to Homeric studies. Many of our leaders have sulked in their tents with Achilles after some violent political crisis and, enraged at the fickleness of fortune, more than one has given up to poetry what was obviously meant for party. It would be unjust, however, to regard ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... so read them without the conviction that their author is a true poet. In the first place, the general conception of his chief operas, taken together, is in the largest sense poetic, and I might even say Homeric. This man has transmitted an entire religion to poetry, and then set it to music. And it is one of the greatest of religions,—what Nature engraved on the heart of our own Teutonic ancestors. It is all there,—its thousand phantasmal years, from the ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... of Trelawny, Williams, Medwin, or the Gisbornes, he was simply happy; and nothing could be further from the truth than to paint him as habitually sunk in gloom. On the contrary, we hear quite as much about his high spirits, his "Homeric laughter," his playfulness with children, his readiness to join in the amusements of his chosen circle, and his incomparable conversation, as we do about his solitary broodings, and the seasons when pain ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... the individual poets; for the graver among them would represent noble actions, and those of noble personages; and the meaner sort the actions of the ignoble. The latter class produced invectives at first, just as others did hymns and panegyrics. We know of no such poem by any of the pre-Homeric poets, though there were probably many such writers among them; instances, however, may be found from Homer downwards, e.g. his Margites, and the similar poems of others. In this poetry of invective its natural fitness brought an iambic metre into use; hence our present term 'iambic', ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... should be called "A bird of Homeric song," appears so harsh to modern ears, that an emendation of the text has been proposed: but surely the learning of the ancients had been long ago obliterated, had every man thought himself at liberty to corrupt ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... of his well-known roars of laughter—a laugh famous throughout the county, a laugh described by his admirers as "Homeric," by his enemies as "ear-splitting." There was, however, enemies or no enemies, something sympathetic in that laugh, something boyish ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... all, there is the great battle scene, standing alone in literature for its carefully detailed delineation- -its persistent minuteness, its rapidity of movement, its balanced effects, its energetic purpose—and surpassing everything in modern verse for its vivid Homeric realism. Fifteen years before, as we have seen, Scott had the progress of the battle in his mind's eye, and at length he produced his description as if he had been present in the character of a skilful and interested spectator. There are envious people who decline to admit that Scott ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... reference to the idioms and antiquities of Arabia of the French consul at Djedda, Fulgence Fresnel. He was the first, in his letters on the history of the Arabs before Islamism, published in 1836, to explain the Himyarite or Homeric language and to recognize that it resembles rather the early Hebrew and Syriac dialects, than the Arabic of the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... part, at least, of the question. Speaking of the opinions held by the Greek philosophers regarding the future state of the soul, Dr. Dollinger says, "The old and universal tradition admitted, in general, that man continued to exist after death; but the Greeks of the Homeric age did not dream of a retribution appointed to all after death, or of purifying and penitential punishments. It is only some conspicuous offenders against the gods who, in Homer, are tormented in distant Erebus. In Hesiod, the earlier races of man continue to live on, sometimes as good demons, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... reflects the characteristics of a wind god. (See Cox, 'Myths of the Aryan Nations;' also Korner, 'Solar Myths in Midsummer Night's Dream,' Poet-Lore, Jan., 1891). Compare his character with that of Hermes in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... . "Honour all men." Every man should be honoured as God's image, in the sense in which Novalis says—that we touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human body! . . . The old Homeric Greeks, I think, felt that, and acted up to it, more than any nation. The Patriarchs too seem to have had the same ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... creeds. The illusion was not necessary—it was disappearing before the fast-approaching meridian light of philosophic religion. Like the myths of Christianity, it had grown up in an age of superstition, when men, blind to the wondrous order of the universe, believed that supernatural beings, like the Homeric gods, actually interfered in the affairs of mortals. Science had revealed the irrevocability of the laws of nature—was man alone to be exempt from them? No. The time would come when it would be as obsolete an absurdity to talk of the temptation ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... "existence" is only applicable to descriptions is concealed by the use of what are grammatically proper names in a way which really transforms them into descriptions. It is, for example, a legitimate question whether Homer existed; but here "Homer" means "the author of the Homeric poems," and is a description. Similarly we may ask whether God exists; but then "God" means "the Supreme Being" or "the ens realissimum" or whatever other description we may prefer. If "God" were a proper name, God ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... to carry a brain that never rests in a body that is always tired. I have defied its infirmities, and forced it to do my bidding. You have no such hindrance, if we may judge by your aspect and habits. You deal with horses like a Homeric hero. No wild Indian could handle his bark canoe more dexterously or more vigorously than we have seen you handling yours. There must be some reason for your seclusion which curiosity has not reached, and into which it is not the province of curiosity to inquire. But in the ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... classical head, in curls like those of the young hyacinth." The hair of Ligeia, in the story of that title, he calls "the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, 'hyacinthine.'" ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... "deer brush," the latter familiar to all readers of Muir as the Cleanothus, in those long periods of Miltonic sweep and dignity in which he summons the clans of the California herbs and shrubs; an enumeration as stately as the Homeric catalogue of the ships, and, to such as lack technical knowledge of botany, imposing respect rather by sonorous appeal to the ear than by visual suggestion to the memory. That herbs should be marshalled in so impressive an array ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... in cast and epic in proportion. Although, judged by the Homeric standard, it falls short in many respects of the complete form, yet it may without violence be called an epic. The central figure, Beowulf, a nobly conceived hero, possessing immense strength, unflinching ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... nature of correctness by the analogy of the arts, and then, as in the Republic, ironically appealing to the authority of the Homeric poems, Socrates shows that the truth or correctness of names can only be ascertained by an appeal to etymology. The truth of names is to be found in the analysis of their elements. But why does he admit etymologies which are absurd, based on Heracleitean ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... the men of higher degree, all alike to join the King in his judgment, like the Homeric warriors of old, as indeed Sidonius had often said that there was no better comment on the ILIAD than ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the Homeric age: something better than the Sandwich or Tonga islanders when they were visited by Captain Cook. Inferior to the former in arts, in polity, and, above all, in their domestic institutions; superior to the latter as having the use of cattle ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man—he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here—a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... were caught they began to throw down their arms and cry for mercy. The gallant Canadians gave it, but in the hot rush of the charge they did not wait to disarm their foe. The second lines merged into the first and the fight in the dim forest became Homeric. Then the cowardly Germans whose lives had been spared, plucked up their courage. They picked up their rifles and began like the Arabs in the desert to shoot the men in the back who had spared their lives. Colonel Boyle went down, killed almost immediately. ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... verse, whimsically but in all seriousness, in an article on "The Four Ages of Poetry," contributed in 1820 to a short-lived journal, "Ollier's Literary Miscellany." The four ages were, he said, the iron age, the Bardic; the golden, the Homeric; the silver, the Virgilian; and the brass, in which he himself lived. "A poet in our time," he said, "is a semi-barbarian in a civilised community . . . The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... earliest mention of a medical charm in classic literature, and hence originated the phrase "Homeric Cure," as applied to healing by ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... treatment of the parricide and incest, not as moral offences capable of being rationally judged or even excused as unintentional, but as monstrous and inhuman pollutions, the last limit of imaginable horror: all these things take us back to dark regions of pre-classical and even pre-homeric belief. We have no right to suppose that Sophocles thought of the involuntary parricide and metrogamy as the people in his play do. Indeed, considering the general tone of his contemporaries and friends, we may safely assume that he did ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... this, it had been done by P.W. Joyce in his OLD CELTIC ROMANCES, and by Standish O'Grady for the whole story of Cuchulain, but in this case with so large an imitation of the Homeric manner that the Celtic spirit of the story was in danger of being lost. This was the fault I had to find with that inspiring book,[3] but it was a fault which had its ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... with respect to the period and progress of the domestication of the duck. It was unknown (8/6. Crawfurd on the 'Relation of Domesticated Animals to Civilisation' read before the Brit. Assoc. at Oxford 1860.) to the ancient Egyptians, to the Jews of the Old Testament, and to the Greeks of the Homeric period. About eighteen centuries ago Columella (8/7. Dureau de La Malle in 'Annales des Sciences Nat.' tome 17 page 164; and tome 21 page 55. Rev. E.S. Dixon 'Ornamental Poultry' page 118. Tame ducks were not known in Aristotle's time, as remarked ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... a splendid sight, both horse and rider, as they rose together over the green swells of the prairie; a picture more like that of some Homeric hero than a ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... different history is that of Zeus among the Greeks—Zeus, Father of Gods and Men, the ideal of kingly majesty and wisdom and goodness. The reason is patent. Ages and ages before the days when the Homeric poets sang, the Greeks had forgotten that Zeus originally meant "sky": it had become to them a personal name of a great spiritual power, which they were free to invest with the noblest ideal of personality. But very likely there is also another reason: I believe that the Olympian Zeus, as modelled ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... Pantagruel representeth unto Panurge the difficulty of giving advice in the matter of marriage; and to that purpose mentioneth somewhat of the Homeric and Virgilian lotteries ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... their great proficiency in rope walking, but they have been equalled by Japanese, European, and American performers. Many women have been famous in this line, and a Madame Sacqui, a Frenchwoman, was such an expert artist that one of her countrymen likened her to a "Homeric goddess" (although I do not know how Juno or Minerva would have looked on a tight-rope), and asserted that her boldness and agility were the glory of the First Empire! This infatuated Frenchman must have ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... No monarch in the world could trace his descent from a longer line of illustrious men; beside the roll of ancestry to which he could point, the oldest of European dynasties were things of a day. When the towering Pyramids that overlook the Nile were still new; before the Homeric ballads had yet been chanted in the streets of an Eastern city; before the foundations of the Parthenon were laid on the Acropolis; before the wandering sons of AEneas found a home in the valley of the Tiber, ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... the play into a battle-cry, and the artists, headed by Mr. Yeats, used Synge to belabour the Philistinism of the mob. In the excitement of the fight they were soon talking about Synge as though Dublin had rejected a Shakespeare. Mr. Yeats even used the word "Homeric" about him—surely the most inappropriate word it would be possible to imagine. Before long Mr. Yeats's enthusiasm had spread to England, where people who ignored the real magic of Synge's work, as it is to be found in Riders ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... he haunted in play hours, rather like an outlaw in the woods, he met a curious agile youth with hair brushed up off his head. Seeing each other, they promptly hit each other simultaneously and had a fight. Next day they met again and fought again. These Homeric conflicts went on for many days, till one morning in the crisis of some insane grapple, the subject of this biography quoted, like a war-chant, something out of Macaulay's Lays. The other started and relaxed his hold. They gazed at each other. Then the foe quoted the following ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... shrieks of approval, oars began to strike the water, and the water began to fly over the Wrykyn boats, which were now surrounded. The latter were not slow to join battle with the same weapons. Homeric laughter came from the bridge above. The town bridge was a sort of loafers' club, to which the entrance fee was a screw of tobacco, and the subscription an occasional remark upon the weather. Here gathered together day by day that section of the populace which resented it when they ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... to travel a long way from the Homeric hymn to the hymn of Callimachus, who writes in the end of Greek literature, in the third century before Christ, in celebration of the procession of the sacred basket of Demeter, not [125] at the Attic, but at the Alexandrian Eleusinia. He developes, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... tone of their early intellectual life has exclusively depended. But I am not surprised that the interest, if awakened, should not at first take the form of admiration. The inconsistency between an Homeric description of a piece of furniture or armor, and the actual rudeness of any piece of art approximating, within even three or four centuries, to the Homeric period, is so great, that we at first cannot recognize ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... the oars.—Ver. 664. Hyginus tells us, that Bacchus changed the oars into thyrsi, the sails into clusters of grapes, and the rigging into ivy branches. In the Homeric hymn on this subject we find the ship flowing with wine, vines growing on the sails, ivy twining round the mast, and the benches wreathed ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... of the road, with graphic and untiring forefinger, he undertook to describe his travels in Greece, whither he had been sent on some learned enterprise by the Minister of Education, and had carried an imagination already prepossessed and dazzled with Homeric visions. He told his story well and with detail, combining the recollections of the scholar with the impressions of an artist. The pediment of the Parthenon, the oleanders of the Ilissus, the stream "that runs in rain-time," the naked ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Roncesvalles, we are rather moved to smile at the violence of their emotion than to weep over the dead, so little power has the poet to touch the springs of feeling. However, there are passages in which the poem rises to sublimity, and which have been pronounced Homeric by its admirers. ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... more than the skill with which he has, by making his hero both a traveller and a warrior, united the beauties of the Iliad and the Odyssey in one composition: yet his judgment was perhaps sometimes overborne by his avarice of the Homeric treasures; and, for fear of suffering a sparkling ornament to be lost, he has inserted it where it cannot shine with its ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... winter when the will of nature compelled him to quit for ever his fleshly garb, and live forever in his writings resplendent with that good philosophy to which we shall always be obliged to return. The good man had, at that time, counted as nearly as possible seventy flights of the swallow. His Homeric head was but scantily ornamented with hair, but his beard was still perfect in its flowing majesty; there was still an air of spring-time in his quiet smile, and wisdom on his ample brow. He was a fine old man according to the statement of those who had ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... thus not only the animated parts of the world, but also the other things of nature personified and deified, or abusively called gods and goddesses."[163] The same is true both of the Orphic and Homeric gods. "Their generation of the gods is the same with the generation or creation of the world, both of them having, in all probability, derived it from the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... on the field, with, it is reported, 5,000 of the foreigners. On the Irish side fell the heir of Leinster, the lord of Morgallion and his son; the lords of Fertullagh and Cremorne, and a host of their followers. The engagement, in true Homeric spirit, had been suspended on three successive nights, and renewed three successive days. It was a genuine pitched battle—a trial of main strength, each party being equally confident of victory. The ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... History of Creation, which he had previously designated a bad romance. But his winged words are not on that account to be forgotten, that "the genealogical trees of phylogeny are about as much worth as, in the eyes of the historical critic, are those of the Homeric heroes" (Darwin ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... in the duel. Over battle and rout and slaughter the two chiefs would glare each at the other, blade in hand and panting, but either ever ready for the stroke that should thrust through the army to the heart of its general. Such a struggle needed only antiquity and a bard to be Homeric. No Greek could equal either champion in cunning, nor Trojan in prowess, nor both in grim persistence and rugged hate. It was truly a fight to have a hand in, and with big, lusty zest, the Storm Centre bounded into the lists. He leaped backward ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... head he wore one of those overloaded helmets of the fifteenth century, which frightened the enemy with their fanciful crests. His bristled with ten iron beaks, so that Jehan could have disputed with Nestor's Homeric vessel the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... doubt about the history of "The Thousand and One Nights" as that which veils the origin of the Homeric poems. It is said that a certain Caliph Shahryar, having been deceived by his wife, slew her, and afterwards married a wife only for one day, slaying her on the morning after. When this slaughter of women had continued some time he became wedded to one Shahrazad, daughter ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... as it often took the Tennyson brothers, to the coast at Mablethorpe, where the long rollers of the North Sea beat upon the sandhills that guard the flat stretches of the marshland. Here the poet as a child used to lie upon the beach, his imagination conjuring up Homeric pictures of the Grecian fleet besieging Troy; and if, on his last visit before leaving Lincolnshire, he found the spell broken, he could still describe vividly what he saw with the less fanciful ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... painted her nether parts with so much skill and truth that no one could have wished for anything more beautiful; I was delighted with that portrait; it was a speaking likeness, and I wrote under it, "O-Morphi," not a Homeric word, but a Greek one after all, and ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... bed that there we too may join in love and learn to trust each other." Later on Odysseus has his adventure with the Sirens, who are always "casting a spell of penetrating song, sitting within a meadow," in order to decoy passing sailors. Charybdis is another divine Homeric female who lures men to ruin. The island nymph Calypso rescues Odysseus and keeps him a prisoner to her charms, until after seven years he begins to shed tears and long for home "because the nymph pleased him no more." ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... give a history of the weapon calls to mind many similar passages in the Homeric poems. The particular story in mind here is the escape of Theodoric from the giants. He loses his way and falls into the hands of one of the twelve giants who guard Duke Nitger. He gains the favor of Nitger's sister, and through her lets his retainers, Hildebrand, Witige, and Heime know of ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... the expedition to avenge upon the Swedes the defeat at Fort Casimir, and their appearance on the march, give some notion of the military prowess of the Dutch. Their appearance, when they were encamped on the Bowling Green, recalls the Homeric age:— ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... horror of the war." There may be something to be said for this point of view, but it strikes me as interesting that the old myth-making faculty has survived into these days, a relic of noble, far-off Homeric battles. And after all, what do we know? It does not do to be too sure that this, that, or the other hasn't ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... the pleasantest functions must come to an end. I was loath to part from Mr MacGinnis just when I was beginning, as it were, to do myself justice; but it was unavoidable. In another moment his ally would descend upon us, like some Homeric god swooping from a cloud, and I was not prepared to continue ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... of war are next considered—that of sacking a town taken by assault, and of blockading a town defended, not by the inhabitants, but by a military garrison—are next examined;—in both these cases the penalty falls upon the innocent. The Homeric description of a town taken by assault, is still ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... up, and his soul unsatisfied; he grips the first dog he meets, and discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric phrase, he makes a brief sort of amende,[101-1] and is off. The boys, with Bob and me at their head, are after him; down Niddry street he goes, bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow—Bob and I, and our small ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... The position of the barrier guard ceased to be—if it ever were—a sinecure, and he was kept busy picking pockets, examining bills, perusing love-letters, written in all sorts of prose, and in verse which was homely, if not exactly Homeric. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... Theocritus. In this the fisherman Asphalion relates how in a dream he hooked a large golden fish and describes graphically, albeit with some obscurity of language, how he "played" it. Asphalion used a rod and fished from a rock, much after the manner of the Homeric angler. Among other Greek writers, Herodotus has a good many references to fish and fishing; the capture of fish is once or twice mentioned or implied by Plato, notably in the Laws (vii. 823); Aristotle deals with fishes in his Natural History, and there are one or two fishing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... series of jokes and puns upon hats and heads, and hair and hair-oil, etc. In the midst of Homeric laughter a knock resounded, and was heard, in spite of an uproar ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... but collapsed in a fit of retching, as from right and left, and from the darkness all around him, a roar of Homeric laughter woke the echoes of the Cove. Men rolled about laughing. Men leaned against one ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... abundance of spirit here. For once, in describing the battle and fall of Patroclus, Goethe seems to have caught a spark of Homeric inspiration, and the lines ring out as clearly as the stroke of the hammer on the anvil. There is no rhyme in the original, which, we confess, appears to us a fault; more especially as the rhythm is that of the ordinary ballad. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... the plot of Clarissa in terms of the Iliad, but judges subtle and complex characters by an over-simplified standard of decorum and censures Lovelace as an intricate combination of Achilles and Ulysses! His unnecessary labors to show that Richardson is not really Homeric illustrate the sterile application of epic canons to the novel that vitiates much early ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... many privations, the people are loyal to their country and lovingly call it "The Maid of the North." They lead pastoral lives and their customs are much like those of the Homeric age. Story-telling is much appreciated by all classes. There are wandering minstrels who gain their livelihood by going from house to house to recite the stories in prose and poetry which they have learned by heart. Spindle and distaff are used in spinning the wool into yarn, which is then knit or ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... the honey-dew of "The Undying Voices," of Keats and Shelley, and of Swinburne's supernal rhythms, which he had brought with him. One visit to the Public Library had quite appalled him; the vast, chill orderliness of it. He had gone there, hungry to chat about books! To the Public Library! Surely a Homeric joke for grim, tomish officialdom. But tomish officialdom had not even laughed at him; it was too official to appreciate the quality of such side-splitting innocence.... Was he likely to meet a like irresponsiveness when he should seek clothing for ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... arrest the national development, which then fades and decays. To this rule Great Britain and Japan are notable exceptions, owing partly to the unusual size of their insular territory, partly to a highly advantageous location. Minoan Crete, in that gray antiquity when Homeric history was still unborn, gave out of its abundance in art, government, laws and maritime knowledge to the eastern Mediterranean world, till the springs of inspiration in its own small land were exhausted, and its small population was unable to resist the flood of northern invasion. Then ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... valour of those times has by no means survived to the present,—an opinion which is at once careless and wholly remote from actual experience of these matters. For the thought has never occurred to them that, as regards the Homeric bowmen who had the misfortune to be ridiculed by this term[1] derived from their art, they were neither carried by horse nor protected by spear or shield[2]. In fact there was no protection at all for their bodies; they entered battle ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... blame in the matter. Professor Murray prefers to believe in a myth growing out of the strife of light and darkness in the sky: but the rape of beautiful girls by seafaring rovers was evidently common enough in those times, so why should not the Homeric version be right? We can always be sure that the old poems represent accurately life, manners, and character; and from the analogy of those legends whose origin is known, we may fairly infer that the root of a famous story, divine or human, is first planted in fact, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... 5, 1805. His farewell address is described as one of the most affecting ever spoken in the Senate. Describing the scene to his daughter, Burr said that tears flowed abundantly, but Burr must have described what he wished to see. American politicians are not Homeric heroes, who weep on slight provocation; and any inclination to pity Burr must have been inhibited by the knowledge that he had made himself the rallying-point of every dubious intrigue ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... justified. For if matter is inert, brute, dead—it certainly seems preposterous to speak of its having within it the potency of life—using "life" as a synonym for living organisms, including man. The nature-mystic is overwhelmed with Homeric laughter. ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... as tyrannical proceeding. Irish Members massed below Gangway howled with delight. Their turn come now. Long they groaned under Prince ARTHUR'S iron heel. Now they've got him down, and dance round him with shouts of exultation and Homeric bursts of laughter. Hardly can his voice be heard above the din; but he pegs along, finally turning his back on jubilant mob below Gangway; addresses himself to SPEAKER, edging in a sentence amid comparative ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... forehead as he renewed his efforts; the stout hickory sapling bent and crackled beneath the pressure of the two men, but held on, and the boat slowly but steadily began to swing clear of the ice. These two Homeric men held it off by sheer strength, until the boat was in freewater, and the men, who had sat like statues in their places, could once more use their oars. The general stepped back into his place, cool and calm as usual, and entirely unruffled by his great exertions. Bentley wiped the sweat ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... sundry volumes full of tales to those hitherto translated; and here the Wortley Montagu copy can be taken as a test. We may, I believe, safely compare the history of The Nights with the so-called Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, a collection of immortal ballads and old Epic formulae and verses traditionally handed down from rhapsode to rhapsode, incorporated in a slowly-increasing body of poetry and finally welded together about ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... only; we must travel back to older ages, known to us only by what lawyers call REAL evidence—the evidence of things. Before history began, there was at least as much progress in the military art as there has been since. The Roman legionaries or Homeric Greeks were about as superior to the men of the shell mounds and the flint implements as we are superior to them. There has been a constant acquisition of military strength by man since we know anything ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... sounded the choral, shot up through the limpid azure; swaying, burning, throbbing, sobs and shouting, tears and transports, so mounted new strains of the mighty chorus, lit through with the flames of Homeric verse. Then stronger yet was the mingling of voices, earth, sky, deep, beasts' cry and gods' cry, all voiced, as chorus answered to chorus. Now the peplus was wafted on a wave of song toward the temple's dawn-facing portal, when from beneath the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... the echo of his own experience; the spiritual diagnosis of his case. With what fortitude he endured his maladies those who knew him best can bear witness. He was no ideal Stoic nor self-conscious martyr; but more like an Homeric hero fighting his troubles, bearing them bravely, talking of them sensibly, always glad to receive sympathy but never seeking it, and complaining when he could endure no longer. He never tried to comfort himself by sophistical reflections, but ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... free-will is afterwards seduced by the Evil Power, and his allies reclaim him with difficulty. Yet the plan of the apologue is embellished with many ingenious conceits and artifices, and conformed in the leading circumstances with an Homeric myth—the names of Ulysses and Circe being frequently substituted for those of the ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... an Almanac made by a student with a name—Nathaniel Ames, junior, student in Physick and Astronomy. He does not apply his intellect to such great speculations as Bowen grappled with, but runs easily into poetry of the true Homeric stamp. Listen: ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... began by undertaking the education of a horse that gave him no very definite results. But, in 1900, he became the owner of a Russian stallion who, under the name of Hans, to which was soon added the Homeric and well-earned prefix of Kluge, or Clever, was destined to upset all our notions of animal psychology and to raise questions that rank among the most unexpected and the most absorbing problems which man ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... farms by the irrigator's ditch or by the dry-farmer's plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada we may find the cowboy, it is true, even today: but he is no longer the Homeric figure that once dominated the plains. In what we say as to his trade, therefore, or his fashion in the practice of it, we speak in terms of thirty or forty years ago, when wire was unknown, when the round-up still was necessary, and the cowboy's life ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... centuries nor weakness of imagination but a subconscious monophysitism. There is to most minds a haze of unreality overhanging the accounts of His life and death. They forget that He shared human experience to the full. They think of Him as doing things rheidios like the Homeric gods. In point of fact, His great results were achieved only after long laborious exertion. His was a life of strenuous human activity, physical and mental. Even His miracles were accompanied by a physical throb of sympathy; virtue went ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... North, philosophy and freedom are essentials to human happiness; in the lands which Aphrodite rose from the waves to govern, as the Seasons, hand in hand, stood to welcome her on the shores, Nature is all sufficient. (Homeric Hymn.) ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Speaking of Homer and Virgil, I have been writing a 'Romance of the Ganges,'[34] in order to illustrate an engraving in the new annual to be edited by Miss Mitford, Finden's tableaux for 1838. It does not sound a very Homeric undertaking—I confess I don't hold any kind of annual, gild it as you please, in too much honour and awe—but from my wish to please her, and from the necessity of its being done in a certain time, I was 'quite frightful,' as poor old Cooke used to say, in order ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... in which he fell we cannot lift a finger, 'Tis idle on the question any longer here to linger; 'Tis true the South has freely bled, her sorrows are Homeric, oh! Her case is like to his of old ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... confess your latter ones have greatly relieved me on the subject you speak of. They only make me long, with an extreme Homeric longing, to be at Pisa,—I mean such an one as Achilles felt when he longed to be with his father,—sharp in his very limbs. We have secured a ship, the David Walter, which will call for us here, and sets sail from London in a fortnight. I have written by to-day's post with intelligence ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... manner—that is to say, by public readings or recitations. In point of fact, the instance there is more directly akin to the present argument. A musical cadence, or even possibly an instrumental accompaniment, may have marked the Homeric chant about Achilles and Ulysses. Whereas, obviously, in regard to Herodotus, the readings given by him at the Olympic games were readings in the modern sense, pure and simple. Lucian has related the incident, not only ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... and "second reader" the Homeric poems are! What characters to imitate: the high-minded, passionate, yet withal loyal and lovable Achilles who would rather fight gloriously before Troy (though death in the campaign is certain) than ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... by theologists of the intellectual kings. Further still, in the Cratylus he follows the traditions of theologists respecting the order of the divine processions. But in the Gorgias he adopts the Homeric dogma, respecting the triadic hypostases of the demiurgi. And, in short, he every where discourses concerning the gods agreeably to the principles of theologists; rejecting indeed the tragical part of mythological fiction, ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... Eminent Hands. It is a round table,—that is, rounded by the principle of rotation,—for how could she settle points of precedence with the august heads of her various Departments without danger of the dinner's growing cold? Substantial dinners are eaten thereat with Homeric appetite, nor, though impletus venter non vult studere libenter, are the visits of the Muse unknown. At these feasts no tyranny of speech-making is allowed, but the bonbons are all wrapped in original copies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... What is to hinder huge London from being to universal Saxondom what small Mycale was to the Tribes of Greece,—a place to hold your [Greek] in? A meeting of All the English ought to be as good as one of All the Ionians; —and as Homeric "equal ships" are to Bristol steamers, so, or somewhat so, may New York and New Holland be to Ephesus and Crete, with their distances, relations, and etceteras!—Few things on this Earth look to me greater than the Future of that Family ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... was conscious of a feeling of envy towards her. She was doing the journey comfortably on a bicycle. He would have to walk it. Walk it! He didn't believe he could. The strangers' mile, followed by the Homeric combat with the two Hooligans and that ghastly sprint to wind up with, had left him decidedly unfit for further feats of pedestrianism. And it was eight miles to Stapleton, if it was a yard, and another mile from Stapleton to St Austin's. Charteris, having once more invoked ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... have regarded the Parmenides as a 'reductio ad absurdum' of the Eleatic philosophy. But would Plato have been likely to place this in the mouth of the great Parmenides himself, who appeared to him, in Homeric language, to be 'venerable and awful,' and to have a 'glorious depth of mind'? (Theaet.). It may be admitted that he has ascribed to an Eleatic stranger in the Sophist opinions which went beyond the doctrines of the Eleatics. But the Eleatic stranger expressly criticises the doctrines in which ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... matchboxes exactly alike, both printed with the Macpherson plaid. One was his, the other mine, which he had seen lying round, and naturally took for his own, thrusting it into his pocket, where it found its twin-brother from the same workshop. In memory of which event we exchanged boxes, like two Homeric heroes. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... mystery and surmise; and when there is no chance of either proving or disproving a case I dare say one man's word answers quite as well as another's. At all events, we have your grandfather's testimony as chief actor and eye-witness against the inherited convictions of our somewhat Homeric young neighbour. For eighteen years before the war Mr. Fletcher was sole agent—a queer selection, certainly—for old Mr. Blake, who was known to have grown very careless in the confidence he placed. When the crash came, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... help afforded in the battle, the King of Virata discovers the princely rank of the Pandavas, and gives his daughter in marriage to the son of Arjuna. A great council is then held to consider the question of declaring war on the Kauravas, at which the speeches are quite Homeric, the god Krishna taking part. The decision is to prepare for war, but to send an embassy first. Meantime Duryodhana and Arjuna engage in a singular contest to obtain the aid of Krishna, whom both of them seek out. This celestial ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... vehemency of his eloquence. In illustrating one of his points, he quoted from my "Memoir of William Forsyth" a brief anecdote, set in description of a kind which most men would have read quietly enough, but which, coming from him, seemed instinct with the Homeric vigour and force. The extraordinary impressiveness which he communicated to the passage served to show me, better than aught else, how imperfectly great orators may be represented by their written speeches. Admirable ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Excellency in hand?" asked the Rev. Mather Byles, whose Presbyterian scruples had not kept him from the entertainment. "Trust me, sir, I have already laughed more than beseems my cloth at your Homeric confabulation with yonder ragamuffin General of the rebels. One other such fit of merriment, and I must throw off my ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... and German ideas had passed thus over our heads there ensued disgust and mournful silence, followed by a terrible convulsion. For to formulate general ideas is to change saltpetre into powder, and the Homeric brain of the great Goethe had sucked up, as an alembic, all the juice of the forbidden fruit. Those who did not read him, did not believe it, knew nothing of it. Poor creatures! The explosion carried them away like grains of dust into the ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... dog, and not he, that caused the Homeric gusts of merriment and the gobbling chorus of amazed questions. The dog was a collie; noble ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... observation, were not necessarily thought of. It is not so easy, with our rates and taxes and need for economy in all directions, to cast away an epithet or remark that turns up cheaply, and to go in expensive search after more genuine substitutes. There is high Homeric precedent for keeping fast hold of an epithet under all changes of circumstance, and so the precocious author of the 'Comparative Estimate' heard the echoes repeating "Young Ganymede" when an illiterate beholder at a railway station would have given ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... worship was but the recognition in the primitive consciousness of the superior worth-ship of these celestial bodies. As Grote says: "To us these now appear puerile, though pleasing fancies, but to our Homeric Greek they seemed perfectly natural and plausible. In his view, the description of the sun, as given in a modern astronomical treatise, would have appeared not merely absurd, but repulsive and impious." [206] What an amount of misunderstanding ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... are full of that intimation of environment which the novelist calls local color, often containing in the name alone a comprehensive suggestiveness as great as that of an Homeric epithet. Thus our familiar Cat and Mouse appears in modern Greece as Lamb and Wolf; and the French version of Spin the Platter is My Lady's Toilet, concerned with laces, jewels, and other ballroom accessories instead of our prosaic numbering of players. These changes that a game ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... author—worshipping his meanest scraps and relics as divine—without one sceptical misgiving of their authenticity, and doubt which was the properest to expound Homer to their countrymen. Reverend Chapman! you have read his hymn to Pan (the Homeric)—why, it is Milton's blank verse clothed with rhyme. Paradise Lost could scarce lose, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... writers of some classical culture—can claim to appreciate Homer far better than the contemporaries of Pope. But our appreciation involves a clear recognition of the vast difference between ourselves and the ancient Greeks. We see the Homeric poems in their true perspective through the dim vista of shadowy centuries. We regard them as the growth of a long past stage in the historical evolution; implying a different social order—a different ideal of life—an archaic conception of the world ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... idea of the Grecian civilization was that it sprung, like Minerva, full armed from the brow of Zeus. It seemed to have no tangible beginning. The fabled kings and heroes of the Homeric Age, with their palaces and strongholds, were said to have been humanized sun-myths; their deeds but songs woven by wandering minstrels to win their meed of bread. Yet there has always been a suspicion among scholars that this view was wrong. The more we study the moral aspects ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Bishop Butler's Works, which costs me a good deal of labor and leaves me, after a few hours upon it, good for very little else. And my perspective, dubious as it is, is filled with other work, in the Homeric region lying beyond. I hope it will be very long before you know anything of compulsory limitations on the exercise of your ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... martial renown has fired the world, whose daring and wonderful exploits have altered the boundaries of nations and changed the very face of the earth. To say nothing of the warriors of biblical history and Homeric verse, as the ages march along every great nation leaves us the glorious memory of some unique character, such as Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar. Even the wild hordes of northern Europe and the barbaric nations of the East had their grand ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... their pleasures in being there was the opportunity of buying sweets! "They can't have too much of them," said one of the officers, and the idea that those hard fellows, whose Homeric fighting qualities had been proved, should be enthusiastic for lollipops seemed to me an amusing touch of character. For tough as they were, and keen as they were, those Australian soldiers were but grown-up children with a wonderful ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... imagines one sees certain periods and landmarks, but in the next page all is chaos again. It may be difficult to confess that with all the traditions of the early migrations of Cecrops and Danaus into Greece, with the Homeric poems of the Trojan war, and the genealogies of the ancient dynasties of Greece, we know nothing of Greek history before the Olympiads, and very little even then. Yet the true historian does not allow himself to indulge in any illusions ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... guard, and all that saved him a ducking was the prompt extension of several stout arms, which clutched and hauled him to the flush after deck. He sat on his haunches, blinking. Then he laughed. So did the man at the top of the slip and the lumberjacks clustered on the boat. Homeric laughter, as at some surpassing jest. But the roar of him who had taken that inglorious descent rose loudest of all, an ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... lining up on either side of one of the great brown tree trunks, carried it bodily to its appointed place. From one end of the rear to the other, shouts, calls, warnings, and jokes flew back and forth. Once or twice a vast roar of Homeric laughter went up as some unfortunate slipped and soused into the water. When the current slacked, and the logs hesitated in their run, the entire crew hastened, bobbing from log to log, down river to ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... of beet leaves and cream, served with ice. Mickiewicz later repeats this passage in true Homeric fashion: ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... god of prophecy above all others. He was born at Delos, according to the poets; and it is there that the Homeric poems say was one of his most ancient sanctuaries. Thence, doubtless, issued the twenty famous oracles at the epoch of the colonisation. At Delphi the priestess was seated on a tripod over a crack in the rock, from which ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... together." This statement represents a position which is actively assailed by the adherents of the communal origin theory. Another critical idea which originated in Germany, and in which Scott had no interest, though he knew something about it, was the Wolffian hypothesis in regard to the Homeric poems. He once heard Coleridge expound the subject, but failed to join in the discussion. (Journal, Vol. II, p. 164; Lockhart, Vol. V, p. 193.) He said the theory could never be held by any poet. See a note by Lockhart on the essay on Popular Poetry. Henderson's ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... deliciously tired and pleasantly sore, you eat what seems ambrosia, be it only tinned beef; and drink nectar, be it only distilled from terrestrial hops or coffee berries, and inhale as culminating luxury balmy fumes which even the happy Homeric gods ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... This Homeric dialogue between the chief combatants was stopped by Dubuisson, who saw that it distracted the attention of the warriors, and so enabled the besieged to run to the adjacent river for water. The firing was resumed more fiercely than ever. ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... combat, fearless of death, or prove an ample reward, on their return from the dangers of the ghazon, or the fight. The excitement they produce exceeds that of the grape. He who would understand the influence of the Homeric ballads in the heroic ages should witness the effect which similar compositions have upon the wild nomads of the East." Elsewhere he adds, "Poetry and flowers are the wine and spirits of the Arab; a couplet ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... her. The scorpion sting was beginning to lose its venomous power. She suffered still, but her suffering was softened by resignation. There is a limit to the capacity for pain in every mind. Diana had borne her share of grief; she had, in Homeric phrase, satiated herself with anguish and tears; and to those sharp throes and bitter torments there had succeeded a passive sense of sorrow that ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... satisfaction, in his own curt way, the problems of the ABSOLUTE and the INFINITE! If the cardinal truths of philosophy and religion hitherto received are doomed to be imperilled by such speculations, one feels strongly inclined to pray with the old Homeric hero,—'that if they must perish, it may be at least in daylight.' We earnestly counsel the youthful reader to defer the study of German philosophy, at least till he has matured and disciplined his mind, and familiarised ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
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