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More "Poetry" Quotes from Famous Books



... to her brother. A hard, wearing life, however, had told a good deal upon her, and trouble had somewhat imbittered her nature. She had not the vein of humor which had stood Raeburn in such good stead. Severely mater-of-fact, and almost despising those who had any poetry in their nature, she did not always agree very well with Erica. The two loved each other sincerely, and were far too loyal both to clan and creed to allow their differences really to separate them; but there was, undoubtedly, something in their natures which jarred. Even Tom found it hard at times ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... letter to me: "Homo sum humani nihil a me alienum puto," as translated and practically illustrated by them. Such a doctrine would give wide authority to every one for the most dangerous intermeddling with the affairs of others. It will do in poetry—perhaps in some sorts of philosophy—but the attempt to make it a household maxim, and introduce it into the daily walks of life, has caused many a "homo" a broken crown; and probably will continue to do it. Still, though a slaveholder, I freely acknowledge my ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... peroration to the glowing account of the battle of Pittsburg Landing, we quote as an illustration of the vein of poetry that pervades his writings: ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... and Poetry, compared Palace of the Regent, its costly fitting Partridge, John, his tomb and errors Parks of London, their utility and capability ——, noblemen's, their inutility Patronage, cause of war Parish allowances to the poor Panorama from Wimbledon Common Paper circulation always ruinous ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... lustful acts done by me, or witnessed; it is written therefore with absolute truth, and without any regard whatever for what the world calls decency. Decency and voluptuousness in its fullest acceptance, cannot exist together, one would kill the other; the poetry of copulation I have only experienced with a few women, which however neither prevented them, nor me from ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous

... 'bus of his, heard the boys yell. Didn't he hop out o' the wagon as spry as a chimpanzee, skin over the fence, an' jump into the pond, swim out there an' tow the boy in! Yes, ma'am, he saved that boy's life then an' no mistake. That man can read me to sleep with poetry any night he has a mind to. He's a plumb fine little ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley

... and appreciation of Hazlitt, the present editor desires to make general acknowledgement—to Alexander Ireland, Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, Mr. Birrell, and Mr. Saintsbury. Mention should also be made of Mr. Nichol Smith's little volume of Hazlitt's Essays on Poetry (Blackwood's), and of the excellent treatment of Hazlitt in Professor Oliver Elton's Survey of English Literature from 1780 to 1830, which came to hand after this edition had been completed. A debt of special gratitude is owing to Mr. Glover ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... you know what he replied when I asked him why he did so?—"Poetry! Poetry!" he said. Oh, he ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg

... talk were heavy and solid, his poetry and metaphors were ponderous and labored. Yet Mabel listened to him now, neither facing nor avoiding him, looking down at her hands, laid, one above the other, upon the window-sill, the image of ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... in which Charley now lived, that of the infernal navvies, had taught him to laugh at romance; but it had not been so successful in quelling the early feelings of his youth, in drying up the fountains of poetry within him, as had been the case with his cousin, in that other school in which he had been a scholar. Charley was a dissipated, dissolute rake, and in some sense had degraded himself; but he had still this chance of safety ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... spent two hours of a precious Saturday afternoon learning poetry, for she had failed miserably in the last literature test; Josephine had been her companion in disgrace, and had even had to spend a precious Friday evening "in durance vile" because of ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett

... Poetry means more to us and we get more enjoyment from reading it when we understand some of the difficulties that the poet has in writing it and can recognize those things which ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... author calls it; so is "Tess"; but it fills the reader with a kind of sullen rage to be an eye-witness of the foul and brutal: he is asked to see a drama develop beside a pig-sty. It is therefore, intensely unesthetic which, if true, is a word of condemnation for any work of art. It is deficient in poetry, in the broad sense; that, rather than frankness of treatment, is the trouble ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... young Russian girl, Marie Bashkirtzeff. She wrote some prose and poetry and did some painting. She lived and died very young from TB on the French Riviera in Nice. Not particularly pretty, nor particularly striking, she had nevertheless a tremendous personality. In fact so striking that the city of Nice after her death created a Museum Bashkirtzeff ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff

... is a very simple matter, you see, to separate every line of poetry into groups of syllables, and in every group to place one accented syllable and one or more syllables that are not accented. Such a group is called a foot. Thus in each of the first two lines in this poem ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... seemed to be turning and on the move in the same direction; but before he started he spoke to Rosamund with a flash of that guileless tact which redeemed much of his childish vanity, and with something of that spontaneous poetry which made it difficult, pedantic as he was, ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... sea than shipwreck and fire, more frights and horrors, mateys, than famine, blindness, and cholera," said the old seaman with a slow motion of his eyes round upon the little company of sailors. "I remember a line of poetry—'a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.' Can any man here tell me who wrote that? Well, I suppose it is a joy so long as it remains a beauty, but d'ye see it's got to remain, ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell

... there is any such danger in this case," said Virginia. "But the Marchese is very handsome, and rather romantic, and he sings like an angel. Oh, yes, I am almost in love with him when he sings—or I was till yesterday. And how he dances! It's poetry. When I am waltzing with the Marchese Loria I invariably make up my mind that I will accept him next time he asks. Then, afterward, something holds me back. To-day, in that valley of shadows, he affected me quite ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson

... the domain of American politics. Inside that field his knowledge was comprehensive, minute, critical. Beyond it his learning was limited. He was not a reader. His recreations were not in literature. In the whole range of his voluminous speaking it would be difficult to find either a line of poetry or a classical allusion. But he was by nature an orator; and by long practice a debater. He could lead a crowd almost irresistibly to his own conclusions. He could, if he wished, incite a mob to desperate deeds. He was, in ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... Cadwallader Perkins. Do yuh like that name? Do yuh think it drips sweetness and poetry, ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower

... hymns care has been taken to choose those that are most characteristic of their authors, their times and the movements out of which they were born. While the translator has sought to produce faithfully the metre, poetry and sentiment of the originals, he has attempted no slavishly literal reproduction. Many of the finest Danish hymns are frankly lyrical, a fact which greatly increases the difficulty of translation. But while the writer is conscious that his translations at times fail to ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg

... 'xactly sure o' the precise words in this case, but that's the sentiment, and everybody knows that sentiment is everything in poetry, whether ye understand it or not. Fire away, leftenant, an' don't be long-winded if ye can ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne

... In the drawer of the old piece of furniture which stood just at the right hand of his own arm-chair there were various books hidden away, which he was sometimes ashamed to have seen by his clients,—poetry and novels and even fairy tales. For there was nothing Mr. Wharton could not read in his chambers, though there was nothing that he could read in his own house. He had a large pleasant room in which to sit, looking ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... have often been pictured by writers of poetry and prose, but without reaching the head of Strathearn these beauties can be only partially seen. The drive from Crieff to Lochearnhead in a summer day is universally regarded as one of the finest in all Scotland. To within a mile or so of St. Fillans ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... refreshment, and a walk of three miles, I arrived at Studley Park. The fairy effect produced on entering this beautiful retreat is almost indescribable. We suddenly exchange the field and forest scenery for all the poetry of prospect. On the right is a declivity clothed with laurel, and stretching far away; and on the left a lofty and well trimmed fence of laurel, forms a screen or curtain to the valley beneath; the sighing of distant woods and the dashing of waterfalls, break ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various

... life he had steeped himself in books, knowing the poetry and romance of nearly every nation. Now he disliked them. If she wanted books he would choose them for her. She would read the love-songs of the revolutionists to their goddess Liberty, the haunting words of those who had suffered for a time, and escaped the Siberian Ice-Hell. The fanaticism ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward

... mystics as the Dark Night of the Soul, is not mentioned in Indian manuals as an episode of the spiritual life, for such an interruption would hardly harmonize with their curriculum of regular progress towards enlightenment. But mystic poetry testifies that in Asia as in Europe this feeling of desertion and loneliness is a frequent experience in the struggles and adventures of the soul. It is apparently not necessary, just as the incidental joys and triumphs ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... laid down Rules for Rhetorick or Poetry, advise the Writer to work himself up, if possible, to the Pitch of Sorrow which he endeavours to produce in others. There are none therefore who stir up Pity so much as those who indite their own Sufferings. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... English poet, born near London in 1812. He was educated at London University, and spent most of his life in Italy. He was the author of many volumes of poetry. He died at ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey

... He, too, wrote poetry, like Pearse, under whom he was at school, but he was better known and his verse of a higher standard. He seems almost to have had an inkling of his future fate, and might also be said to have deliberately chosen the lost cause ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... finally lost altogether. The operations of her intellect could be checked, while the organs of sound would still continue to exert themselves. For instance, while her thoughts were occupied on the poetry and air of Lord Byron's song, "The Maid of Athens," the chain was unrolled; and when she had reached the line, "My life, I love you!" the stupor had increased; a cold statue-like aspect crept over the face — the voice sank — the limbs became rigid ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... say it here: with my poetical productions I was never satisfied any more than with my attempts at drawing. My verses seemed mere farthing dips compared with the resplendent poetry of our country which I read and loved, but my efforts employed and brightened many an hour in my youth that otherwise would ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... taste by which literature is to be judged and relished. Even those who never acquire any very competent knowledge of, or love for pictures, do acquire a respect for art, connect it with classical poetry—the highest poetry, with Homer, with the Greek drama, with all they have read of the venerated works of Phidias, Praxiteles, and Apelles; and having no too nice discrimination, are credulous of, or anticipate by remembering what has been done and valued—the honour of the profession. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... Bulbul is very fond of Clara; and Tom Bulbul, who took George's message to Heeltap, is always hanging about the studio. At least I know that I find the young jackanapes there almost every day, bringing a new novel, or some poisonous French poetry, or a basket of flowers, or grapes, with Lady Betty's love to her dear Clara—a young rascal with white kids, and his hair curled every morning. What business has HE to be dangling about George Rumbold's ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray

... aversion. Where did the printer get these stories? This question was answered. "I will tell you what," said the printer, "we none of us know what to make of the writer of these articles. He writes poetry, and morality, and history: I am a printer, and corrector of the press, and may pretend without vanity to be a tolerably good judge of these matters: he writes them all to my mind extremely fine; and yet he is no more than a Jew." [To my honest printer this seemed as strange, ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... curb her wings, and descend from poetry to prose, in order to narrate the particular adventures ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed

... accomplish his object, the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men, and a wreath more unfading shall entwine itself in the lapse of future ages around the name of Smithson than the united hands of history and poetry have braided around the name of Percy ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... hope they would have walked out, yet, to the eye of the artist, there was nothing coarse or offending, simply a most beautiful harmony of motion. The girl's beauty, her grace and youth, and the slight lissomness of all her body lent to the dance a poetry, a refinement it would not ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross

... floods of nonsense or applying himself vigorously to a task, his face seldom lost its expression of contained vivacity. Apart from a sound knowledge of his art and its history, his culture was large and loose, dominated by a love of poetry. At thirty-two he had not yet passed the age of ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley

... d'Angouleme was the first to write prose that can be read without the aid of a vocabulary; in verse, she excels all poets of her time in sympathy and compassion; her poetry is "a voice which complains—a heart which suffers and which tells us so." "It is not so much her own deep sentiment that is reflected, but her emotion, which is both intellectual and sympathetic, ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... an irresistible fascination about the regions of northern-most Grant Land that is impossible for me to describe. Having no poetry in my soul, and being somewhat hardened by years of experience in that inhospitable country, words proper to give you an idea of its unique beauty do not come to mind. Imagine gorgeous bleakness, beautiful blankness. It ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson

... Harpers and people had their favourite clans and names—a favour won most readily by those who were free both with purse and with sword. The Gordons of the North; and, in the South, Graemes, Scotts, Armstrongs, Douglases, are among the races that figure most prominently in ballad poetry. The great house of Douglas, in particular, is in the eyes and lips of romance and legend more honoured than the Stewarts themselves. The Douglas is the hero of both the Scottish and English versions of Chevy Chase. Hume of Godscroft, in his History of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie

... Carlos, in the land of the Basques. This hero was Roland, the nephew of the great emperor Charlemagne, who has been given by romantic fiction the first place among the legendary Paladins of France, and made memorable in epic poetry as the hero of the celebrated "Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto, and the less notable "Orlando ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris

... just then to do the marketing for the day; she considered this the duty of a wife, and she fulfilled it often enough to keep her sense of it alive, but she much preferred to forage with him in the afternoon; that was poetry, she said, and the other was prose. He would have liked to talk the proposition over with her; to realize the compliment while it was fresh, to grumble at it a little, and to be supported in his notion that it would be bad business just then for him to undertake a task that might draw ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... Rig-veda hymns which there is reason to look upon as the oldest portion of Vedic poetry, the character of Indra is that of a mighty ruler of the firmament, and his principal feat is that of conquering the demon Vritra, a symbolical personification of the cloud which obstructs the clearness ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... knife has cut you may find plainly displayed in Dr. Kellner's little book. He sees the throttling influence of an ever alert and bellicose Puritanism, not only in our grand literature, but also in our petit literature, our minor poetry, even in our humour. The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution—these ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... dogmas and our history are not true, or not "true" in the historical or scientific sense of the word? To ask for such truth in the sphere of theology is as pedantic as to ask for it in the sphere of poetry. Poetical truth means, not that certain events actually happened, or that the poetical "machinery" is to be taken as an existing fact; but that the poem is, so to speak, the projection of truths upon the cloudland of imagination. It reflects and gives sensuous images of truth; but ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... the grand duke only made a pretence of loving literature. A certain Abbe Fontaine, a clever man, amused him with a little natural history, the only science in which he took any interest. He preferred the worst prose to the best verse, not having sufficient intellect to enjoy the subtle charms of poetry. In reality he had ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... Thus might we call M. Alphonse Daudet an artist in pastels, so adroitly does he suggest the very bloom of color. No doubt M. Coppee's contes have not the sharpness of M. de Maupassant's, nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet's—but what of it? They have qualities of their own; they have sympathy, poetry, and a power of suggesting pictures not exceeded, I think, by those of either M. de Maupassant or M. Daudet. M. Coppee's street views in Paris, his interiors, his impressionist sketches of life under the shadows of Notre Dame, are convincingly successful. They are intensely to be enjoyed by those ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee

... yet untainted by the tide of outing travel, was a spot to inspire dreams, poetry, and canvases covered with ocean lore. Its many coves and inlets where the tides ebbed and flowed among the weed-covered rocks; its bold cliffs, sea washed, and above which the white gulls and fish-hawks ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn

... a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alterations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson

... which binds a man to his mother. The one who bore him is not faultless, for motherhood brings new gifts of feeling, sometimes sacrificing judgment and clear vision to selfish unselfishness. It is only in fiction and poetry that such love is valued now, for the divine blindness which does not question, which asks only the right to give, has lost beauty in our age of reason ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed

... about it; between 'the warm precincts of the cheerful day' and the cold solitudes of the inactive night has been the commonplace and stock-in-trade of moralists and thoughtful men from the beginning; has given pathos to poetry, solemnity to our days; and has been the ally of base as well as of noble things. For to say to a man, 'there are twelve hours in the day of life, and then comes darkness, the blackness that swallows up all activity,' may either be made into a support of all lofty and noble thoughts, or, by the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... first Fifteen Psalms of David, translated into Lyric Verse: Proposed as an Essay, supplying the Perspicuity and Coherence according to the Modern Art of Poetry; not known to have been attempted before in any Language. With a Preface containing some Observations of the great and general Defectiveness of former Versions in Greek, Latin, and English. By Dr. [James] Gibbs. London: printed by J. Mathews, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift

... another of these Northern peoples, gave their name to France, and the Belgae gave theirs to Belgium. The older name of Britain did not die out, but it was seldom used. It has really been used much more in modern times than it ever was in the Middle Ages. It is used especially in poetry or in fine writing, just as Briton is instead of Englishman, ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill

... draw Severne to her. But for once she was too excited to listen to reason. She was tempest-tossed. "I will go—I will go," she repeated, as she walked the room wildly, and flung her arms aloft with reckless abandon, and yet with a terrible majesty, an instinctive grace, and all the poetry of a great soul wronged ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... have been "a dear little house"; it would have been a palatial residence with a dance-hall at the top and a wine-cellar at the bottom thereof. I have always observed that when the money comes in the poetry flies out. Bread and cheese and kisses are all well enough for poverty-stricken romance, but as soon as a poor man receives a windfall his thoughts turn inevitably to a contemplation of the probability of ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... seats. She did not know that men were looking at her, as she raised her clear warbling voice amid the silvery trebles of the choir, and uttered with all the expressiveness of genuine emotion those strains of poetry and passion which thrilled from the heart to the harp of the warrior-prophet and poet-king. And never did truer prayers come from a woman's lips than those which her heart offered as her head ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... my plans. Moreover, I possessed a clerk—a knave who had killed an abbot and fled from the monastery—a man of poetry, wit and sentiment. Whenever the letters lacked for ardor, and the lovers had grown too timid, him I set to forge a postscript, or indite new missives, which the rogue did most prettily, having studied love-making under the monks. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... the critic and to the public, I would wish that this work might be tried by the rules rather of poetry than prose, for according to those rules have been both its conception and its execution; and I feel that something of sympathy with the author's design is requisite to win indulgence for the superstitions ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... wishing for when they pray,—for more riches, and more comfort, and more security, and more importance. And God is such a long way off. I can't feel Him, and the pew hurts my back.' She used to read me some, out of a book of poetry, and one verse I got by heart—I guess ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... excuse me," said Theophilus; "but I cannot help being reminded of what an English reviewer once said,—that a lady's facts have as much poetry in them as Tom Moore's lyrics. Of course poetry is always agreeable, even ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... adjectives. He should know how to sketch a scene, to paint a picture, to give life and action. He should be a poet and a dramatist, a painter and an actor. He should cultivate his imagination. He should become familiar with the great poetry and fiction, with splendid and heroic deeds. He should be a student of Shakespeare. He should read and devour the great plays. From Shakespeare he could learn the art of expression, of compression, and all the secrets of ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... school was the unflinching frankness with which it faced a problem belonging to intimate life and barring public discussion, yet closely connected with the economic conditions of society: the problem of sex. The curious revival of pagan eroticism in lyric poetry and the growing tendency toward a scientific cynicism in fiction were supplemented by attempts to handle sex from the standpoint of modern psychology and social ethics in drama. With works of that class has the name of Frank Wedekind become ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... much afraid 'I say') that so 'great a slip' might be attended with 'still greater' and 'worse': for 'your' Horace, and 'my' Horace, the most charming writer that ever lived among the 'Pagans' (for the 'lyric kind of poetry,' I mean; for, the be sure, 'Homer' and 'Virgil' would 'otherwise' be 'first' named 'in their way') well observeth (and who understood 'human nature' better ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson

... were woven together, and trembled with the electric shock of two souls thrilled with a worship of the beautiful, and the solemn poetry of the past. ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens

... bond of that mutual admiration - or rather mutual hero-worship - which is so strong among the members of secluded families who have much ability and little culture. Even the extremes admired each other. Hob, who had as much poetry as the tongs, professed to find pleasure in Dand's verses; Clem, who had no more religion than Claverhouse, nourished a heartfelt, at least an open-mouthed, admiration of Gib's prayers; and Dandie followed ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a volume of Cowper and found his account of the three pet hares. Ellen read it, and then several of his smaller pieces of poetry. Then followed a long talk about hares and other animals; about Cowper and his friends and his way of life. Time passed swiftly away; ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner

... most entertaining Fables ever written in any language, and made them a model of literary perfection; yet our translators and compilers have somehow neglected him. His Fables are lyric poetry of a high order, and this alone has doubtless been a barrier to a better acquaintance with his work when transferred to our own tongue. Done into prose, the Fables are no longer La Fontaine, but take their place with the ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine

... custom with this good and faithful mother to have a little talk with her boys, every night before their bed time, of what had passed during the day. Sometimes she told them stories, sometimes they repeated poetry. ...
— True Stories about Cats and Dogs • Eliza Lee Follen

... her was August von Shierbrand. He loved her apparently in spite of himself. She did not in the least accord with his romantic ideas of what a woman should be. He was something of a poet, and a specialized judge of poetry, and he liked women of the sort who inspired a man to write lyrics. He had tried unavailingly to write lyrics about Kate, but they never would "go." He ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... poetry and song is there anything more exquisitely touching than the lofty and inspired dirge wailed out in tremulous tones—in memoriam—and ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... here an errant swell hit the vessel a tremendous blow on the broadside, making her roll heavily to starboard, and bringing up through the skylights sounds of breaking goblets thrown from the sideboards in the saloon below, while the passenger who hated marine poetry was capsized from his steamer chair and landed sprawling on the deck. A small group of young people on the forward part of the upper deck were passing the day in watching the swells and forecasting the effect of each upon the steamer, rejoicing in the rush upward followed ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... is under the influence of the emotions we need not go to science to learn, for all human experience and all literature are overflowing with evidence that shows the extent of this relation. Scripture is full of it; the heart in Hebrew poetry represents the entire life, we might almost say. Not less forcible is the language of Shakespeare, as for instance, in ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... his verses may not have understood that he was a poet; but, be it remembered, those verses were in a language not native to the writer. Those who are able to understand such fragments of his patois-poetry as still survive, declare that it is marked by tenderness and verve; even if this be not so, a man may lack the power of expression and yet have the poet's temper; Alain was certainly of a deep and sensitive ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene

... throngs, accompanied by guards of honor; yet perhaps it is well that the idea which I represent should be applauded by crowds and accompanied by guards of honor. The pomp and circumstance of war attract the fancy of the multitude; the armored knight moves across the page of romance and of poetry and kindles the imagination of youth; the shouts of the crowd, the smiles of beauty, the admiration of youth, the gratitude of nations, the plaudits of mankind, follow the hero about whom the glamor of military glory dims the eye ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... I lately remarked in another publication, I know of no other animal of which the quest calls forth the combined characteristics of the ibex, the stag and the tiger-hunter. Some of my own experiences I have described in 'Seonee;' but let those who wish to learn the poetry of the thing read the glowing, yet not less true pages of Colonel Walter Campbell's 'Old Forest Ranger;' and for clear practical information, combined also with graphic description, the works of Captain J. Forsyth and ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... father's house in George Square, Edinburgh. His lameness and solitary habits had made him a good reader, and he used to read aloud to his mother, Pope's translation of Homer and Allan Ramsay's "Evergreen;" his mother had the happiest of tempers and a good love of poetry. In the same year he was sent to the High School, Edinburgh, under the celebrated Dr. Adam, who made him sensible of the beauties of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... of Poetry in the University of Oxford has not forgotten the rock whence he was hewn, this simple story may give an hour of entertainment. I offer it to you because I think you have met my friend Dickson McCunn, and I dare to ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... for fower year,—since he war a boy," continued Mr. McCorkle in a loud whisper. "Allers the same, bless you! Can jerk a rhyme as easy as turnin' jack. Never had any eddication; lived out in Missooray all his life. But he's chock full o' poetry. On'y this mornin' sez I to him,—he camps along o' me,—'Milt!' sez I, 'are breakfast ready?' and he up and answers back quite peert and chipper, 'The breakfast it is ready, and the birds is singing free, and it's ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... historians he did a service to young students of history which was, in its way, unique. He showed them a great historian at work. In his comparison of authorities, in his references to and fro, in his appeal to every source of illustration, from fable to architecture, from poetry to charters, he made us familiar not only with his results, but with his methods of working. It was a priceless experience. Year after year he continued these lectures, informal, chatty, but always vigorous and direct, eager ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman

... the Commedia. Any attempt to explain it, by narrowing that interest to politics, philosophy, the moral life, or theology itself, must prove inadequate. Theology strikes the keynote; but history, natural and metaphysical science, poetry, and art, each in their turn join in the harmony, independent, yet ministering to the whole. If from the poem itself we could be for a single moment in doubt of the reality and dominant place of religion in it, the plain-spoken ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... necessities and experiences of his own heart and history, and so by degrees gained power of the only true kind—that, namely, of rousing the will, not merely the passions, or even the aspirations of men. The poetry in which he had disported himself at college now came to the service of his prose, and the deeper poetic nature, which is the prophetic in every man, awoke in him. Till after they had lived together a good ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... all that ran and swam, and flew, or only grew, possessing that extensive familiarity with things which shows equal sweetness of sympathy and playful penetration. Most refreshing to me was his unstudied lore, the unwritten poetry which common life presents to a strong and gentle mind. It was a great contrast to the subtleties of analysis, the philosophic strainings of which I had seen too much. But I will not attempt to transplant it. May it profit others as it did me in the region where it ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... Steubenville in 1814, of a family of North Carolina Quakers, and as a boy his tastes were as peaceful as those of his ancestors. He had pets of all kinds, and he made collections of birds and insects. He was pretty diligent at school, but his studies there were not of the severer kind. He loved poetry; he founded a circulating library; and both before and after he went to Kenyon College, he was clerk in a bookstore. But deep within this quiet outside was the hot nature which fused the forces of the great war, and shaped ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... has lived in a tenement always. The mother used to take care of her baby when she could, and then leave her to the neighbors. But the mother must have been unusual, too, for she taught Tania all sorts of poetry and music when Tania was only a tiny child. Indeed, Tania knows a great deal more about literature than I do now," confessed Madge honestly. "It isn't so strange, after all, that Tania pretends. Why, she and her mother used to play at pretending ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers

... romance has been from time to time claimed for Vergil's poetry, though those who employ such terms seldom agree in their definition of them. His romanticism may be more easily explained by his early devotion to the Catullan group of poets, and the Celtic traits—whatever they may be—by the close racial affiliations ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... noisy, but they laughed at me mostly. I was rough enough and bad enough in those days; as rough as the rest, and as bad as the rest, I suppose, but yet I seemed to have my notions a little different from the others. "Jake's poetry," they ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... in silence, are forging the thunderbolts and the firebrands. Penetrating into this huge circuit, where all is out of measure, gigantic, the mind cannot repress some movement of terror and wonder; the imagination recals those dread temples which Poetry, of old, had consecrated to the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... Paterson and Henry Lawson were writing for the Sydney 'Bulletin' in 1892 when Lawson suggested a 'duel' of poetry to increase the number of poems they could sell to the paper. It was apparently entered into in all fun, though there are reports that Lawson was bitter about it later. 'In Defence of the Bush', included in this selection, was one of ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

... rather have him come along," decided Robert Day, "than to find the wagon. For he could make a camp anywhere, and speak his poetry all the time. What fun he must have if he wants to stay in the woods all night. I expect if he wanted to hide he could creep into that cart and stretch out, with his face where he could smell the honey and ginger cakes. I'd like to have a cart and ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... for, starting with no other initiation into the mysteries of foreign relations than having had a father born in Wales and having spent his vacations in England, probably in the lake region studying the topography of Wordsworth's poetry,—a certain oft detected resemblance to Wilson must make Wordsworth his favorite poet, as he was Wilson's,—in ten days was he not a great Secretary of State; and in three months the greatest Secretary of State? To be ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous

... to introduce you today to the fairy-land of science - a somewhat bold promise, seeing that most of you probably look upon science as a bundle of dry facts, while fairy- land is all that is beautiful, and full of poetry and imagination. But I thoroughly believe myself, and hope to prove to you, that science is full of beautiful pictures, of real poetry, and of wonder-working fairies; and what is more, I promise you they shall be true fairies, whom you will love just as much when you are ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley

... began to make her bright little needle fly almost as swiftly as if it had been in a sewing-machine. While she sewed she hummed the following words, which, as Uncle Morris said, had more truth in them than poetry: ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester

... themes, but have treated them in the plainest language. I have not done that, not because I have greater austerity than they—by no means, but because I am not quite so daring. Otherwise, I am aware that Catullus has laid down the best and truest regulations governing this style of poetry in his lines: "For it becomes a pious bard to be chaste himself, though there is no need for his verses to be so. Nay, if they are to have wit and charm, they must be voluptuous ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger

... intermitted unless by some overruling necessity. He then enters at large into the advantages of such a practice, and into the mode of conducting it, and proceeds to suggest other subsidiary studies in history, biography, and poetry, concluding with the advice of the serving-man to a young student, in Shakspeare—"Study ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy

... greatcoat-pocket. They must be presented to-night, or the poetry is gone. It's against regulations for me to call at night, but not to leave a packet. I ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... distance from that romantic region, pouring out his sweet music amid the bustle and din of cities. Often, however, did the mountains which had been familiar to him in his childhood lift their snowy peaks into the clear atmosphere of his poetry. Neither was the Great Stone Face forgotten, for the poet had celebrated it in an ode, which was grand enough to have been uttered by its own majestic lips. This man of genius, we may say, had come ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various

... sublime story of Sadak in search of the waters of oblivion the Tales of the Genii. Those who have seen Martin's picture on the subject, have failed almost to recognise the respective limits of poetry and of painting. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... on the word "uncle" explains it as meaning "Rutherfoord, who should have married the Lady Baldoon, was Baldoon's uncle." The poetry of this satire on Lord Stair and his family was, as already noticed, written by Sir William Hamilton of Whitelaw, a rival of Lord Stair for the situation of President of the Court of Session; a person much inferior to that great lawyer in talents, and equally ill-treated by the calumny or just ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... Poetry is the Child of Nature, which regulated and made beautifull by Art, presenteth the most Harmonious of all other compositions; among which (if we rightly consider) the Dramaticall is the most absolute, in regard of those transcendent Abilities, which should waite upon the Composer; who must ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher

... making a break. Dick Savage, twenty, the baker's apprentice; Will Joyce, twenty-two, journeyman blacksmith; and Henry Taylor, twenty-four, tobacco-stemmer—were the other three. They were all of a sentimental cast; they were all romance-readers; they all wrote poetry, such as it was; they were all vain and foolish; but they had never before been suspected of having ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... that the men, though thieves, are kind and friendly, and that the birds upon Furneaux's Land have a sweetness of note unknown here," i.e., at Port Jackson. He would not, in February, have heard the song-lark, that unshamed rival of an English cousin famed in poetry, and the sharp crescendo of the coach-whip bird would scarcely be classed as "sweet." "The tinkle of the bell-bird in the ranges may have gratified his ear; but the likelihood is that the birds which pleased him were the ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... influence, a stronger faith, and a brighter realization of heavenly truths. And there are mediums, too, from whose lips distil a lofty eloquence and a remarkable wisdom upon any or all subjects proposed, with a flow of extemporaneous poetry or of heavenly music which has never been equaled under such circumstances by ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... should be saying peremptorily, "In my opinion this is mental," and there would be no more ground for discussion than, if the assertion were "I prefer the Romanticists to the Classicists," or "I consider prose superior to poetry." ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... single leading principle established or even announced, and without any one attempt at argumentative deduction, though the poet had presented a more than usual opportunity for it, by having previously made public his own principles of judgment in poetry, and supported them by a connected train ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... and to rural occupations. The latter, particularly gardening, served as a counterpoise to the sedentary temptation that would have proved physically injurious; but laying in, as I daily did, a plentiful store of romantic adventure or fascinating poetry for rumination when abroad, my mind was unprofitably occupied at all times, to the exclusion of better things. On Sundays, indeed, I made it a point of conscience to abstain from light reading; and, as far as I could, to banish from my thoughts the ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth

... a practical nature would for some time be esteemed. The stage he considered to be an indispensable resource for settled society, and a chief refiner; not merely interesting as a comment on the history of social happiness by its exhibition of manners, but an agent of good as a school for poetry, in holding up to honor the noblest principles. 'I am too old and too far removed,' he added, 'to seek for or require this pleasure myself, but the cause is not to droop on my account. There's my friend Mr. Jefferson has time and taste; he goes always to the play, and I'll introduce ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge

... in Virginia and the Spanish Main. A Kentish boy is trepanned and carried off to sea, and finds his fill of adventure among Indians and buccaneers. The central episode of the book is a quest for the sacred Aztec temple. The swift drama of the narrative, and the poetry and imagination of the style, make the book in the highest sense literature. It should appeal not only to all lovers of good writing, but to all who care for the record ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

... kept ordering the chauffeur of a hired car to slow down, or stop. The practically minded young man believed that this great gentleman and the three ladies must be slightly mad. It was so queer to stop a car when she was going well just to stare around and talk poetry about ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... to belie its own thoughts A man may play the fool in everything else, but not in poetry Against my trifles you could say no more than I myself have said Agitated betwixt hope and fear All defence shows a face of war Almanacs An advantage in judgment we yield to none Any old government ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger

... apartment Frank met a young woman named France, a fragile, fine-haired, dreamy sort of girl, and he was not surprised to learn that she wrote poetry. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... kept up a pretence of thinking history the greatest of all the arts. She always held her head high among her Sisters. It was only on the sly that she was an omnivorous reader of dramatic and lyric poetry. She watched with keen interest the earliest developments of the prose romance in southern Europe; and after the publication of "Clarissa Harlowe" she spent practically all her time in reading novels. It was not until the Spring of the ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... excellent understanding, well improved by education and travel, he united a peculiar elegance of mind and manners, and the advantages of a pleasing person. It is said he possessed a pretty taste for the fine arts, and had himself attained some proficiency in poetry, music, and painting. His knowledge appeared without ostentation, and embellished by a diffidence that rarely accompanies so many talents and accomplishments, which left you to suppose more than appeared. His sentiments were elevated and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall

... you?" he said. Then he added: "About that knife and the finger-prints on it, if it happens to have recorded any: I've been thinking that you may find yourself suffering from an embarrassment of riches. I know that mine will be on it, and Lady Loudwater's, who used it to cut the leaves of a volume of poetry the day before yesterday, and Hutchings', who cut the string of a parcel of books with it yesterday, and very likely the fingerprints of Lord Loudwater. You know how it is with a knife like that, which lies open and handy. ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson

... the tropics has its grip on ye. Ye're surrounded by a ragin' forest full of disreputable beasts—lions and baboons and anacondas—waitin' to devour ye. The sun strikes ye hard, and melts the marrow in your bones. Ye get similar to the lettuce-eaters the poetry-book speaks about. Ye forget the elevated sintiments of life, such as patriotism, revenge, disturbances of the peace and the dacint love of a clane shirt. Ye do your work, and ye swallow the kerosene ile and rubber pipestems dished up to ye by the Dago cook for food. Ye light ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... of London it is hard to imagine what it will be. Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, with the crowd of lesser arts that belong to them, these, together with Music and Poetry, will be dead and forgotten, will no longer excite or amuse people in the least: for, once more, we must not deceive ourselves; the death of one art means the death of all; the only difference in their fate will be that the luckiest will be eaten the last—the luckiest, or the unluckiest: ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris

... and sweet, Have fooled my reason thus, believe me, Your eyes can only help the cheat, Your smile more thoroughly deceive me. I think it well that men, dear wife, Are sometimes with such madness smitten, Else little joy would be in life, And little poetry be written. ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.

... derived from very ancient sources, and are current in the literature of many lands; some have come to us through the ballads and folk tales of the English people; a few are of quite recent origin; nearly all are the subjects of frequent allusions in poetry and prose and in the conversation of educated people. Care has been taken to exclude everything that is not strictly within the limits of probability; hence there is here no trespassing upon the domain of the fairy tale, the fable, ...
— Fifty Famous Stories Retold • James Baldwin

... no notes of the conversation, in which, as may be guessed, I took but little part. It was rather a monologue on the subject of Arabic poetry, full of the clearest and richest knowledge, and sparkling with those evanescent felicities of diction which can so rarely be recalled. I was charmed out of all sense of time, and was astonished to find, when tea appeared, that more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... writings afford many proofs of his keen interest in the sciences of geology, agricultural chemistry, and political economy, and of his intelligent appreciation of the lessons taught by history. Nor was he insensible to the charms of art, especially those of poetry. His favourite authors among the poets seem to have been Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Wordsworth, and Cowper. His knowledge of the customs and modes of thought of the natives of India, rarely equalled and never surpassed, was more than half the secret of his notable success as an administrator. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... topsail from the upper fore top-gallant sail, and either of these from the fore skysail, the crossjack, or the mizzen-royal, they are those of a man who has mastered a language and discovers himself, to his surprise, talking it fluently. The world of shipping has become articulate poetry to him instead of a ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd

... specimen of that sublime wisdom which first arose in the colleges of the Egyptian priests, and flourished afterwards in Greece; which was there cultivated by Pythagoras, under the mysterious veil of numbers; by Plato, in the graceful dress of poetry; and was systematized by Aristotle, as far as it could be reduced into scientific order; which, after becoming in a manner extinct, shone again with its pristine splendour among the philosophers of the Alexandrian school; was learnedly illustrated with ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus

... kingdom, not only geographically, but commercially.—It is forty miles within the manufacturing circle, passing southward, and from forty to sixty miles around, there is the most industrious space on the globe; while no one can think about Derby, without associating the names of Darwin, in poetry and philosophy; of Wright, in painting; and of the Strutts, as the patrons of all the useful and elegant arts. I entered Derby, therefore, with agreeable associations, and they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various

... changing of scenes and groups, and an enormous quantity of Flemish-woven poetry, the "Ghent Peace" came forward, leading a lion in one hand, and holding a heart of pure gold in the other. The heart, upon which was inscribed Sinceritas, was then presented to the real Prince, as he sat "reposing after the spectacle," and perhaps slightly ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... not precisely like our little American friend whom we call by that name, although, as the lines of poetry quoted above will show, in two ways he is the same as ours: he has a red breast, and he is the bird whom every one loves. Of all the little brothers of the air, in every land and clime, the pretty, jolly, neighborly Robin Redbreast is ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown

... at Venice, is left here for Le Sage, as the nativity of the author of Gil Blas is yet disputed. We look at Rousseau to revert to the social reforms, of which he was the pioneer; at La Place to realize the achievements of the exact sciences, and at St. Pierre to remember the poetry of nature. Voltaire's likeness is not labelled for the same reason that there is no name on the tomb of Ney; both are too well known to require announcement. How incongruous become the associations as we proceed; old Pere la Chaise cheek by jowl with the ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various

... further praises of his poetry and eloquence see the extracts from Fakhr al-Din of Rayy (an annalist of the xivth century A.D.) in De Sacy's Chrestomathie Arabe, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... piece was afterwards claimed by John Phillips, and in Edward Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum, published in 1675, the piece is ascribed by name to his brother John, in evidence of his "vein of burlesque and facetious poetry" (Godwin, Lives of the Phillipses, p. 158). It was a rather popular piece when first published, and was twice ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... is, colors which when combined make up the full beam, are felt to be beautiful when seen simultaneously; that is, the mind is made to delight in the unities of nature. At the basis of music there are certain fixed ratios; and in poetry, of every description, there are measures, and correspondencies. Pythagoras has often been ridiculed for his doctrine of "the music of the spheres;" and probably his doctrine was somewhat fanciful, but later science shows that there is a harmony in all nature—in its forms, in its forces, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... there's nothing in what the Atlantic Cable gives, like that it takes away from the heart of the man who has looked the Sphinx in the face and dreamed with the Brahmin under his own banian. Spare the shrinking Nunas of our poetry ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... in this volume "Taormina" was published in the Century Magazine; the others are new. The intention of the author was to illustrate how poetry, politics, and religion are the flowering of the same human spirit, and have their feeding roots in a common soil, "deep in the general heart ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... rapids. For compensation there is the pleasure of splashing ankle-deep and deeper in the cool current, and casting for trout in the "laughing shallow," which I much prefer to the "dreaming pool." They who choose it may fish from boat or ledge: for me, to wade and cast is the poetry of angling. ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor

... until we were hoarse, we celebrated this dearly won victory. "Thus ended one of several terrible conflicts the men of the Expedition had to go through on their way to the beleaguered city." These lines of poetry, were written shortly after the news of this fierce engagement ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle

... music, poetry, philosophy, and medicine, are destined yet to come from the co-operation of the spirit world. We have no music at present superior to that of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various

... girl, with her lilies and roses, her pencilled brows, her magnificent hair magnificently arranged, with her rich silk and airy lace, and muslin folded and gathered and falling into lines which were the very poetry of attire, unless where a piquant provoking frill, band, or peak, reminded the gazer that the princess was a woman, a mocking mischievous woman, as well as a radiant lady! How he listened to her contradictory words, witty and liquid even in their most ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... as hallow and make the luxury of cottage life—evenings yielded up to cheerfulness, to content and harmony. Between music, and poetry, and painting, my heart was subdued to the sweetest refinements of love. Without the immorality, we had the very atmosphere of a Sybarite indulgence. I was enfeebled by the excess of sweets; and the happiness which I felt ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... may be said to have danced through Harvard College was that of 1829, which has been made by the wit and poetry of Holmes the most eminent class that ever left Harvard. The memory of one lady has preserved for us a picture of the girl Margaret as she appeared at a ball ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford

... Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either it is sublime, or it is not. When once it exists, it exists forever and goes on always increasing. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... hamper himself with biographical baggage. Whatever misgivings and misadventures may beset him in his wayfaring, there is no risk of breaking neck or limb over dates or names. For of dates and names and other solid landmarks there are none to guide us in this misty morning-land of poetry. The balladist is 'a voice and nothing more'—a voice singing in a chorus of others, in which only faintly and uncertainly we sometimes fancy we can make out the note, but rarely anything of the person or history, of the individual singer. In the hierarchy of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie

... pre-Augustan and Augustan periods, unlike Horace, were all well born. Catullus and Calvus, his great predecessors in lyric poetry, were men of old and noble family Virgil, born five years before Horace, was the son of a Roman citizen of good property. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, who were respectively six, fourteen, and twenty years his juniors, were all of equestrian rank. Horace's ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... of Scotland, and the Tales of the Covenanters, and some books of poetry that my aunt has got. But I like Flavel too. ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson

... know how much she was learning, both from the books she read and the daily sacrifices she made. Stories and poetry were her delight, but Mac did not care for them; and since his favourite Greeks and Romans were forbidden, he satisfied himself with travels, biographies, and the history of great inventions or discoveries. Rose despised this taste at first, but soon got interested ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott

... 1613 contains, in connection with the preliminary matter, two pieces of poetry, one signed L'ANGE, Paris, the other MOTIN. They were contributed doubtless by some friend, intended to be complimentary to the author, to embellish the volume and to give it a favorable introduction to the reader. This was in conformity to a prevailing custom of that period. They contain ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain

... the poems in A Shropshire Lad illustrates better than any theory how poetry may assume the attire of reality, and yet in speech of the simplest, become in spirit the sheer quality of loveliness. For, in these unobtrusive pages, there is nothing shunned which makes the spectacle of life parade its dark and painful, its ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman

... saw him reading it once; Wilson took Maud and In Memoriam; Bowers always had so many weights to tally and observations to record on reaching camp that I feel sure he took no reading matter. Bleak House was the most successful book I ever took away sledging, though a volume of poetry was useful, because it gave one something to learn by heart and repeat during the blank hours of the daily march, when the idle mind is all too apt to think of food in times of hunger, or possibly of purely imaginary grievances, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... The poetry of earth is never dead; When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various

... changed our lodgings twice every day, dining at one public house and supping at another. We were well treated, and had every evening a musical party, consisting of Bedouins famous for their performance upon the Rababa, or guitar of the desert, and who knew all the new Bedouin poetry by heart. I here met a man from Aintab, near Aleppo, who hearing me talk of his native town, took a great liking to me, and ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... but easy-going journeyman printer wandered along and started the "Napoleon Weekly Telegraph and Literary Repository"—a paper with a Latin motto from the Unabridged dictionary, and plenty of "fat" conversational tales and double-leaded poetry—all for two dollars a year, strictly in advance. Of course the merchants forwarded the orders at once to New York—and never ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... chance in the field while at work, or at the house, he would stop and read." And this habit was kept up until Mr. Lincoln had found both his life work and his individual expression. Later he devoured Shakespeare and Burns; and the poetry of these masters of the dramatic and lyric form, sprung like himself from the common soil, and like him self-trained and directed, furnished a kind of running accompaniment to his work and his play. What he read he not only held tenaciously, but took into ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... traveling toward Sweden (just as I am going to Paris), and in some little town or other he chanced upon the son of a goldsmith, a young man of remarkable good looks, though they could scarcely equal yours. . . . Baron Goertz discerned intelligence in the young man (just as I see poetry on your brow); he took him into his traveling carriage, as I shall take you very shortly; and of a boy condemned to spend his days in burnishing spoons and forks and making trinkets in some little town like Angouleme, he made a favorite, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... Old Roman Lusitania, but with a wider stretch on the North, and a narrower stretch on the East. So the Portuguese are "Lusians," "Lusitanians," etc., in poetry. Cf. Camoens, Lusiads.] ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... her numerous flirtations can only be equalled by the pathos she has thrown into her work every now and then, as if to temper her brightness with a little shade. Her descriptions of scenery are specially vivid and delightful, and very often full of poetry. She is never didactic or goody-goody, neither does she revel in risky situations, nor give the world stories which, to quote the well-known saying of a popular playwright, 'no nice girl would allow her mother ...
— Mrs. Hungerford - Notable Women Authors of the Day • Helen C. Black

... it must have been," yawned Media, "not a dry brook then in Mardi, not a lake that was not moist. Lachrymose rivulets, and inconsolable lagoons! Call you this poetry, minstrel?" ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... be recovered, in the whole Earse language, five hundred lines of which there is any evidence to prove them a hundred years old. Yet I hear that the father of Ossian boasts of two chests more of ancient poetry, which he suppresses, because they are too ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson

... Euripides Burlesque on the Modern Versification of Ancient Legendary Tales: an Impromptu Epitaph for Mr Hogarth Translation of the Two First Stanzas of the Song 'Rio Verde, Rio Verde', printed in Bishop Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry': an Impromptu To Mrs Thrale, on her Completing her Thirty-Fifth Year: a Impromptu Impromptu Translation of an Air in the 'Clemenza de Tito' of Metastasia, beginning 'Deh! se Piacermi Vuoi' Lines Written under a Print representing ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... valuable and interesting specimen of the mind of the writer. The Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation, the Extract of the Cave of Fancy, a Tale, and the Hints for the Second Part of the Rights of Woman, may, I believe, safely be left to speak for themselves. The Essay on Poetry and our Relish for the Beauties of Nature, appeared in the Monthly Magazine for April last, and is the only piece in this collection which has previously found its way ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... me furious, but no one else, except myself, understood his coarse allusions. Nobody, at least, took up the subject. From poetry the conversation passed to poets in general, and the Commandant made the remark that they were all rakes and confirmed drunkards; he advised me as a friend to give up poetry as a thing opposed to the service, and ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... tower and steeple, and this Dora thought of as a delightful subject for a sketch from the Parsonage garden. She made great friends with Lucy Grantley, the eldest daughter, over their tastes in drawing, as well as in the Waverley novels and in poetry, and was invited to spend a long day at Poppleby and take a portrait ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge

... it," answered Redfield. "It's a kind of housecleaning. The Old West was picturesque and, in a way, manly and fine—certain phases of it were heroic—and I hate to see it all pass, but some of us began to realize that it was not all poetry. The plain truth is my companions for over twenty years were lawless ruffians, and the cattle business as we practiced it in those days was founded on selfishness and defended at the mouth of the pistol. We were all pensioners on Uncle Sam, and fighting ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland

... as she was announced, running up to Madame Bathurst, "and how have you been all this while—my biennial absence in the land of poetry—in which I have laid up such stores of beauteous images and ideas in my mind, that I shall make them last me during my life. Have you read my last? It's surprising, every one says, and proves the effect of climate on composition—quite new—an Italian story of thrilling interest. And you have something ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat

... You don't believe that? Maybe your roads are so good and smooth that things do not shake on the road to town. But back in the Black Swamp of Ohio we had corduroy roads. Did you ever see a corduroy road? It was a layer of logs in the mud. Riding over it was the poetry of motion! The wagon "hit the high spots." And as I hauled a wagon-bed full of apples to the cider-mill over a corduroy road, the apples sorted out by the jolting. The big apples would try to get to the top. The little, runty apples ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette

... the Swiss being under the Empire, or something, and she WOULD go into parallels of Saxon words, and English poetry, such as our Fraulein never troubled us with. But I showed her ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Falk, by Lessing; the Masonic poems of Goethe, and many hints in Wilhelm Meister; the writings of Herder (Classic Period of German Letters, Findel), The Lost Word, by Henry Van Dyke; and, of course, the poetry ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... jumping up to get his hat. "A woman who can take up a man's time, with poetry and dreams, might as well have the whole afternoon. Are you ready? Shall ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... made to the use of leisure hours. Leisure hours can be spent in various ways. For instance, in studying the composition and resolution of forces and the laws of elasticity in a billiard room, the poetry of motion, etc., in a ball room, and the chemical properties of various malt and vinous extracts in another room; but the philosophical reason why certain engineering work is done in the way it is, and the proper way in which new work shall be done of a similar character and original work of any ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various

... a pig-sty, with the most charming litter of little black and white pigs, as nice as guinea-pigs, and their considerably coarser grunting mamma, done to hand. He was a jolly, prosaic man, Master Mayor, very proud of his prosaicness, as you rarely see a real man of his poetry: he maintained, though Mrs. Mayor nearly swooned at the idea, that he would sooner have a pig-sty than a batch of heroes. Perhaps the heroes of Master Mayor's day had sometimes wallowed in the mire to suggest the comparison. ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... lain down to die, and had only succeeded in falling asleep, the Diana of the Tchoupitoulas, ranging the magnolia groves with bow and quiver, came upon them in all the poetry of their hope-forsaken strength and beauty, and fell sick of love. We say not whether with Zephyr Grandissime or Epaminondas Fusilier; that, for the time ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... made Mr. Freely such a delightful companion. He was a very good man, she thought, for she had heard him say at Mr. Luff's, one day, that he always wished to do his duty in whatever state of life he might be placed; and he knew a great deal of poetry, for one day he had repeated a verse of a song. She wondered if he had made the words of the valentine!—it ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot

... racing as have never been seen out of California. As lithe as willow wands, on slender horses as graceful as themselves, they looked like meteors springing through space, and there was no trick of the circus they did not know by instinct, and translate from gymnastics into poetry. Even Rezanov shared the excitement of the shouting, clapping Californians, and Concha laughed delightedly when his cap ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... runnin' so sweet," he confessed. "But, mon! That Muller! He's a braw Hoon an' A'm encouraged by the fine things that the baron said aboot ma poetry. Ech! A've got a graund vairse in ma heid for Mr. Muller's buryin'! Hae ye a seegair aboot ye, Captain Blackie? A' gave ma case to the Duke of Argyle an' he ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace

... so many ages; developing gradually century by century, until at last it has perfected itself into the most beautiful system of evasion and duplicity that the world has ever seen. It ranks as one of the fine Arts with Poetry and Painting. A great Pleader is truly a great Artist, and more imaginative than any other. The number of summonses at Chambers is only limited by his capacity to invent them. Ask any respectable solicitor how many honest ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris

... sort of swaggering cheap-jack penny-a-liner, who swore that there was no man so learned as himself in all Ghadames, and that he would teach me the history of Ghadames, and all the world, for money. He then followed me home, asked me for my journal, and wrote in it five lines of Arabic poetry. Meanwhile I poured him out a cup of tea, putting a large lump of sugar in it. When he had finished his five lines, which he did without being asked, he impudently demanded a dollar for his trouble. I told some Arabs who were present to turn him out of the house. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... honester without hesitation but we should be less likely to say honestest on account of the awkward combination of syllables involved. Adjectives of one syllable usually take the short form but not invariably. The exceptions, however, are more common in poetry than in prose. When any question rises it is usually safer to use the long form of comparison in the case of two-syllable adjectives and to use the short form in the case of one-syllable adjectives. The proper use of the long form ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton

... under the influence of deep feeling, makes more impression than a fine overture played by a full orchestra. In all music there is, besides the thought of the composer, the soul of the performer, who, by a privilege granted to this art only, can give both meaning and poetry to passages which are in themselves of no great value. Chopin proves, for that unresponsive instrument the piano, the truth of this fact, already proved by Paganini on the violin. That fine genius is less a musician ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac

... homesickness. Nothing like them can ever happen again, I know; for it's all gone—settled, sobered, and gone. And whatever wholesomer prose of good fortune waits in our cup, how I thank my luck for this swallow of frontier poetry which I ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister

... an imperfect remembrance of their nursery lives that some people believe that the griefs of one's childhood are light, its joys uncomplicated, and its tastes simple. A clearer recollection of the favorite poetry and the most cherished day-dreams of very early years would probably convince them that the strongest taste for tragedy comes before one's teens, and inclines to the melodramatic; that sentimentality (of some kind) is grateful to the verge of mawkishness; and that simple tastes are rather ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... you dwarf its legs, wings, and general muscular development; but you make its liver grow as large as itself. I have known human beings who practised on their mental powers a precisely analogous discipline. The power of calculating in figures, of writing poetry, of chess-playing, of preaching sermons, was tremendous; but all their other faculties were like the legs and ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... and never looked into by their owners. All the books I had ever read were the Bible, Testament, Prayer Book, and the spelling-book. The old books belonging to the children were an abridgment of the history of England, a small geography, and a little book of poetry. I took such pleasure in reading these books that I could soon repeat the whole pages of them without a single mistake, and the poetry I soon learned from the beginning to the ending ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas

... the sickly grin on Ad's face when we went out to milk the cows next morning that my first effort at poetry had nauseated him; he could not hold his head up all day, to look me in the face, without the ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... Indian poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Thagore, was received here by the University of Prague. Learned professors read lengthy addresses of welcome in Czech, and to their own entire satisfaction; the Indian poet spoke in English and recited poetry in his own language, let us hope also to his own satisfaction. Thereupon Rabindranath Thagore, his hands folded meekly inside his wide sleeves, his head drooping and eyes half closed as becomes a poet of the tender kind, passed out from among us—to travel to Paris in an aeroplane. I do not ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker

... accept them, of course, as coming from the mind of a devout Catholic and Spanish gentleman, who belongs to the seventeenth century; but when once that is agreed upon, there are no difficulties greater than those which we might expect to find in any system of poetry so remote from our English habits of thought. There is, for instance, the Divine Philothea, in other words, our human spirit considered as the destined bride of Christ. This sacred drama, we may well call ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... people, drawn from every nook and corner of the map—pink, yellow, blue, red, and green countries. And though the story of California is not written, in all its romantic details, in the school-books of to-day, it is a part of the poetry of our late American history, full of strange and thrilling scenes, glowing with ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Bailey Aldrich. The author was born at Portsmouth, N. H., in 1836. When quite young his family moved to Louisiana, but he was sent back to New England to be educated, and later he located at New York. He is a well-known writer of both prose and poetry. ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... of the Casa Medici in Via Larga, girls dancing the carola upon the street below, one with a wreath and thyrsus kneeling, another presenting the Magnificent with a book of loveditties. The burden of all this poetry was: "Gather ye roses while ye may, cast prudence to the winds, obey your instincts." There is little doubt that Michelangelo took part in these pastimes; for we know that he was devoted to poetry, not always of the gravest kind. An anecdote related by Cellini may here be introduced, since it ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... lessons, and though the little girls had a good governess, their father chose the books they were to read and the subjects they were to study. Greek, Latin, and mathematics he taught them himself, and besides he took care that they could read and speak French, German, and Italian. They were fond of poetry, and no doubt some of the earliest poems of young Mr. Tennyson were among their favourites, as well as 'Lycidas' and the songs of the cavaliers. Parthy was a better artist and a cleverer musician than Florence, though she could ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang

... heart of Europe. We said as much, a few days ago, to another deputation of your fellow-citizens. We said as much to all the children of that glorious Isle of Erin, which the natural genius of its inhabitants, and the striking events of its history, render equally symbolical of the poetry and the heroism of the nations of the north. Rest assured, therefore, that you will find in France, under the republic, a response to all the sentiments which you ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... see it one day—see it again. I should say? Strange to think that I really was born in Rome. I used to call myself a Roman, you know, and grow hot with pride when I thought of it. Those were dreams. Oh, I was to do wonderful things! Poetry was to make me rich, and then I would go and live in Italy, and fill my lungs with the breath of the Forum, and write my great Epic. How good that we can't foresee ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing

... compiled in order that boys and girls, already perhaps familiar with the great classics of the English speech, may also know something of the newer poetry of their own day. Most of the writers are living, and the rest are still vivid memories among us, while one of the youngest, almost as these words are written, has gone singing to lay down his life for his country's cause. Although no definite chronological ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various

... said he to himself, "because she doesn't happen to see, or because she doesn't wish to see? How can I make her open her eyes? Shall I speak to her coldly or gently, with mirth or with melancholy, in poetry ...
— Adventures in Toyland - What the Marionette Told Molly • Edith King Hall

... where a sentence begins and ends; and paragraphs are few and far between. The language is distributed in a different way, and less articulated than in English. For it was long before the true use of the period was attained by the classical writers both in poetry or prose; it was (Greek). The balance of sentences and the introduction of paragraphs at suitable intervals must not be neglected if the harmony of the English language is to be preserved. And still a caution has to be added on the ...
— Charmides • Plato

... did Milton become acquainted with this tragedy? It was at Naples, according to Cowper ('Milton,' vol. iii, p. 206), that the English poet may first have entertained the idea of 'the loss of paradise as a subject peculiarly fit for poetry.' He may well have discussed sacred tragedies, like those of Andreini, with the Marquis Manso. But Milton had returned to England long before Salandra's poem was printed; nor can Manso have sent him a copy of it, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... thoughtful attentions when you are going away, that go right down to the bottom of your heart, and lift it up and make you feel inclined—as you stand alone by the rail when the sun goes down on the sea—to write or recite poetry and otherwise make ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... been speaking his mind. He now felt calmer and better; and so at last he came back to the palace. But on seeing Prince Prigio, who was lolling in a hammock, translating Egyptian hieroglyphs into French poetry for his mother, the king broke out afresh, and made use of the ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang

... after Theodoric's death, the influence of the German legends on history, and of history on the German legends, became so great that it was impossible for a time to disentangle two characters, originally totally distinct, viz. Thjodrekr of the Edda, the Dietrich of the German poetry on one side, and the King of the Goths, Theodoric, on the other. What had long been said and sung about Thjodrekr and Dietrich was believed to have happened to King Theodoric, while at the same time historical and local elements in the life of Theodoric, residing ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... was a beautiful room. It was lined with books from floor to ceiling, and these books had been selected with the greatest care. Standard works of all sorts and in three languages were to be found on certain bookshelves, also modern works, both poetry and prose, with some of the ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade

... into delicious talk of poetry and romance; and Rose, pulling out her watch, was horrified to find that it ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming

... good—used to sit on the rocks; and Bob had a way of standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders holding her hands, and his face close to hers, and they would repeat over and over their favorite verses of the old tent-maker. They saw only the poetry and philosophy of the lines then—indeed, they agreed that the Wine was only an image, and that what was meant to be celebrated was some divinity, or maybe Love or Life. However, at that time neither of them had tasted the stuff that goes ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... content: Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson were writing for the Sydney 'Bulletin' in 1892 when Lawson suggested a 'duel' of poetry to increase the number of poems they could sell to the paper. It was apparently entered into in all fun, though there are reports that Lawson was bitter about it later. 'In Defence of the Bush', included in this selection, was one of Paterson's ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

... strict reserve. Enough that Mr. Castlewood's wedded life was done with in six months and three days. Lady Castlewood, as she would be called, though my father still was living and his cousin disclaimed the title—away she ran from some dull German place, after a very stiff lesson in poetry, and with her ran off a young Englishman, the present Sir Montague Hockin. He was Mr. Hockin then, and had not a half-penny of his own; but Flittamore met that difficulty by robbing her ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... it meant, of course. It made good poetry and interesting fiction; it rendered history amusing; made ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... proved to the great fury of the people concerned, that the French had no national music, and that it would be so much the worse for them if they ever had any. Their language, so proper to be the organ of truth and reason, was radically unfit either for poetry or music. All national music must derive its principal characteristics from the language. Now if there is a language in Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for it is sweet, sonorous, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... of the participants in this war may be conceived from the awful scene of the siege of Magdeburg; a picture for which, says Schiller, "History has no speech, and Poetry no pencil." "Neither childhood, nor age," another author affirms, "nor sex, nor rank, nor beauty were able to disarm the conqueror's wrath. Wives were mishandled in the arms of their husbands, daughters at the feet of their fathers. Women were ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... recited, but is apt to go to sleep at the recitations of any other poet. 'And yet, surely, he who knows the superior ought to know the inferior also;—he who can judge of the good speaker is able to judge of the bad. And poetry is a whole; and he who judges of poetry by rules of art ought to be able to judge of all poetry.' This is confirmed by the analogy of sculpture, painting, flute-playing, and the other arts. The argument is at last brought home to the mind of Ion, who asks how ...
— Ion • Plato

... one-sided handling, partly in the excess of the one dominant masculine passion, partly by the general presence of egoism; that tendency to self-expression instead of social expression, which so disfigures our art; and this is true also of poetry. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... suffered, so deeply rooted was this first love of his youth. He had cursed her; at this moment he pardoned her. True, she had deceived him; but did he not owe to her the only years of happiness he had ever known? Had she not formed all the poetry of his youth? Had he experienced, since leaving her, one single hour of joy or forgetfulness? In his present frame of mind, his heart retained only happy memories, like a vase which, once filled with precious perfumes, retains the odour until it ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau

... true in love, is the singular mingling of two forms of imaginations, wrongly supposed to be incompatible: ideal aspiration and the sense for the realities of life. Thus defined, modesty not only repudiates that cold and dissolving criticism which deprives love of all poetry, and prepares the way for a brutal realism; it also excludes that light and detached imagination which floats above love, the mere idealism of heroic sentiments, which cherishes poetic illusions, and passes, without seeing it, the love that is real and alive. True modesty implies ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... of the present Volume, generally, accords with those of its successful predecessors. Fact and fancy; sentiment, poetry, and popular science; anecdote and art; love of nature and knowledge of the world—alternate in its columns. In these several departments popular reading has been our study. With this view, we have paid especial attention to the domestic history—the customs, amusements, and peculiarities—of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 12, No. 349, Supplement to Volume 12. • Various

... in the future I do not know. But certainly in this volume he has entitled himself to the gratitude of his own race and to the sympathetic appreciation of all who have its interests and those of true poetry at heart." ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards

... of Landor and Dickens, of Ruskin and Tennyson and Carlyle. Unlike his only rival, he had learnt his art before he began to practise it. Of the early work of the greater artist a good half is that of a man in the throes of education: the ideas, the thoughts, the passion, the poetry, the humour, are of the best, but the expression is self-conscious, strained, ignorant. Thackeray had no such blemish. He wrote dispassionately, and he was a born writer. In him there is no hesitation, no fumbling, no uncertainty. The style of Barry Lyndon ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... was an honored guest in the home of nobility—knowing as only an exile can know "how bitter is the bread of dependence and how steep the stranger's stairs." It was during his exile that Dante completed his immortal Divina Commedia, the child of his thought "cradled into poetry by wrong." Dante never again saw Florence for which he yearned with all the intensity of the Hebrew captives weeping on the rivers of Babylon for a sight of Jerusalem. Death came to free his undaunted soul in the year ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery

... from abroad; of literature there was none, long after Greece had passed its period of heroic poetry. The dwellings of the citizens were low and insignificant, though as time passed on they became more massive and important. The vast public structures of the later kings were comparable to the task-work of the builders of the Egyptian pyramids, and they still strike us with astonishment ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... appointed, and a count came to it, and the case was brought before him for trial. He said he was not much acquainted with law cases, as he was but young, and had only been a short time in office; and also, of all things, he said what he least understood to judge about was poetry. "But let us hear what it was." Then ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson

... freshness; their very friendships are polluted by foul suggestions and memories; they become strangers to all the honorable relations of a pure young life; and thus we see stretching wider and wider around us the circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth, without poetry and without love, without ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... That was true, for she knew nothing about it, having never known the lack of it. He promised that he would become a great artist; that she thought fine and amusing, like a novel. She thought it her duty to behave really like a woman in love. She read poetry; she was sentimental. He was touched by the infection. He took pains with his dress; he was absurd; he set a guard upon his speech; he was pretentious. Frau von Kerich watched him and laughed, and asked herself what could have made ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... Greek poets have this deep sadness. Homer has it, in and through his intense feeling for the beauty and energy of life. There has never been such war-poetry as Homer's, and yet there has never been any which felt more poignantly the senselessness in war. 'And I must come here', Achilles says to his noble enemy at the close, 'to torture ...
— Progress and History • Various

... just about as sensible as a whole lot of those old English verses," declared Elfreda, who was not fond of poetry. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower

... hardly have been so patient of hearing so much poetry, if it had not been for the delight he always took in seeing his wife's opinion sought by a clever man, and he was glad to turn for amusement to Percy's curiosities. Over the mantel-piece there was a sort of trophy ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... "Who's making up poetry about soup?" roared Songbird Powell. But then he grew calmer. "All right, fellows, here goes." ...
— The Rover Boys on the River - The Search for the Missing Houseboat • Arthur Winfield

... of the lake. I lay in my favorite place under a large oak, in the dark foliage of which the birds were singing, while the waves of the lake at my feet were a sweet accompaniment. I was reading the lately published poetry of my favorite bard, Goethe, and had just finished 'The Wandering Fool.' This poem struck my heart as lightning. I dropped the book, looked up to the clouds and shouted to them: 'What are you but wandering fools! Oh, take me with ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach

... priest, the most annoying of all for his obstinate assiduity, sought to secure my affections at all cost. There was not an image profane poetry could afford him, nor a sophism he could borrow from rhetoric, nor wily interpretation he could give to the Word of God, which he did not employ to convert me to his wishes. Here is an example ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy

... send you on a message next time. Mr. Poulter has been waiting these twenty minutes, and I am afraid you are not fit to take a lesson now. Dolores looks quite done up! I shall send you both to lie down on your beds and learn your poetry for an hour. And you must write an apology to Mr. Poulter this afternoon. No, don't go in now. Go up at once, Gillian shall bring your books. Does Miss ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge

... in another have disgusted them altogether. Impertinent and rude things done by THEIR child they thought SO clever! laughing at them as something quite marvellous; her commonplace speeches were said over again as if they had been the finest poetry; and the pretty ways which every moderately good child has were extolled as if the result of her excellent taste, and the choice of her judgment and will. They would even say sometimes that she ought ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald

... ourselves. We were poor, of course; otherwise our air castle would not have been "a dear little house"; it would have been a palatial residence with a dance-hall at the top and a wine-cellar at the bottom thereof. I have always observed that when the money comes in the poetry flies out. Bread and cheese and kisses are all well enough for poverty-stricken romance, but as soon as a poor man receives a windfall his thoughts turn inevitably to a contemplation of the probability of ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... than once in imminent danger of being carried away, and my kit sent flying, during a sudden rush of the excited players. But even such an indignity as this does not touch bottom. Boys have before now made me a "Harbour of Refuge," with the poetry left out, and bricks and various missiles substituted. They have dodged behind me to escape the consequences of "cheekiness" to bigger boys, and have used my canvas as a screen ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... of books for the little ones, better, if possible, than even Dot's Library, which has been so popular. Full of pictures, short stories, and bits of poetry. ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox

... a refined people; but by this I mean the refinement which appreciates and cherishes whatever there is in nature, as manifested through the influence of the softer arts of music and poetry. The effect of music upon the Irish heart I ought to know well, and no man need tell me that a barbarous or cruel people ever possessed national music that was beautiful and pathetic. The music of any nation is the manifestation of its general feeling, ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... pallet on the deck, was only able to bow his head with a gracious accepting smile to the respectful messengers, Niemcivitz stood at the prow, his then bright locks dallying with the sweet zephyrs from the gardened shores, and spoke the general's and his own heartfelt thanks, in a language of poetry that best accorded with his own glowing and his chiefs' gallant feelings, and the generous benedicite ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... subjected. The artless manner in which, in his letter to the sovereigns, he mingles up the rhapsodies and dreams of his imagination, with simple facts, and sound practical observations, pouring them forth with a kind of scriptural solemnity and poetry of language, is one of the most striking illustrations of a character richly compounded of extraordinary ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... Simeon, smiling. "I see you are off upon one of your hobbies. . . . But you will not tell me that the fine rugged epic of Beowulf, to which the historians trace back all that is noblest in our poetry, had lost its generative impulse even so early as Alfred's time. ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... indications of what is to be looked for beyond the Gates. But only those who desire to go that way read the meaning hidden within the words. Scholars, or rather scholiasts, read the sacred books of different nations, the poetry and the philosophy left by enlightened minds, and find in it all the merest materiality. Imagination glorifying legends of nature, or exaggerating the psychic possibilities of man, explains to them all that they find in the ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins









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