"Elegy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which affects no other composition; the place in which they are now commonly found restrains them to a particular air of solemnity, and debars them from the admission of all lighter or gayer ornaments. In this, it is that, the style of an epitaph necessarily differs from that of an elegy. The customs of burying our dead, either in or near our churches, perhaps, originally founded on a rational design of fitting the mind for religious exercises, by laying before it the most affecting proofs of the uncertainty of life, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... distinguished personage, as Thomas Jefferson, for example, he soon has the eyes and the ears of the world; whilst others, more worthy, perhaps, in all the elements of true greatness, are left unnoticed and unknown. This thought awakens my recollection of a stanza in Gray's 'Elegy.' It touches tenderly and beautifully upon the neglect and lack of appreciation often experienced by real beauty, virtue and goodness. Here is ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... liveliness a little Gaelic song, the burlesque elegy of a countryman on the loss of his cow, the comic tones of which, though he did not understand the language, made Waverley laugh more than once. [Footnote: This ancient Gaelic ditty is still well known, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... encouraged to compete for a golden violet and a silver eglantine and pansy. A century later the prizes offered were an amaranthus of gold of the value of 400 livres, for the best ode, a violet of silver, valued at 250 livres, for an essay in prose, a silver pansy, worth 200 livres, for an eclogue, elegy or idyl, and a silver lily of the value of sixty livres, for the best sonnet or hymn in honor of the Virgin Mary,—for religion is mixed up with merriment, and heathen with Christian rites. He who gained a prize three times ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause." To the young, or even the middle-aged, it has little meaning. I met a scholar-soldier in the South who had given expression to the sentiment of his race and generation in an essay—one might almost say an elegy—so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that it moved me well-nigh to tears. Reading it at a public library, I found myself so visibly affected by it that my neighbour at the desk glanced at me ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... differs from narrative poems, which find their material in external events and circumstances. Epic poetry is written in a grand style, generally in pentameter, or hexameter; while the lyric adopts any verse that suits the emotion. The principal classes of lyric poetry are the song, the ode, the elegy, and ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... gentle, pervasive silence which wraps us in a mantle of content. It was in Porlock that Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan," transported, Heaven knows whither, by virtue of the hushed repose that consecrates the sleepiest hamlet in Great Britain. It was at Stoke Pogis that Gray composed his "Elegy." ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... "Gray's Elegy! You'll never do it! Oh, you poor chickens! The Bumble can be a perfect beast sometimes! I say, what was ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... it otherwise? for not in vain That very morning had I turned aside To seek the ground where, 'mid a throng of graves, An honoured teacher of my youth was laid, [Z] And on the stone were graven by his desire 535 Lines from the churchyard elegy of Gray. [a] This faithful guide, speaking from his death-bed, Added no farewell to his parting counsel, But said to me, "My head will soon lie low;" And when I saw the turf that covered him, 540 After the lapse of full eight years, [b] those words, With sound of voice and countenance ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... beautiful allegory, and treated with a delicate art which is in extreme contrast with the body of the 'Golden Ass.' The difference is almost as striking as between Gray's lampoon on "Jemmy Twitcher" and his 'Bard' or 'Elegy'; or between Aristophanes's revels in filth and his ecstatic soarings into the heavenliest regions ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... little circle of friends we may be sure he found admiring listeners. The young General had the romance of a boy on many matters. He delighted in music and poetry. On the last day of his life he said he would rather have written Gray's Elegy than have won a battle. We may be sure that with a gentleman of such literary tastes our friend George would become familiar; and as they were both in love, and both accepted lovers, and both eager for happiness, no doubt ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... are some of the "short and simple annals of the poor." But those of whom Gray spoke rest peacefully in the "country churchyard;" their spirits are in heaven, and their history is embalmed in his own immortal Elegy. But these records are of those who yet live and suffer—"Martyrs ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... looking down the long aisles and arches that had stood so many centuries the political changes of Europe. One morning when the sun was flooding the building and casting the colours of the windows in rich patterns on the floor, I sat under the gallery at the west end and read Shelley's great elegy. I remember those wonderful last lines and I thought how, like an unshattered temple, the great works of literature survive the tempests of national strife. My mind was carried far away, beyond the anxieties ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... lower place to the poet who could order those words "religion's," "Saint Ben," "Psalter" and the rest of them, with such inspired good fortune. And yet we know that Paradise Lost is a greater work than this little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the poet's own elegy. There is ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... when the musicians had ceased playing; but one of the best among them tells us how they also pursued him when he walked in his garden or withdrew to the privacy of his chamber, and if they failed to catch him there, would try to win him with a mendicant ode or elegy, filled, as usual, with the whole population of Olympus. For Leo, prodigal of his money, and disliking to be surrounded by any but cheerful faces, displayed a generosity in his gifts which was fabulously exaggerated in the hard times that followed. His reorganization of the Sapienza has ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... forty years or more. The only apparent indication of a still later composition of the book is that found in the reference to the book of Jasher, chap. 10:13. From 2 Sam. 1:18, we learn (according to the most approved interpretation of the passage) that David's elegy on the death of Saul and Jonathan was written in the book of Jasher. But we are not warranted in affirming that this title was applied to a book of definitely determined contents. It may have been a collection of national songs, enlarged from ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... These are characterized not merely by the brilliancy and purity of the language, but also by the variety and richness of the imagery. Among these the Arion, Pygmalion, and Der Heilige Lucas (St. Luke,) the Sonnets, and the sublime elegy, Rhine, dedicated to Madame de Stal, deserve especial mention, and give him a just claim to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... prodigious Latin elegy "containing the briefest summary of the miseries and calamities of the human race." A painter adds a picture of ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... is seldom heard and the smoke of the factory darkens not the long summer days? Away, in the smooth "Flying Dutchman"; past Windsor's glorious towers and Eton's playing-fields; past the little village and churchyard where a century and a half ago the famous "Elegy" was written, and where, hard by "those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade," yet rests the body of the mighty poet, Gray. How those lines run in one's head this bright summer evening, as from our railway carriage we note the ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... the Four Masters, under the year 1106: 'Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m'Bocht, was killed in the middle of the great stone church of Cluainmacnois, by a party of robbers.' Thus he gets the date of the Book of the Dun Cow. This book contains an elegy on the death of St. Columb. Now, even before 1106, the language of this elegy was so old as to require a gloss to make it intelligible, for it is accompanied by a gloss written between the lines. This gloss ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... upon you and flattery falls sweet on your ear, and you are in danger of forgetting the final end of all ambition read "Grays Elegy." ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... table. When she remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but Arthur seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the fire in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy and brought ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Shelley. After a perplexing search his mother found the desired poems, most of them in first editions, at the Olliers, Vere Street, London. She took home also three volumes by another poet, John Keats, who, she was told, was the subject of an elegy by Shelley. Browning never forgot the May evening when he first read these new books, to the accompaniment, he said, of two nightingales, one in a copper-beech, one in a laburnum, each striving to outdo the other in melody. A new imaginative world was opened to the boy. In Memorabilia he ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... side the plain, Belike they mean, since my best friend must die, To shed their silver drops as he goes by. Not all this day here, nor in coming hither, Heard I the sweet birds tune their songs together, Except one nightingale in yonder dell Sigh'd a sad elegy for Philocel. Near whom a wood-dove kept no small ado, To bid me, in her language, 'Do so too'— The wether's bell, that leads our flock around, Yields, as methinks, this day a deader sound. {275} The little ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... labor which "charms the storms of the soul," (DER SEELE STURM BESCHWORT,) he sought without doubt forgetfulness, which occupation, by rendering the memory torpid, may sometimes procure, though it cannot destroy the sense of pain. At the close of that fine elegy which he names "The Ideal," a poet, who was also the victim of an inconsolable melancholy, appeals to labor as a consolation when a prey to bitter regret; while expecting an early death, he invokes occupation as the last resource against the ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... remember that the jury is not all agreed; for Octavia was of his party, and was of the first quality in Rome: she was also present at the reading of the sixth AEneid, and we know not that she condemned AEneas, but we are sure she presented the poet for his admirable elegy on her son Marcellus. ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... Ode or Elegy rhymed couplets numbering more than thirteen: If shorter it is called a "Ghazal." I have not thought it necessary to preserve ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... be sure, these two are not numbered, so that I was long undecided as to just what their proper position might be. At one time I imagined they must belong at the middle of the cycle where at the end of Elegy XIII Priapus' mother summons her son. Obviously Goethe, just returned north from his two years in Italy (1786-88), and alienated from prim, courtly friends (especially since he had taken a girlfriend into his cottage), had no thought of publication when he indited these ...
— Erotica Romana • Johann Wolfgang Goethe
... with Josiah, Josephus sees the power of fate impelling him to his death, and substitutes the Hellenistic conception of a blind and jealous power for the Hebrew idea of a just Providence. He ascribes to Jeremiah "an elegy on the death of the king, which is still extant,"[1] apparently following a statement in the Book of Chronicles, which does not refer to our Book of Lamentations. Jeremiah is treated rather more ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... steer's work is (At least in this world) finished; The gross amount of turkies Is sensibly diminished: The holly-boughs are faded, The painted crackers gone; Would I could write, as Gray did, An Elegy thereon! ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... love in the past, we find this longing for the infinite breathing through poetry in the form of elegy; in sad recollections of a faded world of demigods and heroes; and in the plaints for the loss of man's native home in Paradise, in the faint and dying echoes of the happy innocence of creation before the first outbreak of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sorrowful destiny of the "infelice Duca," who had once boasted himself to be the favourite of fortune—"Il Figlio della Fortuna"—became the burden of popular poetry, alike in France and Italy. Jean d'Auton himself gives vent to his feelings in an elegy on ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... there are names belonging to the period which suggest genius and influence. Edward Young had just published his "Night Thoughts," Thomson, the poet and author of "The Seasons," and Isaac Watts had just passed away, Lord Littleton had written "The Conversion of St. Paul," Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" was being eagerly read by the people, Blackstone's famous "Commentaries on the Laws of England," had made a profound impression, Johnson had completed his "Dictionary" and Oliver Goldsmith was writing his immortal ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... not the most popular poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry. Gray's "Elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that length. But what shall we say to the "Ars Poetica" of Horace? It is crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation. And yet we should rather call it ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... abolished as a "police regulation" in the reign of Henry I. The custom was still observed in many places, and we often heard the sound of the curfew bell, which was almost invariably rung at eight o'clock in the evening. The poet Gray commences his "Elegy written ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... you will grow acquainted with a pathos that will make all elegies hateful. When I was of your age, I also for a time mistook my desire to write verses for an authentic call of my nature in that direction. But one day as I was going forth for a walk, with my head full of an "Elegy on the Death of Flirtilla," and vainly groping after a rhyme for lily that should not be silly or chilly, I saw my eldest boy Homer busy over the rain-water hogshead, in that childish experiment at parthenogenesis, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... absolute identity of sound with an equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Hood abounds in examples of this sort of fun—only that his analogies are of a more subtle and perplexing kind. In his elegy on the old ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... other gifts, I give you this, Who took from you so much, so carelessly, On your far brows a first and phantom kiss, On your far grave a careful elegy. For one who loved all life and poetry, Sorrow in music bleeding, And friendship's last confession. But even as I speak that ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... sambuko. Elder pliagxa. Eldest (first born) unuanaskito. Elect (choose) elekti. Elect (by ballot) baloti. Election elekto. Elector elektanto. Electric elektra. Electricity elektro. Electrify elektrigi. Elegance eleganteco. Elegant eleganta. Elegy elegio. Element elemento. Elementary elementa. Elephant elefanto. Elevate altigi. Elevation (height) altajxo. Elf koboldo, feino. Elicit eltiri. Elide elizii. Eligible elektebla. Eligibility elektebleco. Eliminate elmeti. Elision ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... obsessions of women whose lives in this fashion or that have missed their flowering. Many of the inquiries are sympathetic, tender, penetrating, but most of them incline toward timidity and tameness. Their note is prevailingly the note of elegy; they are seen through a trembling haze of reticence. It is as if they had been made for readers of a vitality no more abundant than that of their ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... consisted of an old shatter'd press, and one small, worn-out font of English which he was then using himself, composing an Elegy on Aquila Rose, before mentioned, an ingenious young man, of excellent character, much respected in the town, clerk of the Assembly, and a pretty poet. Keimer made verses too, but very indifferently. He could not be said to ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... the ballads. Nowadays a poet makes a poem, and it is printed with his name upon the title-page. The poem belongs to him, and is known by his name. We say, for instance, Gray's Elegy, or Shakespeare's Sonnets. But many people helped to make the ballads. I do not mean that twenty or thirty people sat down together and said, "Let us make a ballad." That would not have been possible. But, perhaps, one man heard a ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... “The Visions,” an elegy, the first of the poems in Anna Seward’s “Poetical Works,” having reference to the ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... from foot. "Sweet assurance of a look." A favourite quotation of Lamb's (here adapted) from Matthew Roydon's elegy ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... elegy upon the death of Thyrza, "far too beautiful," says Moore, "and too pure to have been inspired by a mortal being," what pathos, what sensitiveness! What charm in his sonnets to Guinevre! What soft melancholy, what profound and intimate knowledge of the immortality and spirituality ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... hair-bottomed mahogany chairs around the walls. The table had a very literary air, being strewed with sporting magazines, odd numbers of Bell's Life, pamphlets, and papers of various descriptions, while on a sheet of foolscap on the portfolio were ten lines of an elegy on a giblet pie which had been broken in coming from the baker's, at which Mr. Jorrocks had been hammering for some time. On the side opposite the fire-place, on a hanging range of mahogany shelves, ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... Civic Function" showed what a hand had been lost to Punch; but it was his delightful "New Year's Ode: To the Winner of the St. Nisbett—Season, 1844," that was the best of his rare contributions. It was at once an elegy of Mrs. Nisbett, and a prayer and prophecy that she might again be seen on the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... are at all times interesting, if not constantly reliable. After a reading of Gray's "Elegy" by a fourth standard class, the boys were asked what was meant by "fretted vaults," and one youth replied—"The vaults in which these poor people were buried; their friends came and fretted over them." ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... him; but be there this evening at nine. Crevel is at Corbeil with Monsieur Lebas; so I am sure he will bring no princess to his little palace. I have made arrangements here to be free for the night and get back before Marneffe is awake. Answer me as to all this, for perhaps your long elegy of a wife no longer allows you your liberty as she did. I am told she is still so handsome that you might play me false, you are such a gay dog! Burn this note; I am suspicious of ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... can only call the sense of the Eternal. How beautiful, how consoling, that her last book should have been that translation, such as only one who was at once true poet and true scholar could have made, of the sweetest medieval elegy 'The Pearl'!" And Miss Bates, in her preface to the posthumous volume of "Folk-Ballads of Southern Europe", illumines for us the scholarship which went into ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... lion spring had he answered Jonathan's cry for help; how had he bestrode his fallen friend, covering him with his battered shield; mowing a way through the ranks of the Philistines, how had he borne him off to a place of safety, or falling in the attempt, left others to compose their elegy, and sing, They were pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided! God is a very present help in time of trouble; but there was no help for Jonathan in David. Far away from that bloody field, his good will availed Jonathan nothing—beyond embalming his rare virtues in immortal ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... reached a high degree of civilization at a very early period. They have always been distinguished by a love of poetry, especially for the elegy, and they abound in tales, legends and proverbs. Until the middle of the twelfth century they had their own independent kings, since then they have been alternately conquered by the Russians and Swedes; but like the Poles, they have preserved a strong national ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... gets in Hebrew to the best heroines of the troubadours. Immanuel and she exchange verses, but the path of flirtation runs rough. They are parted, she, woman-like, dies, and he, man-like, sings an elegy. Even more to Immanuel's credit is his praise of his own wife. She has every womanly grace of body and soul. On her he showers compliments from the Song of Songs and the Book of Proverbs. If this be the true man revealed, then his light verses of love ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... and of "chaplain" synonymous. Here too there gathered, as also to the Mission House higher up, many a civilian and officer who sought the charms of that Christian family life which they had left behind. A young lieutenant commemorated these years when Brown was removed, in a pleasing elegy, which Charles Simeon published in the Memorials of his friend. Many a traveller from the far West still visits the spot, and recalls the memories of William Carey and Henry Martyn, of Marshman ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... of Naples, and brother to Alfonso Duke of Calabria, a manuscript in folio containing the 'less rude' poems of the old Tuscan writers which Lorenzo de Medici had promised him at Pisa in 1465; and in concert with the most erudite scholars of his time, that same Alessandro wrote a Latin elegy on the death of the divine Simonetta—sad and melting numbers after the manner of Tibullus. Another Sperelli—Stefano,—was during the same century in Flanders, in the midst of all the pomp, the extravagant elegance, the almost fabulous magnificence of the court of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... Array for this county, and on May 28, 1645, had the honour of entertaining his sovereign at Cotes, after which he was fined 1114l. by the parliamentary sequestrators. He was the last of the family who resided at Cotes; and amongst his poems is "An Elegy on the Death of my never enough lamented master, King Charles I." The others are chiefly of a melancholy turn. Sir Henry, his second son, died soon after his father, unmarried; whereupon his title and estate went to his next brother Sir Gray, who, after the death ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... inferred from a striking essay upon the 'Wealth of Nature,' which he contributed to the 'Saturday Review' of September 24, 1859.[76] It may be considered as a sermon upon the text of Gray's reflections in the 'Elegy' upon the 'hearts once pregnant with celestial fire' which lie forgotten in the country churchyard. What a vast work has been done by the unknown! what must have been the aggregate ability of those who, in less than thirty generations, have changed the England of King Alfred into the ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... empire, was to be sacrificed to the mad notion of petty "State Sovereignty," by a sworn band of desperadoes. How sad when other generations would ask, where is the Federal Government, to be answered only by poets, who would sing her elegy, as in the past they have sang that of the ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... Spoon River Anthology was a new book, but that it was a new book from America. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported from Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' People in England who heard of Main Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street; with the principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I practically identified the boarding-house ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... for Mr. Congreve's Comedies, many of which he had seen acted; and was partial to Mr. Gay's Trivia, which brought him many a recollection. He would also listen to Pope. But of the more modern poetry I think Mr. Gray's Elegy pleased him best. He would laugh over Swift's gall and wormwood, and would never be brought by my mother to acknowledge the defects in the Dean's character. Why? He had once met the Dean in a London drawing-room, when my grandfather ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... up the church which gave rise to Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," intending when we got there to have a little scene over it; Mr. S., in all the conscious importance of having been there before, assuring us that he knew exactly where it was. So, after some difficulty with our coachman, and being stopped at one church which would not ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... true only in a limited sense. It is true that the Puritan element in the Horton series of poems becomes more patent as we pass from the two lyrics to the mask of Comus, and from Comus to the elegy of Lycidas, just as, in the corresponding periods of time, the evils connected with the reign of Charles I. and with Laud's crusade against Puritanism were becoming more pronounced. But we can hardly regard Milton as ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... definite proof of the date of publication, however, is found in the fourth Eclogue. It contains a long poem called The towre of vertue and honour, which is really a highly-wrought elegy on the premature and glorious death, not of "the Duke of Norfolk, Lord High admiral, and one of Barclay's patrons," as has been repeated parrot-like, from Warton downwards, but of his chivalrous son, Sir Edward Howard, Lord High Admiral for the short space of a few months, who perished ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... will be begun three days before the advent of the Messiah. Then he will appear in Palestine, and will utter a lament over the devastation of the Holy Land, and his wail will be heard throughout the world. The last words of his elegy will be: "Now peace will come upon earth!" When the evil-doers hear this message, they will rejoice. On the second day, he will appear again and proclaim: "Good will come upon earth!" And on the third his promise will ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... Hogarth, within a month, replied by caricaturing Churchill as a bear with torn clerical bands, paws in ruffles, a pot of porter in his right hand, and a knot of LIES and North Britons in his left. Churchill threatened him with a renewed and severer assault in the shape of an elegy, but was dissuaded ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... the want. The reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could not fail, if he had any ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... earliest volume of verse (1796) in a certain diffused softness and gentle sensibility. This elegiac tone appears particularly in effusions like "Happiness," "The Sigh," "To a Young Ass," "To the Autumnal Moon," "Lines on an Autumnal Evening," "To the Nightingale"; in "Melancholy: A Fragment" and "Elegy; imitated from Akenside," both in the "Sibylline Leaves" (1797); and in numerous "lines," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and "stanzas." [14] Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and parodied himself—and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... about the city that he was mad. He then secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... two of the chief visitations of the Black Death (1361 and 1369), and a few years earlier the poet of the "Vision" had given voice to the sufferings of the poor. It was not, however, the mothers of the people crying for their children whom the courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the year 1369; the woe to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a princely widower temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first wife. In 1367 the Black Prince was conquering Castile (to be lost again before the year was out) for that interesting protege of the Plantagenets ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... said to be an English translation of "The Student of Salamanca," London, 1847. An excellent French version is that of R. Foulch-Delbosc, "L'tudiant de Salamanque," Paris, 1893. Mary J. Serrano has made splendid translations of "The Pirate" and "To Spain: An Elegy," Warner's Library of the World's Best ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... eyes are like black holes, burnt by torches in Tyrian tapestry!" than to cry out, as Antony cries out, for the hot kisses of Egypt? Obviously the madness of physical desire is a thing that can hardly be tempered down to the quiet stanzas of Gray's Elegy. But it is not in itself a wicked thing; or the world would never have consecrated it in the great Love-Legends. One may admit that the entrance of the Nubian Executioner changes the situation; but, after all, the frenzy of the girl's request—the terror of that Head upon ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... into the background. So when the world has admitted that a poet has disputed the supreme palm of epic with Homer and Virgil, it hardly cares to remember that he has also challenged all rivals in such forms as the Pastoral Elegy, the Mask, and the Sonnet. De minimis non curat might be applied to such cases without any very violent extravagance. The first thought that must always rise to the mind at the mention of Milton's name must be the stupendous ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... I wrote an Elegy which may be found in the second volume of my works, a few lines of which I ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... imagination, to the vicinity of the galleries devoted to the men of the Revolution and the campaigns of '92; amid the smoke of conflict ever appears that resolute, olive face with the dark eye fixed and the thin lip curved in decision or expectancy. We mechanically repeat Campbell's elegy as we mark "Hohenlinden," and linger with patriotic gratitude over "Yorktown," notwithstanding the absurd prominence given to the French officers; Conde, Turenne, Moreau, Lannes, Massena, and Lafayette fight over again before us the wars of the Fronde, the Empire, or the Republic. ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection. The most famous English ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Inedited Poetical Miscellanies, brings charges of extreme penuriousness against him, but of his generous treatment of contemporary writers there is abundant testimony. His only works published during his lifetime were four poems, one of which is the elegy on Sidney which appeared in The Phoenix Nest (1593), and the Tragedy of Mustapha. A volume of his works appeared in 1633, another of Remains in 1670, and his biography of Sidney in 1652. He wrote two tragedies on the Senecan ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... only that it might find acceptance with the public, but also that it would confer lustre upon the memory of a poet whom he sincerely admired. No criticisms upon Shelley's works are half so good as his own. It is, therefore, interesting to collect the passages in which he speaks of an elegy only equalled in our language by "Lycidas", and in the point of passionate eloquence even superior to Milton's youthful lament for his friend. "The 'Adonais', in spite of its mysticism," he writes to Ollier, "is the least imperfect of my compositions." "I confess I should be surprised if that ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Campbell is best remembered by such vigorous poems as "Ye Mariners of England," and "The Battle of the Baltic," which express a tense and elevated British patriotism. All the more impressive for that very reason is his elegy in honour of a sailor of another nation, whose merits as a man and whose charm as a writer Campbell had recognised from his ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... the wail of tree, The words the winds and waters say, Make up that general elegy, Whose ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... wrote him a fine elegy (p. 115); and Domitius Marsus a neat epigram. The former promised him an immortality equal to Homer's; the latter sent him to Elysium at Virgil's side. These excessive eulogies are the more remarkable in that Tibullus stood, proudly ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... while at Chiswick he published, in addition to instalments of the "Iliad," two pieces of considerable merit, although they are scarcely regarded by the critics of this age with the enthusiasm they excited in Pope's earliest admirers. One is the celebrated "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," which perhaps owes some of its reputation to the difficulty experienced in identifying the "ever injur'd Shade" intended. She is now understood to have been a much-persecuted Mrs. Weston, who, although she suffered many griefs, did not (as her poet implies) ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... celebrated sonnet, narrating a dream whose prophecy was accomplished by the death of Laura. It took place the night on which the vision arose amid his slumber. Dr. Darwin extended the thought of that sonnet into the following elegy:— ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... This is in a minor key and instead of representing the abandon of the dance, it seems rather to depict a melancholy lover allowing his eyes to travel slowly around the ballroom in a futile search of his heart's desire. The prevailing tone of the composition rather is that of an elegy—the burial of fond hopes. Stephen Heller, pianist and composer, tells of meeting Chopin in the store of a Paris music publisher. Heller had come in to order all the valses. Thereupon Chopin asked him which he ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... damaged press, on which Franklin exercised his skill in repairing, and a small worn-out font of type. Keimer himself, who seems to have been a grotesque compound of knave and crank, was engaged at once in composing and setting up in type an elegy on the death of a prominent young man. He is the only poet to my knowledge who ever used the composition-stick instead of a pen for the vehicle of inspiration. The elegy may still be read in Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia, and on perusing it we may ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... heightened, that the homefelt joy may be more instantly crushed. We know we shall not see dear darling Olivia again for a long, long time; and feel we want a pause and a little diversion—so we will go back to Bill the songster for amusement, and take it if we can; and here is for the purpose Bill's "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog," alas! taught him, too, by honest Mr Williams; we only hope young, sturdy farmers have strong nerves, and don't break their hearts in love's disappointments. Here is Dick's Elegy; and as we, too, have a Moses at home of a "miscellaneous education," we will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Norton's funeral elegy on Ann Bradstreet, the Eve of our female minstrelsy?" interrogated Miss Hurribattle; "there are two lines in it which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... he, with a deeply-drawn sigh. "You cannot, at least, prevent her image from being enshrined in my heart. No, Julia! even when thou descendest to the grave, thy remembrance will cause thee to live in my imagination, and I shall thus write thine elegy: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... and "in the bleak December" the mortal remains were followed from the temple where his youth worshipped, to the snow-clad knoll at Greenwood; garlands and tears, the ritual and the requiem, eulogy and elegy, consecrated the final scene. By a singular coincidence, the news of his decease reached the United States simultaneously with the arrival of the ship in James River with the colossal bronze statue of Washington, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... timbers strain to hold the dead and the living, the ploughmen, the carpenters, the fox-hunting gentlemen and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join together in syllabling the sharp-cut words, which for ever slice asunder time and the broad-backed moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despair and triumph, but for the most part good sense and jolly indifference, go trampling out of the windows any time ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Church of England, and proceeded to India as a chaplain. In addition to his chaplaincy, he held the office of preceptor to one of the native princes of Hindostan. He died at Bhoog, in the kingdom of Cutch, on the 25th of September 1830; and if we add that he was a man of remarkable learning, his elegy may be transcribed ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... expedition to the library. What shall I bring? There is Mosheim's 'Ecclesiastical Ancient History'; that has a solid, venerable sound. Or, if you prefer poetry, I will get Gray's 'Elegy.' That cannot be a literary mushroom, for he was twenty years writing it. But perhaps it is Tupper you would like. That would suit your ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... a Writer of Epic and Elegy.—Epic poetry narrates in grand style the achievements of heroes—the poet telling the story as if present. It is simple in construction and uniform in meter, yet it admits of the dialogue and the episode, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... Prospect of Death Verses—"When pride and envy, and the scorn" Fragment—"Oh! thou most fatal of Pandora's train" "Loud rage the winds without.—The wintry cloud" To a Friend in Distress Christmas Day Nelsoni Mors Epigram on Robert Bloomfield Elegy occasioned by the Death of Mr. Gill, who was drowned in the River Trent, while bathing Inscription for a Monument to the Memory of Cowper "I'm pleased, and yet I'm sad" Solitude "If far from me the Fates remove" "Fanny! ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... professors at the Bourges College, nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy, melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called Tristesse (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems Paquita la Sevillane and Le Chene de la Messe; three sonnets, a description of the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, with a tale called Carola, published as the ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... myself—the best or none! And I found her, Piers; I found her sitting at a cottage door by Enniscorthy, County Wexford, where for a time I had the honour of acting as tutor to a young gentleman of promise, cut short, alas!—'the blind Fury with the abhorred shears!' I wrote an elegy on him, which I'll show you. His father admired it, had it printed, and gave me twenty pounds, like the gentleman ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... Pope is his especial favourite; and if anything in verse has his heart, it is the "Rape of the Lock." Peter Pindar he partly dislikes, but Anstey, the "Bath Guide," is high in his estimation; and with him "Gray's Odes" stand far above those of Collins'. Of the "Elegy in a Country Church" he thinks, as he says, "like the rest of the world." "Shenstone's Pastorals" he has read. Burns he praises, but in his heart thinks him a "wonderful clown," and shrugs his shoulders at his extreme popularity. He says as little about Shakespeare ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... imitators, and the new era had not dawned. Goldsmith and Gray, both recently dead, serve to illustrate the condition in which the most exquisite polish and refinement of language has been developed until there is a danger of sterility. The 'Elegy' and the 'Deserted Village' are in their way inimitable poems: but we feel that the intellectual fibre of the poets has become dangerously delicate. The critical faculty could not be stimulated further without destroying ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... him, Writers of Rome and Greece. This application to Milton of a line from the last elegy (25th) in the second book of Propertius is not only an example of Addison's felicity in choice of motto for a paper, but was so bold and well-timed that it must have given a wholesome shock to the minds of many of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... time after, when despair had sunk into a softened recollection, that it was possible even to breathe forth that wail over the Flowers of the Forest which all Scotland knows. In the first shock of such an appalling event there is no place for elegy. There was a broken cry of anguish throughout the country, echoed from castle and cottage, where the poor women clung together, mistress and maid equal in the flood of common loss: and there was at the same time a strained and terrible rallying of ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... similar thought in His inimitable elegy, which every reader will immediately recollect. Can it be imagined, that nature, which does nothing in vain, nor indeed without a reference to the being who is eminently signalized as lord of the lower creation, has been at pains ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... places, my sorrow is not really and truly poignant. I write elaborately, for that is my habit, and habits are less easily broken than hearts. I could no more 'dash off' this my cri de coeur than I could an elegy on a broomstick I had never seen. Therefore, reader, bear with me, despite my sable plumes and purple; and weep with me, though my prose be, like those verses which Mr. Beamish wrote over Chloe's grave, 'of a character to cool emotion.' For indeed my anguish is very real. The collection I had ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... all the bards of other days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could bring to that one simple phrase What were not rather loss than gain; That elegy so briefly fine, That epic writ in half a line, That little which so much conveys, Whose silence is a hymn of praise And ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various |
