"Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the songs of the Brahmin muse, with as keen a relish as the most devout Christian does the hymns of Dr. WATTS. Melody comes of Heaven, and is a gift vouchsafed to all generations, and all kinds of men. In proof of this, let us adduce a single extract from the great epic of the Hawaiian poet, POPPOOFI, entitled "Ka ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... great epic was called by him a comedy because its ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of the "Venus" and the "Lucrece," said finely of Shakespeare "Shakespeare could not have written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought." This prodigality of nature is exemplified equally in his Sonnets. The copious selection here given (which from the wealth of the material, required greater consideration than any other portion of the Editor's ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Maya seems to have existed from the remotest times in the meridional parts of Hindostan. Valmiki, in his epic poem, the Ramayana, said to be written 1500 before the Christian era, in which he recounts the wars and prowesses of RAMA in the recovery of his lost wife, the beautiful SITA, speaking of the country inhabited by ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... of Scott's creations is almost the least of his great qualities. It is the universality of his sympathy that is so truly great, the justice of his estimates, the insight into the spirit of each age, his intense absorption of self in the vast epic of human civilization. What are the old almanacs that they so often give us as histories beside these living pictures of the ordered succession of ages? As in Homer himself, we see in this prose "Iliad" of modern history the battle of the old and the new, the heroic defense ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... profess to think - the barbarism of the 'Iliad' the highest flight of epic poetry; if Homer had sung this great battle, how glorious we should have thought it! Beyond a doubt, man 'yet partially retains the characteristics that adapted ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... in the beast-epic called Reynard the Fox. Nodel, the lion, represents the regal element of Germany; Isengrin, the wolf, represents the baronial element; and Reynard, the fox, the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... were probably more full-flavoured, more soul-satisfying, than those of Mr. Herdman, who, being a practical man of business, and having a sense of responsibility, would only talk common-sense, and would promise no more than he could hope to perform. Mr. O'Connor speaks in the epic style. He reminds you of Bombastes Furioso, or Ancient Pistol, with a subtle admixture of Falstaff and Parolles. He belongs to the lime-light and blue fire school of oratory, and backs up a vivid imagination with a virulent hatred of England. The raging sea of sedition ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... below, and we said to ourselves, that, beautiful as the land had been through which we had already passed, we were now entering on a Nature of more heroic mould, mightier contours, and larger aspects. We were henceforth to walk in the company of great rivers: the Susquehanna, like some epic goddess, was to lead us to the Lehigh; the Blue Mountains were to bring us to the Delaware; and the uplands of Sullivan County were to bring us to—the ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... Sin-liqi-unninni, and arranged upon an astronomical principle. Each division contains the story of a single adventure in the career of Gilgamesh. The whole story is a composite product, and it is possible that some of the stories are artificially attached to the central figure. (See GILGAMESH, EPIC OF.) ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... some of us to hide our light under the bushel of silence. There was the Honorable Poultry Tickletoe, the historian, whose articles on the shoddy quality of the modern Panama hat have created such a stir throughout the hat trade; Mr. William Darlington Ponkapog, the poet, whose epic on the "Reign of Gold" is one of the longest, and some writers say the thickest, in the English language; James Whistleton Potts, the eminent portraitist, whose limnings of his patients have won him a high ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... Forbes's book on Glaciers called an epic poem, and not without reason: but what gives that noble book its epic character is neither the glaciers nor the laws of them, but the discovery of those laws: the methodic, truthful, valiant, patient battle between man and nature, his final victory, his wresting from her the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... stated the hunchback. "But—please—do not look so shocked. I assure you I do not commonly pick young gentlemen's pockets. It is a vulgar pastime, and I am an accomplished villain. Why, once upon a time, I wrote an epic poem. What mere larceny can compare with that fell deed! Besides, this particular outrage upon the sanctity of your overcoat was not without justification. Observe: Ichi, the beast, picks Little Billy's pocket, and the way to Fire ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... of the literature of the middle ages culminates in the Christian poet, Dante. History, theology, politics, paganism, sweet and melancholy elegies, flashes of fiery indignation, all men and all generations, meet in his majestic epic. Yet the closest unity is preserved through this astonishing range of subjects; one sublime idea broods over its every line,—the idea of a God of perfect justice—of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... meekly, and borrowed fourpence of the operatic villain. Then he took the 'bus for Scotland Yard. There was a not ill-looking servant girl in the 'bus. The rhythm of the vehicle shaped itself into rhymes in his brain. He forgot all about his situation and his object. He had never really written an epic—except "Paradise Lost"—but he composed lyrics about wine and women and often wept to think how miserable he was. But nobody ever bought anything of him, except articles on bacon-curing or attacks on vestrymen. He was a strange, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... various spheres of German society is therefore not dramatic, but epic. Each of them begins to be self-conscious and to press its special claims upon the others not when it is itself oppressed, but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation, create a sociable ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... direction was incomplete owing to bodily fatigue. Hence it lay open to assault, at the mercy of a thousand and one crowding thoughts and perceptions. And over these he desired to gain ascendency—to drive, rather than be driven by them. The epic of his three-score years, from its dim, illusive start to this dramatic and inexorable finish—but instantly disclosed to him in the reluctant admissions of the good-hearted Irish doctor—flung by at a double, in coloured ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... detailed the adventures of this amazing horse and predatory cow. Somewhere near the middle of the epic little Royal Beaudry usually dropped asleep. The rhythmic tale always comforted him. These nameless animals were very real friends of his. They had been companions of his tenderest years. He loved them with a devotion from which no fairy ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... Savonarola and Florence to new levels; a great cathedral inspires Michael Angelo's great dome; a Divine Saviour and His transfiguration exalt Raphael; Paradise explains Dante; listening to the sevenfold Hallelujah chorus of God arouses the sweep and majesty of Milton's epic; the woes of three million slaves made eloquence possible for Phillips and Beecher. The saving of a Union, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal, represented a cause into which Lincoln could fling himself. The thought of meanly losing ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... passed the time in ineffectual overtures to relieve my father of the little girl,—who still clung nestling to his breast,—in a long epic, much broken into episodes, of the causes which had led to her dismissal of the late cabman, who, to swell his fare, had thought proper to take a "circumbendibus!"—and with occasional tugs at her cap, and smoothings ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... This is an epic of the unwearied God, and the fainting strength of man. For splendor of imagery, for majesty and elevation, it is one of the supreme things in literature. Perhaps no other Scripture has exerted so profound an influence upon the world's leaders. Luther read it in the fortress of Salzburg, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... Admirals and Wing-and-Wing were given to the public in 1842, both of them taking a high rank among Cooper's sea-tales. The first of these is a sort of naval epic in prose; the flight and chase of armed vessels hold us in breathless suspense, and the sea-fights are described with a terrible power. In the later sea-tales of Cooper, it seems to me that the mastery with ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... embellished all he touched, but only that he enlivened it. Notwithstanding all that one could say about it, this school introduced the old Gaelic spirit into a poetry which had been till then chiefly Christian or German. Our epic poems are of German origin, and the Table Round is of Celtic origin. Sensual and light, witty and delicate, descriptive and charming, these pleasing romances are never masculine, and become too often effeminate ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... long German and Turkish fronts. Then he led forth his forty-four men and marched, amid new ovations, all through Stamboul, across the great bridge to Galata, to the deck of the steamship General, at the head of his little band, now grown epic, amid the cheers of Byzantium, on which he and his officers had never set foot before—always in the clear blue and sunlight of this ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the hot ferment which the Revolution had left in men's veins. And they were not exhausted, for the very last fight which the French fought was the finest of all. Proud as we are of our infantry at Waterloo, it was really with the French cavalry that the greenest laurels of that great epic rested. They got the better of our own cavalry, they took our guns again and again, they swept a large portion of our allies from the field, and finally they rode off unbroken, and as full of fight as ever. ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Berta I should go to London oftener,' said Picotee, to turn the conversation. 'But she lives mostly in the library. And, O, what do you think? She is writing an epic poem, and employs Emmeline ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... and we understand how Browning, no friend of the conventions of poetic art, entered on and closed his giant task with an invocation to the "Lyric Love," as it were the Urania, or heavenly Muse, of a modern epic. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... his greatest work was done after this misfortune overtook him. As a poet he stands second only to Shakespeare. His early poems, "Comus," "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and "Lycidas," are very beautiful, and his "Paradise Lost" is the finest epic poem in the English language. ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... translation was undertaken from a desire to lay before the English-speaking people the full treasury of epical beauty, folklore, and mythology comprised in The Kalevala, the national epic of the Finns. A brief description of this peculiar people, and of their ethical, linguistic, social, and religious life, seems to be called for here in order that the following poem may ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... the Tartar races, and therefore probably to the Japanese, than the races of Europe proper. Again, through Longfellow, the value of Finnish poetry to English poetry was first suggested, and I think you know that Longfellow's Indian epic, "The Song of Hiawatha," was modelled entirely ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... would add sundry volumes full of tales to those hitherto translated; and here the Wortley Montagu copy can be taken as a test. We may, I believe, safely compare the history of The Nights with the so-called Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, a collection of immortal ballads and old Epic formulae and verses traditionally handed down from rhapsode to rhapsode, incorporated in a slowly-increasing body of poetry and finally welded together about the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... severity shone from his eyes. His friends had flocked in, and he had already begun to tell again at full length the story of the Lieutenant-Governor's visit with still further adornments of a most fantastic kind. The interview was already becoming an epic, both in quality ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... century, would be quite unable to converse with them, and, in like manner, the subjects of Charlemagne could not have exchanged ideas with the Goths of Alaric's army, or with the soldiers of Arminius in the days of Augustus Caesar. So rapid indeed has been the change in Germany, that the epic poem called the Nibelungen Lied, once so popular, and only seven centuries old, cannot now be enjoyed, except by ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... so I will say that for the diagram of the squaw hitch and of the diamond hitch I am indebted to an article by Mr. Stewart Edward White in Outing of 1907, and one by Mr. I. J. Bush in Recreation of 1911; for the "medicine song" and several of the star legends, to that Blackfeet epic, "The Old North Trail," by Walter McClintock; for medical and surgical hints, to Dr. Charles Moody's "Backwoods Surgery and Medicine" and to the American Red Cross "First Aid" text-book; for some of the lore, to personal experiences; and for much ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... language are the poet's own, and his own too in his artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless endeavours to make him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to forget it. The effect is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when the fable and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in THE MESSIAH of Klopstock, or in CUMBERLAND'S CALVARY; and not merely suggested by it as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply permits ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... sequences and high speculations supplied and prompted by the delicate machines which yield a response to the fixed stars, and give readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in the production of epic poems or great judicial harangues. So far from mankind being thrown out of work according to your notion," concluded Trost, with a peculiar nasal note of scorn, "if it were not for your incurable dilettanteism in science as in all other ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... noble English tongue, Who holdest seizin of our speech, Whose epic Mowgli first did reach The valves of all our hearts ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... enthusiastic in his praises of Mademoiselle Taglioni, and said hers was the most poetical style of dancing he had ever seen. Another observed, that it was indeed the poetry of motion. I would describe it as being the epic of dancing. ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... on his way, still turning pensive to the past! One of the finest and rarest parts of Mr. Coleridge's conversation, is when he expatiates on the Greek tragedians (not that he is not well acquainted, when he pleases, with the epic poets, or the philosophers, or orators, or historians of antiquity)—on the subtle reasonings and melting pathos of Euripides, on the harmonious gracefulness of Sophocles, tuning his love-laboured song, like sweetest warblings from a sacred grove; on the high-wrought trumpet-tongued ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... lines, from Bulwer's learned and ornate epic of King Arthur, the dire severity of the Etruscan doctrine of a future life is well indicated, with the local imagery of some parts of it, and the impenetrable obscurity which enwraps the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... tendency sometimes given is that the Negro is only a generation from slavery. It should not be forgotten that individuals of every other race in history have at some time been held slaves. The bondage of Israel is to-day only an epic poem. The Greek Slave adorns simply a niche in some palace of art. The Servii of Rome instructed the masters of the world. The Anglo-Saxon has not only worn the Roman and Norman collars, but individuals of that race were sold as slaves in the West Indies as late as ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... stew made by Orr was epic. At all other good stews it was recalled and discussed, but never did a stew come up to the stew that we so scrupulously divided among us on the bright morning of Sept. 12, 1914, at ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... of the Universe. In 1667 Milton published "Paradise Lost," and in 1672 Bunyan gave to the world his allegory, "Pilgrim's Progress." There was no inspiration to genius in the cause of King and Cavaliers. But the stern problems of Puritanism touched two souls with the divine afflatus. The sacred Epic of Milton, sublime in treatment as in conception, must ever stand unique and solitary in literature; while "Pilgrim's Progress," in plain homely dish served the same heavenly food. The theme of both was the problem of sin and redemption with which the Puritan ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... studying for a long, long time; and I suppose I may have given, on an average, a minute to each. What an absurdity it would seem, to pretend to read two or three hundred poems, of all degrees between an epic and a ballad, in an hour or two! And a picture is a poem, only requiring the greater study to be felt and comprehended; because the spectator must necessarily do much for himself towards that end. I saw many beautiful things,—among them some landscapes by Claude, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... which sparkles on the dark mountain side. The Servian dream is for the waters of Cattaro to be covered with ships under the eagle of the Nemagna, for the country folk know well the story of Uros, the great Stephan Nemagna, and the epic of the wars against ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... deals with financial scandals. It was inspired by the failure of the Union Generale Bank a few years before, and is a powerful indictment of the law affecting joint-stock companies. To L'Argent there succeeded La Debacle, that prose epic of modern war, more complete and coherent than even the best of Tolstoi. And to end all came Le Docteur Pascal, winding up the series on a note ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... blush upon the cheeks, and the gracefulness of the draperies. He strove, like Phidias, to express character in repose. He imitated the personages and the subjects of the old mythology, and treated them in an epic spirit, his subjects being almost invariably taken from ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders of them are unlike other wonders. If we do not see in them the saga and epic, how shall we tell ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... winter and spring some fifteen thousand Mormons with three thousand wagons found their way from camp to camp, through snow, ice, and mud, over the weary stretch of four hundred miles to the banks of the Missouri. The epic of this westward migration is almost biblical. Hardship brought out the heroic in many characters. Like true American pioneers, they adapted themselves to circumstances with fortitude and skill. Linn says: "When a halt occurred, a shoemaker might be seen looking for a stone to serve as a lap-stone ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... themselves, when we try to generalise, in a series of curves, alternate rises and declines, which may be repeated again and again. In English literature out of the unknown past rose the Anglo-Saxon lyric and epic, Deor's Complaint, Beowulf, and the poems of Caedmon and Cynewulf. From the death-like sleep of our language which followed the Norman Conquest rose the heights of thirteenth-century romance. From the dull poetic pedantries of the age ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... animate us to fulness of expression, to a flow of eloquence, and even to lyrical sublimity. The ideal dialogue of Tragedy may therefore find in actual conversation all the various tones and turns of poetry, with the exception of epic repose. The metre therefore of Metastasio, and before him, of Tasso and Guarini, in their pastoral dramas, seems to me much more agreeable and suitable than the monotonous verse of eleven syllables: they intermingle with it verses of seven syllables, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... lord was tarrying there, away from her side. But perhaps, indeed, even this was a duty which he owed to his fame and station; and her face brightened up with new hope as the suggestion flashed upon her. It might be that at this feast there would be present some poet of lofty epic powers, or historian of wondrous descriptive talent, ranking as the brightest star of Roman literature; and either of these, if properly conciliated, would doubtless celebrate her lord's exploits so grandly that in future ages his campaign would ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Syracusans, we who boast of a race which is the most ancient of all and who are of all the Hellenes the only people who have not changed from one land to another; to whom also belonged a man whom Homer the Epic poet said was the best of all who came to Ilion in drawing up an army and setting it in array. 151 Thus we are not justly to be reproached if we ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... Florence was elevating romance out of the street-ballads, and laying the foundation of the chivalrous epic, a poet appeared in Lombardy (whether inspired by his example is uncertain) who was destined to carry it to a graver though still cheerful height, and prepare the way for the crowning glories of Ariosto. In some respects he even excelled Ariosto: in all, with the exception of style, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... thoughts he studied. He had read parts of Homer, parts of Thucydides, parts of Tacitus, parts of the tragedians, at school, but now he had it in his power to study a great author entire, and as a whole. Never before did he fully appreciate the "thunderous lilt" of Greek epic, the touching and voluptuous tenderness of Latin elegy, the regal pomp of history, the gorgeous and philosophic mystery of the old dramatic fables. Never before had he learnt to gaze on "the bright countenance of truth, in the mild and dewy ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... represented, and they also consist of dancing, by which religious fervor is produced, and they give rise to music, romance, poetry, and drama. Thus it is that the esthetic arts have their origin in mythology. The epic poem and the symphony are lineal descendants of the dance, and the dance arises as the first form of worship, born of the mythic conception of ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... by his epic poem "Africa," but it is not read today, even by scholars, except in fragments to see how deep are the barren ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Stafford Northcote, Disraeli himself never made any vain pretensions to be devoted to pursuits for which he did not care a rap. He once dreamt of an epic poem, and his early ambition urged him a step or two in that direction, but his critical faculty, which, despite all his monstrosities of taste, was vital, restrained him from making a fool of himself, and he forswore the muse, puffed the prostitute away, and carried his very saleable ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... great kindness I am indebted for a biographic and critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological treatises, profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed, this poem perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and the ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... sarx]), literally, to 'flay.' 'Satire,' again, has an arbitrary-enough origin; it is satira, from satur, mixed; and the application is as follows: each species of poetry had, among the Romans, its own special kind of versification; thus the hexameter was used in the epic, the iambic in the drama, etc. Ennius, however, the earliest Latin 'satirist,' first disregarded these conventionalities, and introduced a medley (satira) of all kinds of metres. It afterward, however, lost this idea of a melange, and acquired ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... later he was pointed out to strangers by the people of Sweetwater Springs. "That is Richard Clement, the sole owner of 'The Witch,' a mine valued at three millions of dollars." This in itself was truly an epic. ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... first thing to strike us—paradoxical as it may sound to say so—about the Athenian 'Old Comedy' is its modernness. Of its very nature, satiric drama comes later than Epic and Lyric poetry, Tragedy or History; Aristophanes follows Homer and Simonides, Sophocles and Thucydides. Of its essence, it is free from many of the conventions and restraining influences of earlier ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old. It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of the "prose epic" which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... historians. It was in 1837 that Carlyle, who four years before had startled the English-reading public by his strangely worded, bewildering "Sartor Resartus," brought out his astonishing "History of the French Revolution"—a prose poem, an epic without a hero, revealing as by "flashes of lightning" the ghastly tragedy and comedy of that tremendous upheaval; and in 1845 he followed up the vein thus opened by his lifelike study of "Oliver Cromwell," which ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... call this nonsense and its author a mountebank. I call it poetry and its author a poet. You never heard anything like it before; but do not be afraid of your own enjoyment. Read it aloud a dozen times, and you, too will hear roaring, epic music, and you will see the mighty, golden ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... information could scarcely help having an awkwardness. She invented the awkwardness under Densher's eyes, and he marvelled on his side at the instant creation. It served her as the fine cloud that hangs about a goddess in an epic, and the young man was but vaguely to know at what point of the rest of his visit she had, for consideration, melted into it and ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... SHAKSPEARE, with the assistance of Mr. LOONEY, the writer of the recently-published and final work on the authorship of the plays. MILTON will be presented in both verse and prose, Mr. MASEFIELD having promised to re-write his epic in six-lined rhymed stanzas, shorn of Latinisms; while a famous novelist, who does not wish her name to appear at present, has consented to recast it in the form of a romance under the title of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... are almost wholly of his own invention; and the form which he has given to the telling makes the tale his own, even tho' the original story had been the same. But this proves, however, that Homer taught Virgil to design; and if invention be the first virtue of an epic poet, then the Latin poem can only be allow'd the second place. Mr. Hobbes, in the preface to his own bald translation of the Ilias (studying poetry as he did mathematics, when it was too late)—Mr. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the decease of her husband the family tenacity, the family matter-of-factness, had gone sterile within her. A great talker, when allowed, she would converse without the faintest animation for hours together, relating, with epic monotony, the innumerable occasions on which Fortune had misused her; nor did she ever perceive that her hearers sympathized with Fortune, for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... confession now, which I believe nobody has made before me. You know very well that I write verses sometimes, because I have read some of them at this table. (The company assented,—two or three of them in a resigned sort of way, as I thought, as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and was going to read half a dozen books or so for their benefit.)—I continued. Of course I write some lines or passages which are better than others; some which, compared with the others, might be called relatively ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... credit of literature it must be pointed out that the situation is only partly novel. Victor Hugo long ago gave us the epic of the convict and the bishop's candlesticks, of the Crosstian policeman annihilated by his encounter with the Christian Valjean. But Bill Walker is not, like Valjean, romantically changed from a demon into an angel. There are millions of Bill Walkers in all classes ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... too intent on the sublime, too much occupied with the effect of the whole, to tell a common history. His conceptions are epic, and his persons, and his colors, have as little to do with ordinary life, as the violent action of his actors have resemblance to the usually ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... the episode of the ingenuous troutling which, having apparently conceived a violent passion for the Colonel, literally forced itself upon the hook seven times within a short afternoon. Captains on the Sultanitza Planina rehearse the epic incidents of how the Colonel snatched victory from defeat after pursuing for three miles an infuriated pike which had wrenched the very rod from his grasp. Subalterns in the chill wilds of Cologne, adding picturesque details to an already ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... sou'wester it sends no messenger boys ahead to distribute its itinerary handbills." There is no fault of style which these few lines do not display. They combine, with a singular success, commonness and pomp. The epic poets of old were wont to illustrate the life of man by the phenomena of nature. The vulgar American reverses the process—he ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... SOUTHEY! You're a poet—Poet-laureate, And representative of all the race; Although 't is true that you turned out a Tory at Last,—yours has lately been a common case; And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at? With all the Lakers, in and out of place? A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye Like "four and twenty ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Beranger, the analogous authors in modern times? and by what Greek minor poems are they surpassed? We say nothing of Catullus, whom some competent judges prefer to Horace. Does the lyric, then, or even the epic poetry of the Romans, deserve no better title than that of "a hot-house plant, which, in return for assiduous and skilful culture, yielded only scanty and sickly fruits?" The complete originality and eminent merit of their ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... through the blinding fog. His companions saw the big combers tumbling ready to break short upon the dipping bows out of the dark, and half-frozen men struggling for dear life with folds of madly thrashing sail. The pictures were, however, necessarily somewhat blurred and hazy, for after all only an epic poet could fittingly describe the things that must be done and borne at sea, and epic poets—it is, perhaps, a pity—are not bred in the forecastle. When he reached the last scene he gained almost dramatic ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... The Roman Epic abounds in moral and poetical defects; nevertheless it remains the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the history of an age is revealed in its ideas, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... thousand years ago, than I can suppose that the animals or vegetables were better then than they are now. I dare assert too, in defiance of the favorers of the ancients, that Homer's hero, Achilles, was both a brute and a scoundrel, and consequently an improper character for the hero of an epic poem; he had so little regard for his country, that he would not act in defense of it, because he had quarreled with Agamemnon about a w—-e; and then afterward, animated by private resentment only, he went about ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... stand unbrothered like the humped Richard in the play). Or maybe some swirl of fancy blew upon him as he was spooning up his breakfast, which he must set down in an essay before the matter cool. Or an epic may have thumped within him. Let us hope that his thoughts this cool spring morning have not been heated to such bloody purpose that he has killed a score of men upon his page, and that it is with the black gore of the ink-pot on him that he has called for his boots to face the world. You ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... second-rate work of first-rate performers to sink into oblivion. But at the same time there might be a great future before any artist who could discover a new medium of utterance. It seems at present, to take literature, as if every form of human expression had been exploited. We have the lyric, the epic, the satire, the narrative, the letter, the diary, conversation, all embalmed in art. But there is probably some other medium possible which will become perfectly obvious the moment it is seized upon and used. To take an ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... their homesick chief a drink from the well of Bethlehem; the story of Bathsheba and Uriah—lust, treachery, and murder; the prophet's rebuke; the years declining under heavy shadows. How full of lifeblood it all is! Every chapter is an idyl, an epic, or a tragedy. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... you will, an affectation, this studied avoidance of all appearance of enthusiasm or excitement; showing the weak spot in the armour of these heroes, henceforth to be of epic fame. But Man is essentially a weak being. It is only when the immortal spirit of him nerves the frame of perishable bone and muscle that he rises to heights that are sublime. Such souls of fire burned within these men, that when the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... vague, sweet longing, May! once more. Then her hair! then her voice! then the rosy softness of her hand! then, with hideous revulsion, from her perfections to himself! The gulf of shame! His boots were an epic of despair, his necktie was a tragedy. Then back to her with all the graces of the heavens upon her! Then back to himself again, and the deep damnation of the button which was missing from his waistcoat Paul was a ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... These epic moments are best related swiftly. Roland took the paper, and the first thing that met his sleepy eye and effectually drove the sleep from it was ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... training he had already forged ahead of his class when he attained the maturity of working papers. He was plunging eagerly—brilliantly, in fact—into a rapid translation of the Iliad, fired from the very first line by the epic of the hexametered anger of Achilles, and stubbornly he held out against ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... turn read aloud the fragment of an epic called L'Aveugle and two or three of the Elegies, till, when he came ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... overcome. We shudder to think of the petty cabals, the underbred indignities, direct and indirect, which the present eminent Judge had to watch against, to brush aside, to smile at, in course of his epic strides towards the highest local pinnacle of his profession. But [145] with him, as Time has shown, it was ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... great prairie fire usually or quite often was followed by a heavy rainstorm. What Banion now indicated was the approach of yet another of the epic phenomena of the prairies, as rapid, as colossal and as ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... not stagger me to hear his disciples calling him, as HEGEL does, 'a man of a mighty mind,' or, as LAW does, 'the illuminated Behmen,' and 'the blessed Behmen.' 'In speculative power,' says dry DR. KURTZ, 'and in poetic wealth, exhibited with epic and dramatic effect, Behmen's system surpasses everything of the kind ever written.' Some of his disciples have the hardihood to affirm indeed that even ISAAC NEWTON ploughed with Behmen's heifer, but had not the boldness to ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... inaccuracies of rhythm, faults of arrangement, and violations of dramatic law met us from time to time, the earnest purpose of the writer carried us over them all. The book has a fine flavor of the Elizabethan age,—a sustained epic rather than dramatic character, an affluence of quaint, original images; yet the construction was frequently that of a school-boy. In opulence and maturity of ideas, and poverty of artistic skill, the work stands ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... to teeth of Time, So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry; Blot out the Epic's stately rhyme, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... gazed as though he would read o'er The scroll of rising winds, the burst of suns, And lists—ah, might it be earth's shore Freed of her epic hates and tuned groans! War's passion beat, and woe's sad chorus past, And all her song pure-winnowed, clear at last, Pouring the music of her ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... proof of singular art, was the girdle of your tunic, which, you said, was as fine as the most costly Persian fabric, and of your own weaving; moreover, you told us that you had brought with you poems, epic, tragic, and dithyrambic, as well as prose writings of the most various kinds; and you said that your skill was also pre-eminent in the arts which I was just now mentioning, and in the true principles of rhythm and harmony and of orthography; and if I remember ...
— Lesser Hippias • Plato
... parasites,[45] which live on their parent gods and yet tend to reduce them, we now revert to that happiness hereafter to which looks forward the epic knight that has not been tempted to 'renounce' desire. In pantheistic passages he is what the later remodeller makes him. But enough of old belief remains to show that the warrior really cared a great deal more for heaven than he did for ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... diffused over it. In face and turn of genius he differs in every respect from his successor, Spenser; and in truth, in Chaucer and Spenser we see the fountains of the two main streams of British song: the one flowing through the drama and the humourous narrative, the other through the epic and the didactic poem. Chaucer rooted himself firmly in fact, and looked out upon the world in a half-humourous, half-melancholy mood. Spenser had but little knowledge of men as men; the cardinal virtues were the personages he was acquainted with; in everything ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... glance at the other side of the indebtedness, we need only recall that Edmund Spenser's famous Marriage Ode—the Epithalamium—the noblest marriage ode in the English language, and Milton's equally famous description of Paradise in the fourth book of his Epic, owe a good deal to direct imitation of the Song of Songs. It is scarcely an exaggeration to assert that the stock-in-trade of many an erotic poet is simply the phraseology of the divine song which we have been considering so inadequately. ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... expedition of Odin, which, by deducting the enmity of the Goths and Romans from so memorable a cause, might supply the noble groundwork of an epic poem, cannot safely be received as authentic history. According to the obvious sense of the Edda, and the interpretation of the most skilful critics, As-gard, instead of denoting a real city of the Asiatic Sarmatia, is the fictitious appellation of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... epic poets of the world were blind,—Homer and Milton; while the third, Dante, was in his later years nearly, if not altogether, blind. It almost seems as though some great characters had been physically crippled in certain respects so that they ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... grandson of the master, has written an interesting booklet on KRIYA. "The text of the BHAGAVAD GITA is a part of the great epic, the MAHABHARATA, which possesses several knot-points (VYAS-KUTAS)," Sri Ananda wrote. "Keep those knot-points unquestioned, and we find nothing but mythical stories of a peculiar and easily-misunderstood type. Keep those knot-points ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... logic, are resolved into universals and abstractions, such as costumes, landscapes, portraits, domestic life, battles, animals, flowers, fruit, seascapes, lakes, deserts, tragic, comic, piteous, cruel, lyrical, epic, dramatic, knightly, idyllic facts, and the like. They are often also resolved into merely quantitative categories, such as little picture, picture, statuette, group, madrigal, song, sonnet, garland of sonnets, poetry, poem, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... call it. 'Men,' he says, 'may overlade a ship or barge, and therefore I will skip at once to the effect, and let all the rest slip.' And he unconsciously suggests a striking difference between himself and the great Elizabethan epic poet who owes so much to him, when he declines to make as long a tale of the chaff or of the straw as of the corn, and to describe all the details of ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the tremendous vigour with which these wars of the south were waged may be gathered from "La Araucana," the magnificent epic written by Ercilla, the Spanish poet, who composed his verses hot from the fight, his arms still weary ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... epic tirade for the epigram as the vehicle of his satire, and handled this lighter missile with unsurpassed brilliance and verve. Despite his sycophancy and his fulsome flattery of prospective benefactors, he ...
— English Satires • Various
... fight, recognize each other as old family friends, exchange arms, and vow to avoid each other henceforth in the fray. (N.B. and this in the tenth year of the war!) After this comes, you know, the meeting of Hector and Andromache, which we read together; altogether a truly Epic canto indeed. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... great subjects, the great matieres, are French in their early treatment, with the exception of the national work of Spain, Iceland, and in part Germany. All the forms, except those of the prose saga and its kinsman the German verse folk-epic, are found first in French. Whosoever knows the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, knows not merely the best literature in form, and all but the best in matter, of the time, but that which ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... many minor passions in the Garden. It sees and passes on, embodying none of them in deathless epic as His passion was embodied.... Men and women have cried out to listening Heaven that the cup might pass from their lips, and it has not been permitted to pass, as His was not permitted to pass. In the souls of ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... of a people of slaves, they gradually changed customs and religion. And so the Brahmanic society was established. Many works in Sanscrit are preserved from this time, which, with the Vedas, form the sacred literature of the Hindoos. The principal are the great epic poems, the Mahabarata, which has more than 200,000 verses; the Ramayana with 50,000, and the laws of Manou, ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... flung in pebbles well to hear The moment's music which they gave. Oft pealed for him a lofty tone From nodding pole and belting zone. He heard a voice none else could hear From centred and from errant sphere. The quaking earth did quake in rhyme, Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime. In dens of passion, and pits of woe, He saw strong Eros struggling through, To sun the dark and solve the curse, And beam to the bounds of the universe. While thus to love he gave his days In loyal worship, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... to the tombstone immortality of a name and date! Think of the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the toil, the confidence (of himself and wife) in an impartial and generous posterity;—and then read "Smith J.(ohn?) 1713-1784(?). The Vision of Immortality, an Epic Poem in Twelve Books, 1740, 4to. See Lowndes." The time of his own death less certain than that of his poem, which we may fix pretty safely in 1740,—and the only posterity that took any interest in him the indefatigable Lowndes! Well, even a bibliographic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... having spoken of carmina bardi, the word bard began to be used, early in the 17th century, to designate any kind of a serious poet, whether lyric or epic, and is so employed by Shakespeare, Milton and Pope. On the other hand, in Lowland Scots it grew to be a term of contempt and reproach, as describing a class of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... among the fortunate was a silent young lieutenant of infantry—a taciturn, but not unamiable young lieutenant—who was afterward destined to give the name of a great general into the keeping of history forever. Wrapped up somewhere in this Mexican war is the material for a brief American epic; but it is not to be unrolled ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Dissertatio and Young Kock's Phalaecians: Milton's Edition of Raleigh's Cabinet Council: Resumption of the old Design of Paradise Lost and actual Commencement of the Poem: Change from the Dramatic Form to the Epic: Sonnet in ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... cash; lying widespread, with dragon-appetite for cash; fit to swallow Princedoms! And so Prince Philippe, amid his Sillerys, Lacloses, and confused Sons of Night, has rolled along: the centre of the strangest cloudy coil; out of which has visibly come, as we often say, an Epic Preternatural Machinery of SUSPICION; and within which there has dwelt and worked,—what specialties of treason, stratagem, aimed or aimless endeavour towards mischief, no party living (if it be not the Presiding Genius of it, Prince of the Power of the Air) has now ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... who had saved the life of his brother Timophanes in battle, afterwards put him to death for aiming at the supreme power in Corinth. Warton says that Pope once intended to write an epic poem on the story, and that Akenside had the same design (Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., 1806, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron |
