"Homer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with much superfluity, we find a sublime system of ethics, an amazing knowledge and command of human nature. Many of the Greek and Roman classics made their appearance in English translations, which were favourably received as works of merit; among these we place, after Pope's Homer, Virgil by Pitt and Wharton, Horace by Francis, Polybius by Hampton, and Sophocles by Franklin. The war introduced a variety of military treatises, chiefly translated from the French language; and a free country, like Great ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Across time's bounded sea, A boundless flight beyond the dim sun's car, Till all the spheres of night Chime concord round their flight Too loud for blasts of warring change to mar, From stars that sang for Homer's birth To these that gave our Landor ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... more distinctly as the star is the brighter. Sirius, which surpasses the brightest stars of the northern hemisphere full four times in lustre, shows these changes of colour so conspicuously that they were regarded as specially characteristic of this star, insomuch that Homer speaks of Sirius (not by name, but as the 'star of autumn') shining most beautifully 'when laved of ocean's wave'—that is, when close to the horizon. And our own poet, Tennyson, following the older poet, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... were brutish giants with one eye who lived in caverns and fed on human flesh, if the opportunity offered. Lowell is recalling in these lines the adventure of Ulysses with the Cyclops, in the ninth book of Homer's Odyssey. ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... that of the still more ancient one of the Egyptians. Dr. Burgh, a learned musical writer states that, of "the time before Christ, music was most cultivated and was most progressive in Greece." The verses of the Greek poet Homer, who was himself a musician, abound in beautiful allusions to and descriptions of this charming science; while in mythology are recounted the wonderful musical achievements of the god Orpheus, who is said to have been so skilled in music that the very rocks and trees followed ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... propose doing in November?—Well, I think I shall retranslate the works of HOMER, and write an exhaustive article in the Encylopaedia Britannica (new edition) on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... of places at that sea-port as "The Land of Green Ginger," "Pig Alley," "Mucky-south-end," and "Rotten Herring Staith;" and I have come to the conclusion, that "The Land of Green Ginger" was a very dirty place where horses were kept: a mews, in short, which none of the Muses, not even with Homer as an exponent, could exalt ([Greek: Epea pteroenta en athanatoisi theoisi]) ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... the more than Homeric endeavor on Homer's sea, lay an assemblage of shipping such as no harbor had ever held. Within sight of Troy they came and went, and in the classic waters ringed round by classic hills waited for the day, a great armada, line upon line of black transports, crowded with the finest flower ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... Though Homer fired my youthful breast, My tender fancy deep imprest, Ere grief had made me smart: Yet of him Ossian has ta'en place; His woe-fraught strains, with solemn grace, ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... sarcasm constantly peeping from behind a thick veil of complimentary phraseology. Brougham more various, more imaginative, more impassioned, more eloquent, and exceedingly dexterous. Unable to crush Lyndhurst, he resembled one of Homer's heroes, who, missing his great antagonist, wreaked his fury on some ignominious foe, and he fell upon Wynford with overpowering severity. As somebody told me who heard him, 'He flayed him alive, and kept rubbing salt upon his back.' It appears to have been a great ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... remedied by teaching mere facts. The Greeks, many years ago, found the true method of imparting the latter grace and we shall probably not be able to discover a better one to-day. Their youths learned Homer and the other great poets as a part of their daily tasks, and by thus constantly dwelling upon and storing in their minds the noblest and most beautifully expressed thought in their literature, their own mental life became at once refined ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... his Elysium under the earth, and assigns it for a residence to the spirits of the blessed. But in Homer Elysium forms no part of the realms of the dead. He places it on the west of the earth, near Ocean, and described it as a happy land, where there is neither snow, nor cold, nor rain, and always fanned by the delightful breezes of Zephyrus. Hither favored heroes pass without ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... walls refused to come to the scratch on any terms. Homer is silent as to how long the walls of Ilium took to dry; they must have been wet if they were built by Neptune. But one may be excused for doubting if they took as long as wet new plaster does, in premises parties are waiting to come into, and getting impatient, in London. Ascribe this ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Greek classic poetry Homer Greek lyrical poetry Pindar Dramatic poetry Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides Greek comedy: Aristophanes Roman poetry Naevius, Plautus, Terence Roman epic poetry: Virgil Lyrical poetry: Horace, Catullus Didactic poetry: Lucretius Elegiac poetry: Ovid, Tibullus ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... or any like expression, to be found in Homer? If so, I should feel much obliged to any of your correspondents who would favour me with ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... are apt to think there is no bright side at all. Nor shall we let slip the opportunity of saying, at the risk of being considered very simple, that of all the gifts of felicity bestowed, as the Pagan Homer tells, upon mankind by the gods, no one is so perfect and beautiful as the love that exists between a good ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... plans for the campaign were perfected, and when it was out they met in the White Garden, known to the directory as Tompkins Square, the traditional duelling-ground of the lower East Side; and there ensued such a battle as Homer would have ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... We've Ellenborough's curls still left us:— Sweet curls, from which young Love, so vicious, His shots, as from nine-pounders, issues; Grand, glorious curls, which in debate Surcharged with all a nation's fate, His Lordship shakes, as Homer's God did,[2] And oft in thundering talk comes near him; Except that there the speaker nodded And here 'tis only those who hear him. Long, long, ye ringlets, on the soil Of that fat cranium may ye flourish, With plenty of Macassar oil Thro' many a year your growth to nourish! ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... a small Gladstone bag, which he habitually carried, and thence he extracted a cigar about the size of the butt of a light trout-rod. He took a vesuvian out of a curious brown hollowed nut-shell, mounted in gold (the beach-comber, like Mycenae in Homer, was polychrysos, rich in gold in all his equipments), and occupied himself with the task of setting fire to his weed. The process was a long one, and reminded me of the arts by which the beach- comber's native friends fire the root of a tree ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... songs of the Provencal bards gave place to the immortal productions of the great creators of the European languages. Dante led the way in Italy, and gave to the world the "Divine Comedy"—a masterpiece of human genius, which raised him to the rank of Homer and Virgil. Petrarch followed in his steps, and, if not as profound or original as Dante, yet is unequalled as an "enthusiastic songster of ideal love." He also gave a great impulse to civilization by his labors in collecting and collating manuscripts. Boccaccio ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... too, Mrs. Legend," said John Effingham, "since it made a palpable allusion to all those vulgar incidents that associate themselves in the mind, with these said common-place isles. The arts, philosophy, poetry, eloquence, and even old Homer, are brought unpleasantly to one's recollection, by ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... to describe the effects which gunpowder and grape- shot had had on the walls of Antwerp. Let the curious in these matters read the horrors of the siege of Troy, or the history of Jerusalem taken by Titus. The one may be found in Homer, and the other in Josephus. Or if they prefer doings of a later date there is the taking of Sebastopol, as narrated in the columns of the "Times" newspaper. The accounts are equally true, instructive, ...
— The Relics of General Chasse • Anthony Trollope
... contained that which would have made ANY man a happy slave. Woman, lovely woman, was there in abundance and variety! The fact is, that when the campaign commenced in 1803, the ladies of the army all congregated to this place, where they were left, as it was supposed, in safety. I might, like Homer, relate the names and qualities of all. I may at least mention SOME whose memory is still most dear to ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... into the sea. A large mill, which much resembles an ancient castle, and in all probability had served both purposes in times gone by, stood near. Upon the sandy beach close by, and hauled entirely out of the water, lay several vessels in the style of Homer's ships; and I have no doubt bore a strong resemblance to ships of ancient time, for they were picturesquely formed, and painted fantastically with figures of fishes and eyes. The wild-looking mariners were lounging lazily about in their ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... also that now he had naught to fear save his own axe and therefore he counselled him to guard it well, since if it was lifted against him in another's hands it would bring him down to death, which nothing else could do. Like to the heel of Achilles whereof the great Homer sings—have ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... misled us moderns in our efforts towards understanding the primitive stage in Greek religion have been first the widespread and almost ineradicable error of treating Homer as primitive, and more generally our unconscious insistence on starting with the notion of 'Gods'. Mr. Hartland, in his address as president of one of the sections of the International Congress of Religions at Oxford,[9:1] dwelt on the significant fact about savage religions that wherever ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... inhuman. The use of such words are due to temporary forgetfulness in such connections. Like Homer, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... The word "Cape" rises across the face of a dial; a gong strikes: the South African mid-weekly mail is in at the Highgate Receiving Towers. That is all. It reminds one comically of the traitorous little bell which in pigeon-fanciers' lofts notifies the return of a homer. ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... putting back his second volume and taking down a third, "you have Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Ossian; for garbage, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... never fails to elicit the applause of the audience; but still the question remains unanswered: Who wrote Shakspeare? a question, we humbly think, which might be made the theme for as much critical sagacity, pertinacity, and pugnacity, as the almost equally interesting question, who wrote Homer? In the former case, the question is certainly in one respect more simple, for the recognised plays and poems that go by Shakspeare's name are—at least by far the larger portion—unquestionably from one and the same pen; while Homer, poor, dear, awful, august, much-abused shade! ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... fair woman Ilion suffered unspeakable tortures. But to us a single song of Homer is worth more than all these Hebrew writings. And yet a Trojan war of the intellect has been kindled concerning them. Here freedom of investigation, yonder with Hoogstraten and Tungern, fettering of the mind. Among us, the ardent ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... by love. l. 222. The younger love, or Cupid, the son of Venus, owes his existence and his attributes to much later times than the Eros, or divine love, mentioned in Canto I. since the former is no where mentioned by Homer, though so many apt opportunities of introducing him occur in the works of ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... that night. He had not had his golf after all, for the Homer baby had sent out his advance notice early in the afternoon, and had himself arrived on Sunday evening, at the hour when Minnie was winding her clock and preparing to retire early for the Monday washing, and the Sayre butler was announcing dinner. Dick had come in at ten o'clock weary and triumphant, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Naturalistic View of the Bible.—The Bible is not inspired at all, or at least in no way differing from any other book. Its authors were inspired, perhaps, just as Homer, or Thucydides, or Cicero were inspired, but not differently. It has no authority, therefore, over any other book, and is just as liable to be in error as any other. If you should bind in one volume the histories of Herodotus, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... Carlaverock, on the Scottish border, by EDWARDI., in the year 1300. In addition to very curious descriptions of the muster of the Royal troops at Carlisle, their march northwards, and the incidents of the siege (which last have a strange resemblance to what Homer has recorded of incidents that took place during the siege of Troy), this Roll gives some graphic personal sketches of the princes, nobles, bannerets, and knights, whose banners and shields of arms are set forth in it with minute exactness. This Roll, as ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... custom is continued, though the presents are arbitrary. The man is not obliged to purchase the woman he marries, but, on the contrary, receives a portion with her equal to her condition. It is on the famous shield of Achilles that Homer has described a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... family, from the full beauty of my excellent wife to the sun-lighted hair of my prattling little Charles, (the which reminds me of those beautiful lines which are contained in a translation of the Iliad of Homer by Mr Hobbes, descriptive of the young Astyanax in his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... perish, so my Enemies fall along with them. [Footnote: Me mortuo terra misceatur incendio. Pereant amici dum una inimici intercidant.] But in gentle Dispositions, there is a certain inbred Love of their Country, which they can no more divest themselves of, than of Humanity it self. Such a Love as Homer describes in Ulysses, who preferred Ithaca, tho' no better than a Bird's Nest fix'd to a craggy Rock in the Sea, to all the Delights of the ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... Court professedly Christian, still, it is not unwelcome, for the honour of human nature, to discover in consequence of them those vestiges of moral rectitude which the degradation of ages had not obliterated from the Tartar character. It is well known that when Homer, 1,500 years before, speaks of these barbarians, he calls them, on the one hand, "drinkers of mare's milk;" on the other, "the most just of men." Truth, honesty, justice, hospitality, according to their view of things, are the historical characteristics, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... witless, and of necessary motion; yet not cunning only, but having perfect habitual skill of hand also; the confirmed reward of truthful doing. Recollect, in connection with this passage of Pindar, Homer's three verses about getting the lines of ship-timber true, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... assented. "Yet it seems to me that a richer compensation for the lost gift is at the disposal of you artists than of us other mortals, for you understand how to look with the eyes of the soul. With them you retain what you have seen, and illumine it with a special radiance. Homer was blind, and for that very reason, I think, the world and life became clear and transfigured for him though a veil concealed both ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... solitude, those thoughts which unite us to others, much as we all dislike, when fatigue or illness has sharpened the nerves, hoardings covered with advertisements, the fronts of big theatres, big London hotels, and all architecture which has been made to impress the crowd. What blindness did for Homer, lameness for Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint you will, bad health did for him by making him ask no more of life than that it should keep him living, and above all perhaps by concentrating his imagination upon one thought, ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... object was to excite a distaste for sedition. Pierre la Seine, going a step farther, shows that the intention was to recommend to young men temperance in eating and drinking. Just so, too, Jacobus Hugo has satisfied himself that, by Euenis, Homer meant to insinuate John Calvin; by Antinous, Martin Luther; by the Lotophagi, Protestants in general; and, by the Harpies, the Dutch. Our more modern Scholiasts are equally acute. These fellows demonstrate a hidden meaning in "The Antediluvians," a parable in Powhatan, "new views in Cock Robin," ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... After the civil war of Sertorius (B. C. 80-72), the Romans became acquainted with the Canaries, which, because of their luxuriant vegetation and soft climate, were identified with the Elysium described by Homer, and were commonly known as the Fortunate islands. "Contra Fortunatae Insulae abundant sua sponte genitis, et subinde aliis super aliis innascentibus nihil sollicitos alunt, beatius quam aliae ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... and will not let it go out of his hand till it is finished to the last line, though the house be on fire over his head. And after a first reading he will not throw it aside, but will keep it by him, with his Shakespeare and his Homer, and will take it up many and many a time, when the world is dark and his spirits are low, and be straightway cheered and refreshed. Yet this work has been allowed to lie wholly neglected, unmentioned, and apparently unregretted, ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... because neither of the disputants can perceive that his opponent must be possessed of some truths, in spite of his trying to defend other positions which are indefensible. Strange! that a thing which it seems so easy to avoid, should so seldom be avoided! Homer said well: ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... Cyprus was a centre of Phoenician enterprise. And, as we are told in that fine work 'Kypros, the Bible, and Homer: Oriental Civilisation, Art and Religion in ancient times,' "The oldest extant Phoenician inscriptions, themselves the earliest examples of letters properly ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... the gods! I have collected within my home, like a living bouquet, the fairest flowers of Asia and of Greece. I know all that the art of sculptors and painters has produced since the time of Daedalus, whose statues walked and spoke. Linus, Orpheus, Homer, have taught me harmony and rhythm. I do not look about me with Love's bandage blindfolding my eyes. I judge of all things coolly. The passions of youth never influence my admiration, and when I am as withered, decrepit, ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... splendid figure of a man. He walked like a ram at the head of his flock. As he began speaking I thought of that flash of Homer's ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... manner of their fall—a couple of as great heroes as were ever heard of in the annals of war; not excepting even those of Homer himself. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... Nights so well as Galland. His is the reverse of a scientific rendering, but it is as pleasantly readable as the Iliad and Odyssey would be if Alexandre Dumas had kept his promise to translate Homer. Galland omitted the verses and a great number of passages which nobody would miss, though the anthropologist is supposed to find them valuable and instructive in later scientific translations which do not amuse. Later, Persian ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... and deservedly, in favor of the great poets of antiquity. Unmeasured praise has been bestowed upon the epic grandeur of Homer and the classical purity of Virgil. They have ever been considered as foremost amongst the best models of poetic excellence. Yet there was wanting to them the true sources of poetic inspiration, whence flow the loftiest conceptions and sublimest emanations ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... genius in comparison with whom I, a simple herdsman, an humble farmer, am as nothing. What, indeed,—if product is to be compared with product,—are my cheeses and my beans in the presence of his "Iliad"? But, if Homer wishes to take from me all that I possess, and make me his slave in return for his inimitable poem, I will give up the pleasure of his lays, and dismiss him. I can do without his "Iliad," and wait, if necessary, for ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... minds of the world from Homer to Humboldt, Shakspere never had an equal or superior, standing on the pinnacle of the pyramid of human renown, and lifting his mammoth mental form above the other philosophers of the earth as Mount St. Elias soars above ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Fairy Queen, At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept; And from thenceforth those graces were not seen, For they this Queen attended; in whose stead Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse. Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed, And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce: Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief, And cursed the access of ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... clusters, freed from the brownish budscales, with a far background of bluest sky, and think that it must have been such a grove as this to which the Princess Nausicca sent Ulysses to wait for her, described by Homer as "a beautiful grove of aspen poplars, a fountain ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... Grecian herald who accompanied the Greeks in the Trojan War, and whom Homer describes as "the great-hearted, brazen-voiced Stentor, whose shout was as loud as that of fifty other men," hence the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Mrs. Homer shook her head. "I am afraid not, but you can ask him. Julia will be greatly disappointed, but you know Justus is nothing if not conscientious and if he has made up his mind he ought not to go, nothing will ...
— A Dear Little Girl at School • Amy E. Blanchard
... At five he was taken to see a friend, to whom he repeated long passages from Dryden. A gentleman present, who was not unnaturally sceptical about Willie's attainments, desired to test him in Greek, and took down a copy of Homer which happened to have the contracted type, and to his amazement Willie went on with the greatest ease. At six years and nine months he was translating Homer and Virgil; a year later his uncle tells us that William finds so ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... he himself a profound student of it, but he suggested to Boccaccio that line of study which governed the entire intellectual life of the author of the "Decameron." With the application of Boccaccio to the translation of Homer into Latin we perceive a singular illustration of the trend of the classic devotion of the time. Despite the fact that the "Divina Commedia" had magnificently demonstrated the beauty of Italian as a literary ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... angry—a sloppy, slushy language, extremely ugly. At Princeton, you know, we stand by the classics, Latin and Greek, the real thing in languages. You ought to hear Dean Andy West talk about that. Of course a fellow forgets his Virgil and his Homer when he gets out in the world. But, then, he's had the benefit of them; they've given him real culture and literature. There's nothing outside of the classics, except perhaps a few things in French and Italian. Thank God ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... is not wholly satisfactory. Who began it among the Romans? becomes the next interesting question. One old writer says it was brought to Rome from Arcadia sixty years before the Trojan war (which Homer wrote about, you know). I'm sure that's far enough back to satisfy anybody. The same writer also says that the Pope tried to abolish it in the fifth century, but he succeeded only in sending it down to us in the name of ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... historian Zosimus to the common benefit: yet it cannot be dissembled, that the mind of Alaric was ill prepared to receive, either in sleeping or waking visions, the impressions of Greek superstition. The songs of Homer, and the fame of Achilles, had probably never reached the ear of the illiterate Barbarian; and the Christian faith, which he had devoutly embraced, taught him to despise the imaginary deities of Rome and Athens. The invasion of the Goths, instead of vindicating the honor, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... abundance of literary talent and an important output of works of which few English readers have any conception. For instance, who has ever heard, in Great Britain, of Adam Michiewicz the great Polish poet, who, critics declare, can be placed in the same category with Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Klopstock, Camoens, and Milton? Joseph Kraszewski as a novel writer occupies in Poland as high a position as Maurice Jokai does in Hungarian literature, while Mme. Eliza Orzeszko is considered to be the Polish Georges Sand, even by the Germans, ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... dear to me; that only because of this feeling for the forgotten rustic who wrote rhymes I am now here, strolling about in the shade of the venerable trees in Troston Park-the selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic Capel knew in his day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and by other names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... although Massachusetts has been prominent in denouncing the South for her treatment of the colored man, whom she has extensively favored with office, Boston, at least, has now had the first opportunity of practicing her doctrine; and let us hope that the man's name—Homer—will be classical enough to counteract her ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... sword and axe, of the shock of the contending forces, the hopes and fears of victory and defeat, the deeds of desperate valor, the mighty achievements of noted chiefs, on that hard-fought field no Homer has sung, and they must remain untold. All we know is that the Danes fought with desperate valor, the English with a courage inspired by revenge, fear of slavery, thirst for liberty, and the undaunted resolution of men whose every blow was ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Reverend Homer Greene, and an intermittent mother, who sometimes palely presided over a twilight teapot. The Reverend Homer was a burr-like man with a life-work. He was writing a concordance to the Scriptures, and had ...
— Options • O. Henry
... most severe tests of poetry that I know of is to read it aloud on the shore of an angry sea. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton gain ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... eleventh-century France, with its aristocratic society, its barbaric vigour, its brutality, and its high sentiments of piety and honour. The beauty of the poem lies in the grand simplicity of its style. Without a trace of the delicacy and variety of a Homer, farther still from the consummate literary power of a Virgil or a Dante, the unknown minstrel who composed the Chanson de Roland possessed nevertheless a very real gift of art. He worked on a large scale with a bold confidence. Discarding absolutely the aids of ornament and the rhetorical elaboration ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... disturbed by the discovery he made; and giving no further attention to his companion, he continued to study the approaching craft, at the same time endeavoring to account for her appearance. His uncle Homer had gone to find some one who was to render assistance in preventing the Bellevite from leaving the bay, and becoming a part of the navy of ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... cool sort of tone by which people show they assent to admiration without participating in it, and added something of there being no language but Greek; at which Harry Benson laughed and asked him if he was still reviewing his Homer. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... dock and up the lawn toward the house. The arrival was a long and lean and lank and lantern-jawed man with a set of the most fiery red whiskers ever seen outside a musical comedy. The Master had seen him several times, in the village; and recognized him as Homer Wefers, the newly-appointed Township Head Constable. The Mistress recognized him, too, as the vehement official whose volley of pistol-bullets had ended the sufferings of the black mongrel. She shivered, in reminiscence, ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... taken from Homer. In his Ionian Pentateuch is the statement that beggars are sent by Zeus, that whoever stretches a hand is respectable in his eyes, that the mendicant who is repulsed may perhaps be a god[37]—suggestions ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... next find fault with their living in the market-place; but I commend it. For if it had been bad, Homer would never have been for representing Nestor as an orator; nor all the other wise men. I will return, then, from thence to the tongue, which this fellow says our youths ought not to exercise, while I maintain they should. And again, he says they ought to be modest: two very ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... before he was twenty he had written discussions of the higher geometry, which, appearing in the same repository of the best learning, attracted the general attention of European scholars. In 1802, with his friends Jeffrey, Francis Homer, and Sidney Smith, he established the Edinburgh Review. In 1806 he published his celebrated "Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers," and soon after was called to the English bar, and settled ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... doubtless would keep to himself): Domitian says that nothing is more grateful, (not even killing flies); Aristotle affirms that beauty is better than all the letters of recommendation in the world: Homer, that it is a glorious gift of nature; and Ovid calls beauty a favour bestowed by the gods, which this same Ovid shows the gods to have been jealous of among mortals." Certainly the moderns do not wage war for a beautiful woman, as did the ancients: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... of a talent. Dr. Gill considers it about sixty pounds; this was the lesser Roman talent. Michaelis estimates the Jewish talent at thirty-two pounds and a half. The attic talent of gold used in Greece in the time of Homer is estimated at less than an ounce. The safest conclusion as to the weight of the hail-stones is, that they were enormous, and fell with a velocity to crush all ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... mother language of the Aryans that he could thus write to Ryland, with more than a mere scholar's enthusiasm, of one of the two great Vedic epics:—"I have read a considerable part of the Mahabarata, an epic poem written in most beautiful language, and much upon a par with Homer; and it was, like his Iliad, only considered as a great effort of human genius, I should think it one of the first productions in the world; but alas! it is the ground of faith to millions of the simple sons of men, and as such must be held in the utmost abhorrence." ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... Angelique, giving a glance in the great Venetian mirror before her. Her freshly donned robe of blue silk, edged with a foam of snowy laces and furbelows, set off her tall figure. Her arms, bare to the elbows, would have excited Juno's jealousy or Homer's verse to gather efforts in praise of them. Her dainty feet, shapely, aspiring, and full of character as her face, were carelessly thrust forward, and upon one of them lay a flossy spaniel, a privileged pet of his ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of the Tyrrhenian Sea have been sung since the days of Homer. That the Mediterranean generally, and its beautiful boundaries of Alps and Apennines, with its deeply indented and irregular shores, forms the most delightful region of the known earth, in all that relates to climate, productions, and physical ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... lost a game that way just as we thought we had it tucked away in our bat bag. The other fellows were one run ahead, and when we came to bat in our half of the sixth we got three men on bases in less than no time. Our heaviest batters were just coming up, and one of them knocked a homer, clearing the bases and putting us three runs in the lead. The fellows were dancing round and hugging each other, when just then the rain came down like fury and the game had to be called. Of course, our runs didn't count and the score ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... She remembered more bitterly the romance that had tickled her earlier fancy, told of two college friends of her brother-in-law's who were living the "perfect life" in the mines, laboring in the ditches with a copy of Homer in their pockets, and writing letters of the purest philosophy under the free air of the pines. How, coming unexpectedly on them in their Arcadia, the party found them unpresentable through dirt, and thenceforth unknowable through domestic complications that had filled their ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... that he originally came from that town in Thessaly, and that he retired thence to Egypt. Virgil, and Servius, his Commentator, assert that Proteus returned to Thessaly after the death of his children, who were slain by Hercules; in which assertion, however, they are not supported by Homer or Herodotus. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Temperance is a fine and noble thing; and quietness in many or most cases is not so fine a thing as quickness.' He tries again and says (2) that temperance is modesty. But this again is set aside by a sophistical application of Homer: for temperance is good as well as noble, and Homer has declared that 'modesty is not good for a needy man.' (3) Once more Charmides makes the attempt. This time he gives a definition which he has heard, and of which Socrates conjectures that Critias must be the author: 'Temperance is doing one's ...
— Charmides • Plato
... we announced as a sure cure for indigestion, "stop eating!" When our prisoner chaplain Emerson on a Sunday afternoon prayed for the dear ones we expected to see no more, and even the roughest and most profane were in tears, we said with old Homer, "Agathoi aridakrues andres" ("Gallant men are easily moved to tears"), or with Bayard Taylor, "The bravest are the tenderest, ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... passages toward the close of the book which may fitly be compared with the lyrical freedoms of no matter what epic, and which display an unsurpassable dexterity of hand." And now what are we to say of "Manon Lescaut"? That it is a million times better than Milton and knocks spots off Homer? But all this though distressing is not conclusive; it proves provinciality but it proves nothing worse. Mr. Bennett may really have been thinking all the time of "Robert Elsmere" and "The Epic of Hades." About another of his favourites, however, he ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... thought! The true war poets, after all, have been warriors themselves. Koerner and Alcaeus fought as well as sang, and sang because they fought. Old Homer, too,—who can believe that he had not hewn his way through the very battles which he describes, and seen every wound, every shape of agony? A noble thought, to go out with that army against the northern ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... to-day, it may not impossibly be due to the fact that we have ceased to prize the old, old tales which have been the delight of the child and the child-man since the foundations of the world. If you want your child to love Homer, do not withhold ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... search of his island home and his faithful Penelope. In those days, so the Greek bard tells us, there dwelt upon these islets strange sea-witches with the faces and forms of most beautiful maidens, although their lower limbs had the resemblance of eagles' feet and talons. Two sirens only, says Homer, dwelt upon these coasts, although later poets have increased the number of the fatal sisters to three or even four. Singing the most enchanting songs to the sound of tortoise-shell lyres, there used to bask in the sunlight beside the gentle ripple the Sirens, their nether limbs well ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... few years were insufficient to satisfy him, began now to aspire for some supernatural honors, and he accordingly conceived the design of having himself declared to be the son of a god. The heroes of Homer were sons of the gods. Alexander envied them the fame and honor which this distinction gave them in the opinion of mankind. He determined to visit the temple of Jupiter Ammon in the Oasis of Siwah, and to have the declaration of his divine origin made ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... books were almost like my own. I carried them around hid in my breast; my coat-skirts were weighted with books. There were Plutarch's Lives in the old French of Amyot, over which I labored; a French translation of Homer; Corneille's tragedies; Rochefoucauld; Montaigne's essays, in ten volumes; Thomson's poems, and Chesterfield's letters, in English; the life of Petrarch; three volumes of Montesquieu's works; and a Bible; which I found greatly to my taste. It was a ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... preserved," said the licentiate, "and kept as a jewel; and let such another casket be made for it as that which Alexander found among the spoils of Darius appropriated to preserve the works of the poet Homer....Therefore, master Nicholas, saving your better judgment let this and Amadis de Gaul be exempted from the flames, and let all the rest perish without any farther inquiry." "Not so neighbour," replied the barber, "for behold here the renowned Don Belianis." The priest replied, ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... rather than deter. The student says, "I will; therefore I can." He also says, "I can; therefore I will." He knows that the forces fighting for him are more than those that fight against him, strong as these are. Man in his noblest relationships, the songs of the poet (the best interpreter, from Homer and Virgil to the "Winepress" of Alfred Noyes), the torture, the pains, the sufferings, the woes, the vision of the prophet of a loving and perfect humanity, the reason of logic—all these and more are to him inspirations, ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... battle-bows unstrung, Strong, hero-limbed, like those whom Homer sung, Pastorius fancied, when the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... characterized by Flaxman as "mere beginners," or "laborious mechanics;" their works as "lifeless forms, menial vehicles of an idea." When Egyptian art ended, then Grecian art began. It appears, however, to have made but little progress down to the time of Homer; and Ddalus and his disciple Eudus are, we believe, the only artists of that early period whose fame has survived. These sculptors worked in wood, and by their proficiency we may form a pretty accurate idea of the state of art in Greece when Homer wrote. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the water corral we separated into two groups. The smaller, under the direction of Jed Parker, was to drive the mesquite in the wide flats. The rest of us, under the command of Homer, the round-up captain, were to sweep the country even as far as the base of the foothills near Mount Graham. Accordingly we put our ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... in his comfortable sitting-room in the Hotel Wellington—Homer and Juvenal (in the original) ranked on the piano-top beside De Vere Stackpole novels and other contemporary literature called to mind that though Brahms and Beethoven violin concertos are among his ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... something of a poet in his spare moments, the impression as of departed divinity. The atmosphere of the hotel hall seemed to take a rosy tinge, and to be impregnated with enchanting odours as from the visit of an Olympian. Mr. Wilkins had been going through a course of Homer of late, in Bohn's translation, and permitted himself occasionally to allow his fancy free play in classical allusion. Never, though, to his credit be it recorded, did his poetic studies or his love-dreamings operate in the least to the detriment of his serious ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... mores of their ancestors. In the Homeric poems cases are to be found of disapproval by a later generation of the mores of a former one. The same is true of the tragedies of the fifth century in respect to the mythology and heroism in Homer. The punishment of Melantheus, the unfaithful goatherd, was savage in the extreme, but when Eurykleia exulted over the dead suitors, Ulysses told her that it was a cruel sin to rejoice over slain enemies.[143] In the Iliad boastful shouts over the dead are frequent. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Hampstead, who compared artichokes with the father and read poetry with the son. To Trumbull Pope submitted some of his earliest verses, and from him, it seems, received much valuable advice, including a recommendation to translate Homer. Another acquaintance was the minor poet and criticaster, William Walsh, who gave his young friend that memorable (and somewhat ambiguous) injunction to "study the ancients" and "be correct." He had been introduced to Walsh ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... grievance, or, as Dr. Garnett says, "the carpers and fault-finders of the clan". Their first attempts were, as has been conjectured, merely personal lampoons against those they disliked or differed from, and were perhaps of a type cognate with the Homeric Margites. Homer's character of Thersites is mayhap a lifelike portrait of some contemporary satirist who made himself dreaded by his personalities. But even in Thersites we see the germs of transition from merely personal ...
— English Satires • Various
... teaching him at five years old, with the aid of piled-up chairs and tables—the cat for Helen, and Towzer and Tray as the Atreidai,—the story of the siege of Troy, and, later, his urging the boy to read the tale "properly told" in the translation of Homer by his favourite poet, Pope. He lived almost to the close of his eighty-fifth year, and if he was at times bewildered by his son's poetry, he came nearer to it in intelligent sympathy as he grew older, and he had for long the satisfaction of ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... over your Homer here, with an infinite pleasure, and find several little passages explained, that I did not before entirely comprehend the beauty of; many of the customs, and much Of the dress then in fashion, ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... lived at his father's house in George Square, Edinburgh. His lameness and solitary habits had made him a good reader, and he used to read aloud to his mother, Pope's translation of Homer and Allan Ramsay's "Evergreen;" his mother had the happiest of tempers and a good love of poetry. In the same year he was sent to the High School, Edinburgh, under the celebrated Dr. Adam, who made him sensible of the beauties of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... speeches of Lysias; of the hundred and eighty treatises of Theophrastus; of the eighth book of the conic sections of Apollonius; of Pindar's hymns and dithyrambics; and of the five and forty tragedies of Homer Junior. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... mosaic represents the body in its extreme maceration and humiliation. The rhetorician, Dio Chrysostom, in a somewhat whimsical passage, which was suggested by a remark of Plato, found a special moral significance in the fact that Homer, though he places his heroes on the the banks of what he calls 'the fishy Hellespont,' never makes them eat fish, but always flesh and the flesh of oxen, for this, as he says, is 'strength-producing food' and is therefore suited for the ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... turned the young fellow's head. He soon began to play lord paramount of Parnassus, with every air of one born to the purple. The kings of the earth vied with each other to do him honor. Ronsard affected scholarship, and the foremost scholars of his time were proud to place him with Homer and with Virgil on the roll of the poets. Ronsard's peculiarity in style was the free use of words and constructions not properly French. Boileau indicated whence he enriched his vocabulary and his syntax, by satirically saying that Ronsard ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... medical treatment. If none of these things seemed demanded, I smoked my pipe. To me one afternoon came a big-framed, old, dignified man, with the heavy beard, the noble features, the high forehead, and the blank statue eyes of the blind Homer. He was led by a very small, very bright-eyed naked boy. At some twenty feet distance he squatted down cross-legged before me. For quite five minutes he sat there silent, while I sat in my camp chair, smoked and waited. At last he spoke in a rolling deep bass voice rich ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... with the due liberality of a nobleman, in his affairs; sagacious and conscientious as a magistrate; generous to his friends. "He puts me in mind," said one who knew him, "of an ancient hero; and I remember Dr. Johnson was positive that he resembled Homer's character of Jaspedon."[396] "His agreeable look and address," observes that adorer of rank, Boswell, "prevented that restraint, which the idea of his being Lord High Constable of Scotland might otherwise ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... says, "I know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly by way of precept, or sermoned at large, as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises." He thought that Homer and Virgil and Ariosto had thus written poetry, to teach the world moral virtue and political wisdom. He attempted to propitiate Lord Burghley, who hated him and his verses, by setting before him in a dedication sonnet, the true ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... recall the ancient quarrel 'Twixt Man and Time, that marks all earthly things? Why labor to re-word the hackneyed moral, [Greek: Os phhyllongenehe], as Homer sings? ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... not an end but a means to an end. All the literary criticism ever uttered would be useless as such if it did not evince a desire to further the development of literary art. The Iliad and the Oedipus were written long before Aristotle's Poetics, and it is not likely that either Homer or Sophocles would have been a greater poet if he could have read the Stagirite's treatise. Yet the Poetics, as a summary of the essential features of that art, served an important purpose in later ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... ten minutes later, and, the calls on her time being many, remained out so long that at half-past six she hadn't come back. At that hour, on the other hand, Scott Homer knocked at her door, where her maid, who opened it with a weak pretence of holding it firm, ventured to announce to him, as a lesson well learnt, that he hadn't been expected till seven. No lesson, none the less, could prevail against ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... a truth beyond all question, that, when at one time Rome was the abode of all the virtues, many of the nobles, like the Lotophagi, celebrated in Homer, who detained men by the deliciousness of their fruit, allured foreigners of free birth by manifold ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... doing this. He is more elastic, less devoted to system. Without being as free, as sensitive to impressions as we like to see an artist of his powers, he escapes pedantry. His subject is not "The Rape of the Sabines," but "The Apotheosis of Homer," academic but not academically fatuitous. To follow the inspiration of the Vatican Stanze in the selection and treatment of ideal subjects is to be far more closely in touch with contemporary feeling as to what is legitimate and proper in imaginative painting, than to ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... from Homer to illustrate the same point. It is the place where Achilles is endeavouring to light the funeral pyre of Patroclus, but because there is no wind the fire will not catch. What is he to do? What can ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... hair cut,' he wrote, 'and whether I am riding or dining, I either read or get some one to read to me.' Some of his favourite volumes are described in terms of delightful affection. He tells us how Homer and Plato sat side by side on the shelf,—the prince of poets by the prince of philosophers. He only knew the rudiments of Greek, and was forced to read the Iliad in the Latin version. 'But I glory,' he said, 'in the sight of my illustrious guests, and have at least ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... at this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty with the golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy. If Keats could say, when he first opened Chapman's Homer,— ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... his scholarship, and during the last six months before leaving to enter Williams College, in 1868, Mr. Tufts says he did seem "to catch something of the spirit of Cicero and Virgil and Homer [where was Horace?], and to catch a little ambition for an education." His gentle preceptor thus summed up the characteristics of the youth he was ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... laughed at it, and said that Mrs. Browning's poetry was so coarse that he could not tolerate it, and he was amused to hear that any people had got above Mrs. Hemans; and he asked me if we had outgrown Homer! To which I replied that they were ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell |
