"Idyl" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prettiest idyl to us onlookers," she wrote to Lady Adeline. "Love at first sight with both of them, and their first glimpse of each other was in church, which we all take to be the happiest omen that God's blessing is upon them, and will ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the truth to themselves; they were ignorant as yet that they were commencing the first chapter of their life-idyl. Fern had a vague sense that the room was brighter when Erle was there looking at her with those kindly glances. She never owned to herself that he was her prince, and that she had found favor in his eyes. She was far too humble for that; but she knew ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... apostrophe to the Union which crowns "The Building of the Ship." It was written in 1849, in the stress of the struggle over California, and it may well last as long as the nation lasts. The poem is an idyl of the ship-building folk and the sea; the consummation is the bridal of the captain and the builder's daughter, and the launching of the ship, christened "The Union"—emblem of the wife's and husband's voyage begun together on ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... now occurred in the continuation of "Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances." The first contributions that Julie sent from her new home were, "An Idyl of the Wood," and "The Three Christmas Trees."[11] In these tales the experiences of her voyage and fresh surroundings became apparent; but in June 1868, "Mrs. Overtheway" was continued by the story of ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... bestowed without intending it, and I have taken without your knowledge. Do not regret the accident which has enriched another. This concealed idyl of the hills was mine, as I supposed, but I acknowledge your equal right to it. Shall we share the possession, or ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... [Footnote 1: This Lyric Idyl of 'Solomon's Song,' together with some narrated stories of the same idyllic spirit, are united in a single volume of this series under the ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... Nikomis, are not confined to the life of the aborigines. Every spirited boy is a Hiawatha, and in one form or another goes through the same experiences that Longfellow has represented with such consummate art in his American epic-idyl. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... most important work of Mrs. Browning is Aurora Leigh: a long poem in nine books, which appeared in 1856, in which the great questions of the age, social and moral, are handled with great boldness. It is neither an epic, nor an idyl, nor a tale in verse: it combines features of them all. It presents her clear convictions of life and art, and is full of philosophy, largely expressed in the language of irony and sarcasm. She is an inspired advocate of the intellectual claims of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... my dear duke, a most charming idyl; in true Watteau style, I will be the sweet shepherdess, and lead your highness by a little ribbon. But ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... this angelic woman, whose gentle, unselfish character left on me an impression that can never fade... Her life, like her nature, was calm and uniform. Her character fascinated the Emperor and bound him down to her." This loving idyl, a sort of interlude in the tragedy of war, may have suited Constant's taste, but it was hardly of a nature to please Josephine, who, like most jealous people, knew almost always what she wanted to know, and from the Tuileries found ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... instrument neither better nor worse. Youth might fade, honors take wing, the face of nature change, but Hans, Gargantuan Hans, appeared but a figure in an eternal present! Gazing at that substantial landmark, the soldier was carried back in thought over the long period of separation to a forest idyl; a face in the firelight; the song of the katydid; the drumming of the woodpecker. Dreams; vain dreams! They had assailed him before, but seldom so sharply as now in a place consecrated to ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... 28, is recorded: "Set about 'Gabrielle,'[Footnote: The poem Evangeline, to which the poet at first intended to give the title Gabrielle.] my idyl in hexameters, in earnest. I do not mean to let a day go by without adding something to it, if it be but a single line. F. and Sumner are both doubtful of the measure. To me it seems the only one for such a poem." And again, on December 7, "I know not what name to give to—not ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... and occasionally wrote pieces with purely fictitious names, (this is worthy of notice, as forming a transition towards the new comedy,) one of which was called the Flower, and was probably therefore neither seriously affecting nor terrible, but in the style of the idyl, and pleasing. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... there a musk-rose or a violet that retains its fragrance. He seems to have taken Shirley as his master; but desire in the pupil's case outran performance. It is, indeed, a pitiful fall from the Grateful Servant, a honey-sweet old play, fresh as an idyl of Theocritus, to the paltry faded graces ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... Three grand weeks afterwards I waited around, going walks with her in the park, taking her on foolish steamer rides, sending her flowers, notes, candy. We were rare spoons, and she was as good as she was witty. There was an idyl for you! Then, when I woke up one day—why, I ran away without a word! What else could I do? I was bound for an Australian sheep ranch. And there I went. Since then not a whisper of her. By now it's quite likely she's the wife of some lucky dog of a doctor, and never gives ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... It is only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature without ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... the day passed, a day that remains forever an idyl of simple loveliness to me, such as any man is the richer for having known. When darkness overtook us, we made for ourselves the softest of ferny beds, and slept serenely, untroubled by anything, under the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... very prose of life, so unbearable to the former, was by them converted into poetry. Although the ancient idyls and the family scenes of English authors were at first imitated, this style of poetry retained an essentially German originality; the hero of the modern idyl, unlike his ancient model, was a fop tricked out with wig and cane, and the domestic hero of the tale, unlike his English counterpart, was a mere political nullity. It is perhaps well when domestic comforts replace the want of public ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... first direct general cargo landed in Hong-kong harbor—an event that to the men who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily remote as the dark ages of history. But Captain Whalley could in a half hour of solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its sorrow. He had to close her eyes himself. She went away from under the ensign like a sailor's wife, a sailor herself at heart. He had read the service over her, out of her own prayer-book, without a break in his ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... curious and simple race, painted, not from within, but from the outside or Russian point of view. But here is no refining, no affectation of pastoral simplicity. The Cossacks is distinctly a primitive poem, one which can scarcely be classed either as idyl or epic, though, in spite of its scenes being mainly rural, it perhaps approaches more nearly to the epic. There is an Homeric simplicity in its descriptions of half-drunken warriors with their superb physique, their bravado, their native dignity and singleness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... dwelling here, and that it might please him here to abide." [Footnote: Od. vi. 244.—Translated by Butcher and Lang.] About the whole scene there is a freshness and a fragrance as of early morning, and a tone so natural, free and frank, that in the face of this rustic idyl the later centuries sicken and faint, like candle-light in ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... memories came back to me of three friends of my own childhood—'Robinson Crusoe,' 'The Swiss Family Robinson,' and 'Masterman Ready'—and I would be glad to know that all, old and young, who have enjoyed those immortal tales would take to their hearts this last idyl of an island."—Sara Andrew Shafer, in the ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... little west of the Arch of Stars except groves and meadows. Neuilly and Passy were distant villages. Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, with comic opera villas nestled in high-walled gardens. To Auteuil Armand Duval and his Camille hied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days there was a lovely lane called Marguerite Gautier, with a dovecote pointed out as the very "rustic dwelling" so pathetically sung in Verdi's tuneful score and tenderly described in the original ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... he in his wooings, that he would leave his flocks to wander at will, while he sang his uncouth lays from the hilltops to Galatea in the bay below. Her only answers were words of scorn and mockery. See Andrew Lang's translation of Theocritus, Idyl VI, for further account. ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... at once rich passion and spare form. Here Mr. Allen is at his best, representing young love springing up fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter moments to fall flat from a lack of the true ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... me to my dreams. But visions did not return. My idyl was spoiled. Old-fashioned ideas emerged, and took form in the plain light of every-day common-sense. I knew the wonderfully gorgeous spectacle these two young people were going to see at the play that night, with its lights, its music, its splendidly meretricious Orientalism. ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... one of her brother's favorite phrases, and now quite as excited over the idea as he. "I do so love to act in movies. Is there a part in that 'Idyl' story for me?" ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... Empress of France in sad monotony; in Versailles, in Trianon, lived the present Queen of France in the dazzling splendor of her glory, of her youth, and of her beauty. In Trianon—this first gift of love from the king to his wife—the Queen of France dreamed life away in a pleasant idyl, in a joyous pastoral amusement; there, she tried to forget that she was queen, that is to say, that she was the slave of etiquette; there she tried to indemnify herself for the tediousness, the emptiness, the heartlessness of the great festivals in the ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... of the book is given by the word Idyl, which was to be so closely connected with Tennyson's fame. Here he is working in a small compass, but he breaks fresh ground in describing scenes of English village life, and shows that he has used his gifts of observation ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... have given him greater leisure as well as better opportunities of culture, he has published but two poems in the last five years,—an Ode for the ter-centenary anniversary of Shakspeare's birth, and the sacred idyl of "Jephthah's Daughter." The former is a production the spirit of which is worthy of its occasion, although, in execution, it is weakened, by an overplus of imagery and epithet. It contains between seven and eight hundred lines. The grand, ever-changing music of the Ode will not bear to be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... "This idyl becomes true," Kautsky says, "only if we grant that but one side of the opposed forces [the proletariat] is growing and increasing in strength, while the other side [the capitalists] remains immovably fixed to the ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... sensation. He, in his turn, was fully aware of the happiness she felt in being there, and he reserved the work which required skill for the time when she could look on in wonder and admiration. It was an idyl that they were unconsciously enacting all that spring, and when Gervaise returned to her home it was in ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... dissipated that fascinating idyl about the old race of tall, blond Aryans as the originators of our present civilisation, for it has been shown that the so-called Aryan civilisation was inferior in many ways to the primitive culture of neolithic times, and ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... to have grown unprecedentedly beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judicious depopulation to make of any spot an Eden. Perhaps the early Jewish myth-makers had some such thought in mind when they wrote their idyl of the cosmogony. The human traits are true to-day. Then at last our souls throw aside their conventional wrappings to stand revealed as they really are. Certain of comprehension, the thoughts we have ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... mountain air, walked vigorously, and wrote, with great rapidity, says Mrs Orr, his poem of Russia, Ivan Ivanovitch. When a boy he had read in Bunyan's "Life and Death of Mr Badman" the story of "Old Tod", and with this still vivid in his memory, he added to his Russian tale the highly unidyllic "idyl" of English life, Ned Bratts. It was thus that subjects for poems suddenly presented themselves to Browning, often rising up as it were spontaneously out of the remote past. "There comes up unexpectedly," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "some ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Scriabine. And yet, despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, their hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to some degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony, for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried," although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed and rose-lit woodland, Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The "Poeme de l'extase," with ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... of his idyl suffered a check when the great senatorial fight came on in the Legislature. Attacked by a combination of rivals, Brander was given the fight of his life. To his amazement he discovered that a great railroad corporation, which had always been friendly, was secretly ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... was formerly, in the Jewish collections, regarded as a part of the Book of Judges, is a beautiful pastoral idyl of the same period. Its scene is laid in Judea, and it serves to show us that in the midst of all those turbulent ages there were quiet homes and gentle lives. No sweeter story can be found in any literature; maternal tenderness, filial affection, genuine chivalry, find in ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... contemplation, intent upon objects of peaceful beauty, and undisturbed by rude anxieties and vehement passions, suggested only kindred reproductions to the creative faculty by which it was vivified; so that the whole man was not only a poet, but, as it were, a poem,—a living idyl, calling into pastoral music every reed that sighed and trembled along the stream of life. And Helen was so suited to a nature of this kind, she so guarded the ideal existence in which it breathes! All the little ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and to her brain with a thought that was bitter: Why is this world as it is? Why is it not different? But perhaps it was different somewhere else, but not for her? She had ceased to believe in an idyl. She had looked too long, and from too near a point, at the tragedy and irony of things to preserve faith in idyls. Maybe there were idyls somewhere, but not in the sphere where she lived—they were ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... with so ardent a desire for mutual happiness that, for a moment, they had attained to the very depths of the love which gives and immolates itself. And now their long, tear-drenched tenderness, their pure idyl of suffering, was ending in this brutal separation; she on her side saved, radiant amidst the hosannas of the triumphant Basilica; and he lost, sobbing with wretchedness, bowed down in the depths of the dark crypt in an icy, grave-like solitude. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... to bring a little light into the invalid's eye by a basket of grapes or a fragrant bunch of flowers, or to delight Tiny Tim with a trinket, or to let little Jacob "know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket, as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... The little idyl was the talk of the villagers before it came to the squire's ears. When he questioned Alfred the young man confessed it readily enough. He loved Miss Percival, and she didn't mind waiting. Mr. Thorne was not altogether displeased, for, though his intercourse ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... was but a loving woman who had given her heart to him, who understood him, and who, in a woman's way, was of his mood. It was an idyl of ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... idyl," says Stedman, "is without a counterpart; no richer juice can be pressed from the wild grape of the Yankee soil." Greenslet thinks that this poem is "perhaps the most nearly ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... the emperor, with troubled mien. "I had forgotten that I had a home." This question had awakened him from his idyl. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... immortalized by his admiration—"For heaven's sake, when you kill him, hurt him not"—should suffice to preserve and to embalm the name of the writer. I can scarcely think that a later scene, apparently imitated from the most impudent idyl of Theocritus, can have been likely to elevate the moral tone of the young gentleman who must have taken the part of Callisto; but the honest laureate of the city, stern and straightforward as he was in ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... marriages that the first was an idyl, the second a romance and the third a fairy-tale. Others said harsher things. But Asta Grundtvig paid no attention to the scandal mongers. A very earnest Christian woman herself, she devoted all her energy to create ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... The following idyl, extemporized by one of Stanley's black soldiers, on the occasion of reaching Lake Nyanza, possesses more energy of movement, perspicuity of style, and warm, glowing imagery, than any song of its character we have yet met with from the lips of unlettered Negroes. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... living and breathing before us in a poem. No wonder, then, that, in the present dearth of poetry in France, this epic or idyl, call it as you will, was received with acclamations. M. Rene Taillandier has consecrated to it one of his most masterly articles in the "Revue des Deux Mondes." Lamartine has devoted to it a whole entretien in his "Cours de Litterature." It was discussed, quoted, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... had enough of my maunderings. But before I conclude them, may I ask you to give all our kindest regards to Lowell, and to express our admiration for the Yankee Idyl. I am afraid of using too extravagant language if I say all I think about it. Was there ever anything more stinging, more concentrated, more vigorous, more just? He has condensed into those few pages the essence of a hundred diplomatic papers and historical disquisitions and Fourth of July ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the North British Review. In 1855 he published 'Horae Subsceivae,' which contained, among medical biography and medico-literary papers, the immortal Scotch idyl, 'Rab and his Friends.' Up to this time the unique personality of the doctor, with its delightful mixture of humor and sympathy, was known only to his own circle. The appearance of 'Rab and his Friends' revealed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... displays to every village throughout Germany. From the polar latitudes to the Mediterranean, from the mouths of the Rhine to the Euxine, there was no other exhibition of free deliberative eloquence in any popular assembly. And the Luise of Voss alone, a metrical idyl not less valued for its truth of portraiture than our own Vicar of Wakefield, will show, that the most sequestered clergyman of a rural parish did not think his breakfast equipage complete without the latest report from the great senate that sat ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... brought out in a volume were prefaced by imaginary notices of the press, including a capital parody of Carlyle, and a reprint from the "Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss," of the first sketch—afterward amplified and enriched—of that perfect Yankee idyl, The Courtin'. Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of Biglow Papers appeared, called out by the events of the civil war. Some of these, as, for instance, Jonathan to John, a remonstrance with England for her unfriendly attitude toward the ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... — N. poetry, poetics, poesy, Muse, Calliope, tuneful Nine, Parnassus, Helicon^, Pierides, Pierian spring. versification, rhyming, making verses; prosody, orthometry^. poem; epic, epic poem; epopee^, epopoea, ode, epode^, idyl, lyric, eclogue, pastoral, bucolic, dithyramb, anacreontic^, sonnet, roundelay, rondeau [Fr.], rondo, madrigal, canzonet^, cento^, monody [Slang], elegy; amoebaeum, ghazal^, palinode. dramatic poetry, lyric poetry; opera; posy, anthology; disjecta membra poetae ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Acadian face. The mouth and chin are more delicate in the real than in the ideal Evangeline. If you look again, after the first surprise is over, you will see that these are the traditional pictures, such as we might have fancied they should be, after reading the idyl. From the forehead of each you see at a glance how the dark mass of hair has been combed forward and over the face, that the little triangular Norman cap might be tied across the crown of the head. Then the hair is thrown back again over this, so as to form a large bow in front, then re-tied ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... foot of it is barren. Even the sage-brush has a charm, if only from its dim likeness to a miniature olive tree, both being glaucous and hoary. An oasis of irrigated clover on Humboldt River is made a theme for an idyl. The vast rocks, when bare even of moss, are at least rich and various in tint and form, and have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... back to an idyl little known of Marie's twelfth year. The fact itself is not very extraordinary. The little girl is training herself for motherhood by lavishing caresses on wretched papier-mache baby dolls. She is practising ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... Eric carried to the old orchard a little limp, worn volume that held a love story. It was the first thing of the kind he had ever read to her, for in the first novel he had lent her the love interest had been very slight and subordinate. This was a beautiful, passionate idyl exquisitely told. ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... A prose idyl is the term which best describes the courtly and pastoral character of Lodge's "Rosalynde," the last work of fiction of any importance which distinctly bears the impress of euphuism. Published in 1590, the ten editions through which it passed during the next fifty ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... on, alas, it came more and more to seem that the Dorothea idyl had not been meant to be taken as a work of realism. The "treffliches Maedchen" was perhaps too kind-hearted; her emotions were too voluminous for so small a house, her personality seemed to spread all over it. She would sing Hungarian love-ditties ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... After a brief period of retirement from the world, during which he chattered with fear when he wrapped Trudy's gay little possessions in bundles and gave them away, he emerged in the satisfactory role of a young widower on the loose who feels that "Perhaps it was all for the best; an idyl of youth, y'know; someone quite out of my sphere," and was welcomed ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... not think that there has ever been an idyl like that through which we lived during those fifteen months, first on the heights of the Atlas range and then in the infernal plains of the Sahara: an idyl of heroism, of privation, of superhuman torture and superhuman joy; an idyl of hunger and thirst, of total defeat ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... interest,—this man with the dark, eager face and bold black eyes? His eyes are fixed on the child; his face is aglow with wonder and delight, but with something else too,—some passion which strikes a jarring note through the harmony of the summer idyl. What is this man doing here? Why does he eye the blind child so strangely, with looks ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... from Jack, he began to talk of her—of her beauty—of her kindness—of his own unworthiness—of what she had said and done—until, finding in this gracious stranger the vent his pent-up feelings so long had sought, he sang then and there the little idyl of his boyish life. He told of his decline in her affections after his unpardonable sin in keeping her waiting while he went for the trout, and added the miserable mistake of the rattlesnake episode. "For it was a mistake, Mr. Hamlin. I oughtn't to have let a lady like ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... marriage altar, and it will be told in future years of these two great souls who were the first to recognize the dignity of human individuality. The domestic life of this couple who set up the standard of absolute equality of husband and wife was an exquisite idyl, fragrant with love and tenderness, a poem whose rhythm was not marred, a divine melody that rose above the discords and dissensions of domestic life upon the lowlands where man is the ruler and woman ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... Monsieur, Madame, and the Pea-Green Parrot. The Bishop of Saskabasquia. "As it was in the Beginning." A Christmas Sketch. The Idyl of the Island. The Story of Delle Josephine Boulanger. The Story of Etienne Chezy d'Alencourt. "Descendez a l'ombre, ma jolie blonde." The Prisoner Dubois. How the Mr. Foxleys Came, Stayed, and Never Went Away. ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... it all, brought by Pythagoras from Egypt is very old. Known in Memphis, it was known too in Babylon, perhaps before Memphis was. But the legend of Isis and that of Ishtar—both of whom descended into hell—lack the transparent charm which this idyl unfolds and of which the significance was revealed only to initiate in ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... now fairly afloat upon the gentle stream of an idyl? Shall I watch the banks as they glide past, and record each fairy-headed flower that looks at its image in the wave? Or shall I mow them down and sweep ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... without whom he felt it impossible to exist. Numberless are the stratagems he contrived, and incredible the ingenuity with which they were executed; the freshness of his romance was itself an exquisite idyl. . . . Victor never despaired; but in the midst of his anticipations he was overwhelmed ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... written by Shakspere, Daniel, Drayton, Drummond, Constable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals and Shephera's Pipe (1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, {95} The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, which Shakspere quoted in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's Romeo and Juliet (the source of Shakspere's tragedy), Marlowe's ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... vivid picture of Revolutionary scenes. The story is a strong one, a thrilling one. It causes the true American to flush with excitement, to devour chapter after chapter, until the eyes smart, and it fairly smokes with patriotism. The love story is a singularly charming idyl. ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... going to follow your advice," went on Alexia, "be so good as to tell us a little bit more. Now what shall we do in the way of a simple, appropriate fandango—a perfect idyl of a thing, ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... been written, Whittier would have composed his "Snow-Bound," no doubt; and the latter only recalls the former on account of that genuine home-atmosphere which surrounds both these exquisite productions. After a perusal of this new American idyl, no competent critic will contend that we lack proper themes for poetry in our own land. The "Snow-Bound" will be a sufficient reminder to all cavillers, at home or abroad, that the American Muse need not travel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... Profundis, still sounding from very far away. At long intervals the great earth sighed dreamily in its sleep. All about, the feeling of absolute peace and quiet and security and untroubled happiness and content seemed descending from the stars like a benediction. The beauty of his poem, its idyl, came to him like a caress; that alone had been lacking. It was that, perhaps, which had left it hitherto incomplete. At last he was to grasp his song in all its entity. But suddenly there was an interruption. Presley had climbed the fence at the limit of the Quien Sabe ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... and through, with a strong leaning toward the French school. Among the best of his tales are 'Araminta May,' 'Skaellnora Quarn' (Skaellnora's Mill), and 'Grimstahamns Nybygge' (Grimstahamn's Settlement). His idyl 'Kapellet' (The Chapel) is wonderfully true to nature, and his novel 'Palatset' (The Palace) is rich in humor and true poesy. His literary fame will probably rest on his romances, which are the best of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... fill the time. This tale of laborious days bounded by the fires of sunrise and sunset, this struggle with the primal forces of storm and flood, this passage across a panorama unrolling in ever wilder majesty, was the setting for her love idyl. The joy of her mounting spirit broke out in an answering cry that flew across the river to David like the call of ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... that the very foundation of that stoic equanimity which the mountains had bred in him had suffered a temporary upsetting. His happiness was almost an insanity. The dream wherein he had wandered with a spirit of the dead had come true; it was the old idyl in the flesh again, his father, his mother—and back in the cabin beyond the ridge such a love had cried out to him. And he was afraid to return. He laughed the fact aloud, happily and with an unrepressed exultation as he strode ahead of the pack-train, ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... the next day and ensuing days, kept the even tenor of her way, sunk a thousand or two more in unsuccessful speculation, and made no change in her habits of personal economy. Weeks passed without any apparent sequel to this romantic idyl. Nothing was known definitely until Jack, a month later, turned up in Sacramento, with a billiard-cue in his hand, and a heart overcharged with indignant emotion. "I don't mind saying to you, gentlemen, in confidence," said Jack to a ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... other people's opinion of him: but he found himself for ever wondering what Hetty Gunn thought of him; whether she were beginning to lose any of her old prejudice against him; and whether, after this sea-side idyl were over, he should ever see her again. The more he pondered, the less he could solve the question. No wonder. The simple truth was that Hetty was not thinking about him at all. She had accepted the whole situation with frankness ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... the Prince; "it is a charming and poetic idyl which you present to me. We should flee far from the world, eh? We should go to an unknown spot and try to regain paradise lost. How long would that happiness last? A season during the springtime of our youth. Then autumn would come, sad and harsh. Our illusions would vanish like the swallows ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was born, the end which Fate forced upon him, to me, was inevitable. Each word and act of the three weeks of his parents' love-idyl must reflect in the character and life of the child. Little by little the baby King grew before my mental vision until I saw at last there was no escape from his importunity and I allowed the insistent Boy—masterful even from ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... the harmonies of water notes blended with the chiming of distant bells, and Watteau showed in the many studies which he made in the garden how potent was its influence in investing his fetes champetres with the grace of the idyl. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... treatment. The hero is drawn with a master hand. The picture of the heroine is a revelation of innocence and beauty of the most exquisite English type. The love story which runs through the book, like a golden thread, is an idyl. Few novels are so well calculated to appeal to a large class of readers, comprising, as it does, food both for thought ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... Beneath an idyl of Moschus, of all places in the world, Macaulay notes the fact of Peel being First Lord of the Treasury; and he finds space, between two quotations in Athenaeus, to commemorate a Ministerial majority of 29 on the Second Reading ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... was elected a member of the French Academy in 1891, succeeding to the chair of Octave Feuillet. Some of his writings are: 'Aziyade,' written in 1879; the scene is laid in Constantinople. This was followed by 'Rarahu,' a Polynesian idyl (1880; again published under the title Le Mariage de Loti, 1882). 'Roman d'un Spahi (1881) deals with Algiers. Taton-gaye is a true 'bete-humaine', sunk in moral slumber or quivering with ferocious joys. It is in this book that Loti has eclipsed Zola. One ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... faithful had a pencil and discovered a sheet of wrapping paper in the box of the buggy. Anne folded up her dripping parasol, put on her hat, spread the wrapping paper on a shingle Diana handed up, and wrote out her garden idyl under conditions that could hardly be considered as favorable to literature. Nevertheless, the result was quite pretty, and Diana was "enraptured" when ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... effective. "Zanetto" is nothing more than an operatic sketch in one act. In its original shape, as it came from the pen of Franois Coppe, under the title "Le Passant," the story is a gracious and graceful idyl. A woman of the world, sated and weary with a life of amours, meets a young singer, feels the sensations of a pure love pulsing in her veins and sends him out of her presence uncontaminated. Here are ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... too, is the recollection of the exquisite little prose idyl of "Moss-Side," from "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life." From the few short words with which it began—"Gilbert Ainslee was a poor man, and he had been a poor man all the days of his life"—to the happy waking of his little daughter Margaret out ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... to see her here weeping over me,—me, who had so often called up her tears by my ill conduct, filled me with confusion. At the remembrance of my injustice and of her love, even the tears came into my eyes; I hastened to implore pardon of her, doubly and trebly: and I turned this incident into an idyl, [Footnote: Die Laune des Verliebten, translated as The Lover's Caprice, see p. 241.] which I never could read to myself without affection, or ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... at large had no theory, and the practice varied as much in the relation of master and servant as it varied in other family relations. Too much tragedy and too much idyl have been imported into the home life of the Southern people; but this is not the place to ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... of girls as sweet as his white snowdrop. He felt, if he could only afford to buy a lighter for himself, they might marry, and the bride's life might be saved. But it was out of the question, and perhaps the idyl would have ended in tragedy, had he not confided his troubles to his master. That master, as it happened, had a lighter which he'd fitted up with a motor. He'd used it all summer, and got his money's worth of fun out of it; so when he heard ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... evening George Sand, who sometimes thought aloud when with Chopin—this being her way of chatting—spoke of the peacefulness of the country and unfolded a picture of the rural harmonies that had all the charming and negligent grace of a village idyl, bringing, in fact, her beloved Berry to the fireside of the room in ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... clearly impossible and out of our reach we very soon cease sighing for. Men do not cherish a passion which they recognize as utterly hopeless; and Clement Moore, being a man, and moreover an honorable one, put this summer idyl out of his head and heart with all despatch. 'All blundering is sin.' If he had blundered in allowing it to take such hold of his life, he expiated the sin bravely. Sympathies bud and blossom with miraculous quickness in this tropical atmosphere of affinity. He did not know till ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... different in style and conception even from such poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere." They are more mannerised, more in the spirit of Pre-Raphaelite art, than anything in Morris' later work. If the name-poem is put beside Tennyson's idyl "Guinevere"; or "Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery," beside Tennyson's "Sir Galahad," the difference is striking. In place of the refined ethics and sentiment, and purely modern spiritual ideals which find a somewhat rhetorical ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... traveler of a hundred years ago) says the woods on this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees—"flat-nosed bees," as he calls them in the Seventh Idyl—and comparisons in which comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this world's goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with honeycombs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis and fed on ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Spanish sailor was found. You don't remember the Spanish sailor, Eliza Jane—it was before your time. There was a little personal skirmishing here, which I feared, at first, might end in a suspension of maxillary functions, and the loss of the story; but here it is. Ah, me! it is a pure white winter idyl: how shall I sing it this bright, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... idyl for our sailor. He spent most of his days making a jacket with which to clothe the rat, and actually did catch one (I hoped he was not my friend of the staircase) and proceeded to put him into this sailor-made costume, which was not an easy thing to do, ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... and a Dreamer" is a rich fulfillment of this prophecy. Brimming over with genial humor and wholesome fun, the book is an exquisite love story and charming idyl of life among the mountains and ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... province was recruited mostly from German JUNKERS. German fairy tales and stories, rich in the miraculous deeds of the heroic knights of Kurland, wove their spell over the youthful mind. But the beautiful idyl was of short duration. Soon the soul of the growing child was overcast by the dark shadows of life. Already in her tenderest youth the seeds of rebellion and unrelenting hatred of oppression were to be planted ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... The simple idyl of their loves was unbroken by any stain or disappointment, and yet always shadowed with the deepest anxiety for the future. Though treated with the utmost indulgence, she was legally a slave, and so was the boy of whom she became the mother. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... transition—Musset's Un Caprice in contrast with the wanton works of his youth. George Sand's village novels, in contrast with her novels on Marriage. The popular tone and the landscape drawing here, which, for that matter, are all derived from Rousseau, lead on into a tranquil idyl. Works like Ponsard's Lucrece and Augier's Gabrielle show the reaction from Romanticism. In the tragedy it is Lucrece, in the modern play, Gabrielle, upon whom the action hinges. In Ponsard and Augier common sense, strict justice, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... me about him, and all Mr. Mavering's family. We're so interested, you know, on account of—Isn't it pretty to have that little love idyl going on here? I wonder—I've been wondering all the time— what she thinks of all this. Do you suppose she quite likes it?" His costume is so very remarkable!" Miss Cotton, in the absence of any lady of her intimate circle, was appealing ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the love-idyl of the period, when Laura and Charles Henry, after unheard-of obstacles, are finally united, all cares and tribulations and responsibilities slip from their sleek backs like Christian's burden. The idea is a pretty one, theoretically, but, like some of those models ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... money-matters. It really did. And then, besides—ah, my lady, you know that I would glory in the thought that I had given up all for you. You know, I think, that I would willingly work my fingers to the bone just that I might possess you always. So I had dreamed of love in a cottage—an idyl of blissful poverty, where Cupid contents himself with crusts and kisses, and mocks at the proverbial wolf on the doorstep. And I give you my word that until to-day I had not suspected how blindly selfish I have been! For poor old prosaic Rudolph ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... of execution and literary excellence, both "The Market Place" and "Gloria Mundi" are vastly inferior to "The Damnation of Theron Ware," or that exquisite London idyl, "March Hares." The first 200 pages of "Theron Ware" are as good as anything in American fiction, much better than most of it. They are not so much the work of a literary artist as of a vigorous thinker, a man of strong opinions and an intimate and comprehensive ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... than themselves. The talent for sarcastic epigram is hereditary with the people. The pointed style of Martial was handed down through successive generations. The epigram in his hands was no longer a mere inscription, an idyl, or an elegy; it had lost its ancient grace, but it took on a new energy, and it set the model, which the later Romans knew well how to copy, of satire condensed into wit, in lines each of whose words had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... said, with a little lip-curl of disappointment. "He thinks he ought to remember, and he is trying—trying because Grantham said something that made him think he ought to try. But it's no use. It was only a little summer idyl, and we have both ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... tragic idyl, and of flight and hot pursuit, And the jingle of the bridle, and cuirass, and spur on boot, As our horses's hooves struck showers from the flinty bowlders set In freshet ways with ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... spoil an idyl, isn't it? But that is the way with all the little playtime heroics we leave behind in childhood. You could have ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... the state which the shepherd idyl, begun at five o'clock in the morning, had reached at half-past four in the afternoon. The sun was setting; their ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Their idyl at the mines lasted exactly twenty-seven hours. Denver showed Darbor around, explained some of the technicalities of moon-mining to her. The girl misused some precious water to try washing the alley-filth from her clothes. Her ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... a mental agony before we know its substantial cause; and we only see the cause as reflected in it "Ned Bratts," again, conveys in its first lines the sensation of a tremendously hot day in which Nature seems to reel in a kind of riotous stupefaction; and the grotesque tragedy on which the idyl turns, becomes a matter of course. It would ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... she had no wish to avoid him there; no doubt they would work together and as impersonally as they had sometimes done in the past; but to see him here, even in the drawing-room, which held no sacred memories, would be but another and uglier blot on her already dimming idyl; and a subtle infidelity to this man whose every thought seemed to be of her in spite of all he had to ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the heroic age of Israel prior to the monarchy; the Books of Samuel and of Kings, of the monarchy in its glory and its decline; the Books of Chronicles treat of parts of the same era, more from the point of view of the priesthood; Ruth is an idyl of the narrative type; Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther have to do with the return of the Jews from exile, and the events ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... win them. "It seemed at that time," M. Beugnot goes on, "as if Heaven had given him every means of securing happiness. A son had just been born to him, whose future the poets were justified in foretelling in their own way. The child who inspired the Mantuan poet with the idyl, or rather with the magnificent prophecy, Sicelides Musae, etc., was but an humble creature by the side of this infant, who to the most impressive pride of race added enormous, newly acquired glory, such as the world had never seen." The happy Emperor ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... period. During the years at Weimar before he knew Schiller he began "Wilhelm Meister," wrote the dramas, "Iphigenie," "Egmont," and "Torquato Tasso," and his "Reinecke Fuchs." To the period of his friendship with Schiller belong the continuation of "Wilhelm Meister," the beautiful idyl of "Hermann and Dorothea," and the "Roman Elegies." In the last period, between Schiller's death in 1805 and his own, appeared "Faust," "Elective Affinities," his autobiographical "Dichtung und Wahrheit" ("Poetry and Truth"), his "Italian Journey," much ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... proposed to work for an indefinite time. It seemed to him that he should accomplish more than one object, by carrying on his work in Europe; he could insensibly divide himself and his wife from the Ellwell connection. All went sweetly for his first months; he had begun to regard his marriage as an idyl slipped in between pages of prose. But when their child was coming, his wife grew restless; she must go home, he saw; it was natural that she should long to return to her mother at ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... the Friends in Council, a literary club of Kansas City, Mo. It has received the encomiums of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, John J. Ingalls and others for its beauty of expression and dramatic qualities. "Invocation," an April idyl; "The Sea-shell;" and "Mountain Born" sing of the love of nature. "In the Conservatory;" "My Summer Heart;" and "Tired of the Storm" hint of sorrow and unrest and longing. Then in 1886, "Compensation" was written. "Irma's Love For The King" is a favorite; also, "'Sold'—A ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... begins so innocently, like a sweet old idyl of mediaeval France—"un echo du temps passe"—seems to have been a somewhat Rabelaisian ditty; by no means proper singing for a Sunday morning in a boys' school. But boys will be boys, even in France; ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... as the Veronese at Venice; and his picture is truer to the premium standard. The painting shows a pampered animal, with over-red blotches on his white hide, and is by half too fat to breast such "salt sea-foam" as flashes on the Idyl of Moschus. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... publication of a complete translation of the Divina Commedia in terza rima. With Primel el Nola (1852) he included poems written under Italian influence, entitled Les Ternaires (1841), but in the rustic idyl of Marie (1836) turned to Breton country life; in Les Bretons (1845) he found his inspiration in the folklore and legends of his native province, and in Telen-Aroor (1844) he used the Breton dialect. His Histoires poetiques (1855) was crowned by the French Academy. His work is small ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... the long months' loiter along the California coast, and the gray house near Greenwich where they lived until late autumn made the country dreary—those days, those places, saw the enraptured hours. The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way, first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship. The breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day and it was gone, how they scarcely knew. Had either of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... ballad, verse, distich, lyric, elegy, eclogue, idyl, madrigal, epic, ode, georgic, cid, rondeau, epilogue, epigram, elegiac, roundelay, dithyramb, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of this unusual artist seek out her genre pictures in the exhibitions of to-day, much as one turns to an idyl of Heinrich Voss, after a dose of the "storm and stress" poets. Most of her works are in ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... nieces, which would not be long, no doubt. As it was, one of them, Thea, the one who did five pullings-up with her left hand, had his permission to receive letters from her sweetheart, a young man at St. Louis, quite well-off. The idyl made good Mr. Fuchs blossom into a genial smile: family life! Simple joys! The only true ones! Worth more than the stage! And Nunkie talked and talked: the Parisienne, a perpetual scandal! And wait a bit: what was that he heard at an agent's the other ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... I believe I have it in me, I believe I have sufficient devotion and ability, not only to keep alive the flame of his love in our solitary life, far from the world, but even to make it burn stronger and brighter. If I am mistaken, if this splendid idyl of love in hiding must come to an end—an end! what am I saying?—if I find Gaston's love less intense any day than it was the evening before, be sure of this, Renee, I should visit my failure only on myself; no blame should attach to him. I tell you ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... STOKER, M.A. (SAMPSON LOW), is a simple love-story, a pure idyl of Ireland, which does not seem, after all, to be so distressful a country to live in. Whiskey punch flows like milk through the land; the loveliest girls abound, and seem instinctively to be drawn towards the right man. Also there are jooled crowns to be found by earnest seekers, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... de Contes is the life of the wedded poets, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that it is difficult to realize that this immortal idyl of Poetry, Genius, and Love was less than fifteen years in duration, out of his seventy-seven, and her fifty-five years of life. It is a story that ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... A beautiful little idyl of Palestine concerning the sandals of Christ. It tells of their wanderings and who were their wearers, from the time that they fell to the lot of a Roman soldier when Christ's garments were parted among his crucifiers to the day ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... 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, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... sighed I to myself, And strove some vain regrets to bridle, 'Though now laid dusty on the shelf, Was hero once of such an idyl! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... spirit, entitled "An Invocation." Before quoting from it I must explain somewhat; otherwise you might not be able to imagine what it means, because it was written to be read by those only who are acquainted with Theocritus and the Greek idylists. Perhaps I had better say something too, about the word idyl, for the use of the word by Tennyson is not the Greek use at all, except in the mere fact that the word signifies a picturing, a shadowing or an imagining of things. Tennyson's pictures are of a purely imaginative ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... House, with two interludes of appeals to the country. The clerical party described the position of the clergy in a florid style. They declaimed that poets and painters had represented the life of a Danish priest as a beautiful idyl, each scene in relative harmony with surrounding nature, whose heart is not touched as wandering in the path-fields he hears the bells of the country church ringing in the morning of the sabbath. How lovely is the little white church, with its red roof and quaint gables, amidst ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... are a corrupt version of some text in nature with which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... do not love because they are "clad royally." In our day, to be clad royally is scarcely a distinction. To have a superfluity is not a distinction. But in those moments when we have a clear vision of life, that which seems to us most admirable and desirable is the simplicity that endears to us the idyl of Nausicaa. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... It was perhaps this encomium upon the farmer at the expense of the banker which inspired Horace's friend Alfius to withdraw his capital from his banking business and dream a delicious idyl of a simple carefree country life: but, it will be recalled (Epode II, the famous "Beatus ille qui procul negotiis") that Alfius, like many a modern amateur farmer, recruited from town, soon repented that he had ever listened to the alluring call of "back to the ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... suitable employment for his ability and energy. Edward can give him just the needed work, with great advantage to the property, and would like to do so. Charlotte fears that the presence of the Captain may disturb their pleasant idyl, but finally yields. She herself has a niece, Ottilie, a beautiful girl whom no one understands and who is not doing well at her boarding-school. Charlotte would like to have the girl under her own care. After much debate the pair take both the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... motor cars. Rezanov, plenipotentiary of the Czar, here wooed Senorita Arguello, daughter of the Spanish commandante of the Presidio, in an adobe building still standing in the reservation. You may read about this tragic idyl in Bret Harte and Gertrude Atherton. ["D" car on Geary street and Union street car at Ferry Depot, or taxi, auto ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... idyl of Ruth is in sharp contrast with the bloody and turbulent annals of Judges. It completes, but does not contradict, these, and happily reminds us of what we are apt to forget in reading such pages, that no times are so wild but that in them are quiet corners, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... as impatient as I am to have a new one." And then we can hear, or think we hear, the young man begin in a low and modest tone the story of "Edward Fane's Rosebud," or "The Seven Vagabonds," or perchance (O tearful, happy evening!) that tender idyl of "The Gentle Boy!" What a privilege to hear for the first time a "Twice-Told Tale," before it was even once told to the public! And I know with what rapture the delighted little audience must have hailed ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... you might realize your mother's touching dream of becoming a boor, and repenting your sins in sackcloth and ashes! That maternal idyl still troubles your poor, shallow brain, does it? For my part, I think no spectacle on earth is so ridiculous as that of the repentant sinner. It is the most humiliating character in which a man can appear before the world, and it is unworthy of you, Carlo. Hold up your head ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... is full of mother-wit and observation of men and things, especially of every changing mood of the nature he regards as his true mother. He is brave and resourceful, and rescues Lorna and himself from numberless difficulties by his native shrewdness. And his love is a poem, an idyl that crowns him a shepherd king in his own green pastures. Nothing that he does in his plodding, sturdy way wearies us. His size, his strength, his good farming, the way he digs his sheep out of the snow, entertain us as well as his rescue ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... of a lovely woman, who was passionately devoted to him, and amid beautiful scenery, he devoted himself to practicing and composition, also giving much study to the guitar (the favorite instrument of his inamorata), on which he became a wonderful proficient. This charming idyl in Paganini's life reminds one of the retirement of the pianist Chopin to the island of Majorca in the company of Mme. George Sand. It was during this period of his life that Paganini composed twelve of his finest sonatas ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... sketches like these, thrown off in the repose of power, that form the best setting for a heroic or poetical action: what better device was ever invented, even by Tennyson himself, for striking just the right note in the reader's mind while thinking of a noble primitive knight, than that in another Idyl, where Lancelot went along, looking at a star, "and wondered what it was"? Of a more imaginative kind of beauty are the descriptions of the walls of rock near Castle Dangerous, decked by the hermit with tinted bas-reliefs, and the fine one of Camelot, looking as if "built by fairy kings," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... has done a good service, and done it well, in translating this famous idyl, which has been justly called 'one of the most faultless poems of modern times.' Nothing can surpass the simplicity, tenderness, and grace of the original, and these have been well preserved in Miss Frothingham's version. Her success is worthy of the highest praise, and the mere English reader ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... Baby" is not an idyl. It is a tragedy. It breathes the spirit of Malthus, only the spirit is transformed into one of pity for the victim of life rather than one of preservation of the nation. We are not, in this book, ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... has imitated this beautiful ode in his nineteenth idyl; but is very inferior, I think, to his original, in delicacy of point and naivete of expression. Spenser, in one of his smaller compositions, has sported more diffusely on the same subject. The poem to which I allude ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... provincial fashion of some years back. In a wider sphere one might have called her a woman of the world, with her unexpected bits of modern knowledge, but Mrs. Todd's wisdom was an intimation of truth itself. She might belong to any age, like an idyl of Theocritus; but while she always understood Mrs. Fosdick, that entertaining pilgrim could not always understand ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... love were wrong there could not be within us such peace. That Aniela does not call it by its proper name means nothing; it is there all the same. The whole day passed for us like an idyl. Formerly I disliked Sundays; now I find that a Sunday, from morning until night, may be like a poem, especially in the country. Soon after breakfast, we went to church in time for the early mass. My aunt followed in our rear; even Pani ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz |
