"Laureate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... literary research might be profitably followed by the student who should trace the footsteps of all the poets, dead and gone, that have held, in England, the office of laureate. John Kay was laureate in the reign of King Edward the Fourth; Andrew Bernard in that of King Henry the Seventh; John Skelton in that of King Henry the Eighth, and Edmund Spenser in that of Queen Elizabeth. Since then the succession has included the names of Samuel Daniel, Michael ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... soften their manners, and make them less of wild beasts. Some have thought it omnipotent for this; others have given it as a sign of the decline and fall of the nobler part of us. Neither is, and both are true. Art does, as our Laureate says, make nobler in us what is higher than the senses through which it passes; but it can only make nobler what is already noble; it cannot regenerate, neither can it of itself debase and emasculate and bedevil mankind; but it is a symptom, and a fatal one, when Art ministers to a nation's ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... glanced along the old masters, but without seriously looking at anything. While I was among the Dutch painters, a gentleman accosted me. It was Mr. J———, whom I once met at dinner with Bennoch. He told me that "the Poet Laureate" (as he called him) was in the Exhibition rooms; and as I expressed great interest, Mr. J——— was kind enough to go in quest of him. Not for the purpose of introduction, however, for he was not acquainted ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stirring of courage; not of abusing man's wit, but of strengthening man's wit; not banished, but honoured by Plato; let us rather plant more laurels for to ingarland the poets' heads (which honour of being laureate, as besides them only triumphant captains were, is a sufficient authority to show the price they ought to be held in) than suffer the ill-favoured breath of such wrong speakers once to blow upon the clear ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... persons we have seen rushing from one wild extreme to another, out-Paining Paine, out- Castlereaghing Castlereagh, Pantisocratists, Ultra-Tories, heretics, persecutors, breaking the old laws against sedition, calling for new and sharper laws against sedition, writing democratic dramas, writing Laureate odes panegyrising Marten, panegyrising Laud, consistent in nothing but an intolerance which in any person would be censurable, but which is altogether unpardonable in men who, by their own confession, have had such ample experience ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... e'en the man who runs may read The lesson with this lay entwined. (If Topsey-turvey thus succeed, The noble Laureate will not mind!) And liberal applications lie In this quaint Legend, good my friend. So, put the song and picture by, And hook ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 26, 1891 • Various
... whole current of Mr R's ideas, and altered his plans for me. I was no longer to be the future poet-laureate; I was no more enticed to sing great deeds, but to do them. The sword was to displace the pen, the hero the poet. Verse was too effeminate, and rhyme was severely interdicted, and to be forgiven only when it ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... The Evening News, lambs have already put in an appearance in Dorset. People who expect the POET LAUREATE to rush to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... IV. had been succeeded by the stormy minority of Louis XIII., when Malherbe (1556-1628), the tyrant of words and syllables, appeared as the reformer of poetry. He attracted attention by ridiculing the style of Ronsard. He became the laureate of the court, and furnished for it that literature in which it was beginning to take delight. In the place of Latin and Greek French, he inaugurated the extreme of formality; the matter of his verse was made subordinate to the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... give alms to the poor in the name of God. He was a very learned and accomplished man; and his writings, both in prose and verse, were equal to those of Zahiri and Naziri. When he first came to India, he resided for some years at Delhi; but having had some dispute with the poet-laureate of the Emperor Mohammed Shah, he found himself under the necessity of retiring to Benares, where he lived in great privacy. As he was a stranger in the country, was engaged in no calling or profession, and received ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... the throne: her head a cloud conceal'd, In broad effulgence all below reveal'd, ('Tis thus aspiring Dulness ever shines,) Soft on her lap her Laureate Son reclines." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... women." A wicked light snapped into his eyes. "Hear, dear lady, the Bard of the Congaree, the Poet Laureate of South Carolina, Coogle for your benefit," hissed The Author, ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Bobby Burns a farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth a government employee, Emerson a lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house inspector, and Whitman a clerk. William Morris was a workingman and a manufacturer, and would have been Poet Laureate of England had he been willing to call himself a student of sociology instead of a socialist. Socialism itself (whatever it may be) is not offensive—the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Clough's Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848). These alone, not to mention the lesser imitations, were enough to discredit the movement metrically. Meanwhile Tennyson and Kingsley, followed later by William Watson, and still enthusiastically by the present Poet Laureate, undertook to harmonize syllabic length and stress by more or less occult processes. As a matter of learned experiment and debate these problems have a certain academic interest, but only the staunchest and (one may say) blindest ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Rowe (1674-1718), dramatist and poet laureate, and one of the first editors of Shakespeare, was at this time under-secretary to the Duke of Queensberry, Secretary of State ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... knew The beautiful gates must open to our quest, Somewhere that marvellous City of the West Would lift its towers and palace domes in view, And, to! at last its mystery is made known— Its only dwellers maidens fair and young, Its Princess such as England's Laureate sung; And safe from capture, save by love alone, It lends its beauty to the lake's green shore, And Norumbega is ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... I have heard your Laureate sing, That pity was a royal thing; Under your mighty ancestors, we Pigs Were bless'd as nightingales on myrtle sprigs, 40 Or grasshoppers that live on noonday dew, And sung, old annals tell, as sweetly too; But now our sties are fallen in, we ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... she wouldn't be so alarmingly outspoken when she sings our praises to strangers. She gave him to understand that I am a full-fledged author and playwright, the peer of any poet laureate who ever held a pen; that Lloyd is a combination of princess and angel and halo-crowned saint, and Joyce a model big sister and an all-round genius. How she managed in the short time they were alone to tell him as much as she did ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... poem. Its half-dozen beds were so many cantos. Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate could copy in the cold mosaic of language. The rhythm of alternating dawn and sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible through all the sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain serving-man. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... conjecture. Wordsworth, Southey, and Charles Kingsley, all of whom had gone from radicalism in their youth to conservatism in their old age, were severally proposed as the original of Browning's portrait. The poem was published in 1845, two years after Wordsworth was made poet laureate. Early in 1845 Wordsworth was presented at court, a proceeding which aroused comment—sometimes amused, sometimes indignant—from those who recalled the poet's early scorn of rank and titles. Browning and Miss Barrett exchanged several gay letters on this subject in May, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... a cousin of Miss Martineau, who told us some good stories, especially about Tennyson. On this a brother of our host said that he was once travelling when he met with a party of tourists, among whom he recognized the Laureate. "Who is that gentleman?" said they. "He has been the life and soul of our party, and we cannot get a clue to his name, for he has baffled us in every way, tearing it off his luggage and out of the book he was reading." Mr. ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... traced in this period. John Alexander Brassicanus, poet laureate, came from Tubingen in September 1520 and saw Erasmus at Antwerp; whence in reply to a letter of self-introduction he bore away a complimentary letter that he afterwards printed, and the sound piece of advice, that if he wished ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... School" of poetry was attributed to "men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations." Byron's revenge was complete. In his "Vision of Judgment" (published in The Liberal, No. I., October 15, 1822) the tables are turned. The laureate is brought before the hosts of heaven and rejected by devils and angels alike. In October Byron wrote Heaven and Earth, a Mystery (The Liberal, No. II., January 1, 1823), a lyrical drama based on the legend of the "Watchers," or fallen angels ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... you, I'll tell you the reason for which I refuse you: Love's Goddess has oft to her parents complain'd, Of my favouring a bard who her empire disdain'd; That at my instigation, a poem you writ, Which to beauty and youth preferr'd judgment and wit; That, to make you a Laureate, I gave the first voice, Inspiring the Britons t'approve of my choice. Jove sent her to me, her power to try; The Goddess of Beauty what God can deny? She forbids your preferment; I grant her desire. Appease the fair Goddess: you then may rise higher." The next[2] that appear'd had good ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... this sonnet to Messer Guido, who laughed a little, and said that I might be the laureate of the tavern and the brothel, but that this new and nameless singer was a man of another metal, whom I could never understand. Whereat I laughed, too; but being none the less a little piqued, as I think, I made it a point thereafter, whenever ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... given the privilege of selecting his poet-laureate we may be sure he would have named Whittier. For they were both lovers of nature and of man. Both earnest abolitionists, intensely patriotic, loving liberty and the rights of the humblest of God's creatures, they were kindred spirits. So Whittier wrote not alone for New ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... and in the Quarto of 1691 the play is divided into acts, but not into scenes, though the first act is headed Actus Primus, Scaena Prima. The first systematic division into scenes was made by Nicholas Rowe, poet laureate to George I, in the edition which he issued in six octavo volumes in 1709. In this edition Rowe, an experienced playwright, marked the entrances and exits of the characters and introduced many stage directions and the list of dramatis ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... in league with Vice and Shame, And lending all her light to gild a lie; Crowning with laureate-wreaths an impious name, Or lulling us with Siren minstrelsy To false repose when peril most is nigh; Decking things vile or vain with colours rare, Till what is false and foul seems ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... behold that brave Knight in mail of Gold, Sworn his Standard to uphold high and aureate; And that blusterous battle-bout, twixt those champions stern and stout, Will inspire, I have no doubt, Our next Laureate! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... at times must seek! The Lotos blows by many an English creek. Punch is no "mild-eyed melancholy" coon, Born, like the Laureate's islanders, to moon In lands in which 'tis always afternoon. No, TOBY, no! Yet stretch your tawny muzzle Upon these tawny sands! We will not puzzle, For a few happy hours, our weary pates With Burning Questions or ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 29, 1891 • Various
... for two things; firstly, it is about a very English thing; secondly, the style of the writing is nothing short of delightful, a statement that is not true of all good poetry. It has been said that Chesterton might well be the Poet Laureate; at least, it is a matter for extreme joy that he is not, not because he is not worth that honour, but because anything that tended to reduce his poetical output would be a serious thing in these days when good poets are as scarce as ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... was always a sufficient substratum of truth in his accusations to render it inexpedient to prosecute him for libel. The punishment of what was false would have involved the public exposure of what was true. The official party realized the force of the laureate's ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... rest whom we have named enjoyed any share of the royal bounty, except W. Whitehead, who succeeded to the place of laureate at the death of Cibber; and some of them whose merit was the most universally acknowledged, remained exposed to all the storms of indigence, and all the stings of mortification. While the queen ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... this voyage around England the Premier visited the Orkneys on a similar trip, in the "Pembroke Castle," the poet laureate being of the party on this occasion. From the Orkneys he sailed across to Denmark and suddenly appeared at Copenhagen, where Mr. Gladstone entertained the Czar and Czarina, the King of Greece, and the King and Queen of Denmark, and many others ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... in" together, and fill the little boat. The baronet follows up his luck, and keeps close to Edith. How beautiful she is with the soft silver light on her face. He sits and watches her, and thinks of the laureate's lines: ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... has an early determination—a first one—to follow some ennobling profession, once he has come to man's estate, such as being a policeman, or a performer on the high trapeze. The poet would not have been the "Peoples' Laureate," had his fairy god- mother granted his boy-wish, but the Greenfield baker. For to his childish mind it "seemed the acme of delight," using again his own happy expression, "to manufacture those snowy loaves of bread, those delicious tarts, ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... s'pose you've heard," he says, "that Kipling has been very ill?" Yes, we had heard of his illness before we left England. "He's pulling through now, though," says the conductor with heartfelt satisfaction. That, too, we had ascertained on board. "He ought to be the next poet-laureate," our friend continues eagerly; "he don't follow no beaten tracks. He cuts a road for himself, every time, right through; and a mighty good road, too." He then proceeded to make some remarks, which in the rattle of the street I did not quite catch, about "carpet-bag knights." ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... carpeted as now. The bay was an emblem of victory in old Roman times, and victorious generals were crowned with it. A wreath of this laurel, with the berries on, was placed on the head of a favorite poet in the Middle Ages, and in this way came the title 'poet-laureate'—laureatus,' crowned with laurel.' ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... milder seaside air of Baiae. Maecenas introduced him to Augustus, who, according to Suetonius, offered him a place in his own household, which the poet prudently declined. But as the unrivalled lyric poet of the time Horace gradually acquired the position of poet-laureate; and his ode written to command for the celebration of the Secular Games in 17 B.C., with the official odes which followed it on the victories of Tiberius and Drusus, and on the glories of the Augustan age, mark the highest level which this ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... in The Evening News, "Why is the Poet Laureate so strangely silent?" Everyone else will remember Mr. BRIDGES' patriotic lines at the beginning of the War, and we begin to suspect that Mr. ASHTON'S well-known repugnance to writing for the papers has been extended to ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... made to live Past kingdoms, with his vivid brain! Who could such warmth to shadows give, By the mere magic of his pen, That Charles and England rose again! Well sleeps he 'mid the Abbey's dust: And, Laureate! thy funereal verse Shall have such echo as it must From hearts just wrung ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... and Crashaw furnished instances of conceits; Waller, Young, and Hayley of frigidity; and Darwin of affectation. "What beaux and beauties crowd the gaudy groves, And woo and win their vegetable loves"— a phrase adopted—"vapid vegetable loves"—by the Laureate in "The ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... Royal Autumn! Poet King! The Laureate of the Seasons, whose rare songs Are such as lyrist never hoped to fling On the fine ear of an admiring world. Autumn, the Poet, Painter, and true King! His gorgeous Ideality ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... swaggering cowardice is so vividly depicted, was, in actual life, Feraj Ullah Khan. The commander of the King's Camel Corps, who had to give up his house to the British Elchi, was Mohammed Khan. The Poet Laureate of the story, Asker Khan, shared the name of his sovereign, Fath Ali Khan; and the story of his mouth being filled on one occasion with gold coins, and stuffed on another with sugar-candy, as a mark of the royal approbation, is true. The serdar of Erivan, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... grew closely in touch with the life of the Indiana farmer. About 1873 he first contributed verses, especially in the Hoosier dialect, to the papers, and before long had attained a recognized position as poet-laureate of the Western country folk. His materials are the incidents and aspects of village life, especially of the Indiana villages. These he interprets in a manner as acceptable to the na[:i]ve as to the sophisticated, which is saying a good ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... cared little for verses and much for money. From the day of his accession he set himself to make small economical reforms, such as bring on a government the reproach of meanness without producing any perceptible relief to the finances. One of the victims of his injudicious parsimony was the Poet Laureate. Orders were given that, in the new patent which the demise of the crown made necessary, the annual butt of sack, originally granted to Jonson, and continued to Jonson's successors, should be omitted. [231] This was the only notice which the King, during the first year of his reign, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... tart reply — 'You steal from all and call it wit, But I prefer my simple "twit".'" But the latter view is espoused by most of the writers mentioned, notably and nobly by Drake, the Haynes, the Laniers, Lee, Meek, and Thompson, the poet-laureate of the mocking-bird, whose poems should be read by every lover of nature and especially of the mocking-bird. As Thompson's tributes are all too long for quotation, I give here Meek's, in the hope that I may rescue it from the long oblivion of ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... are greatly loved by all Scandinavians. Every young Dane delights in Oehlenschlaeger as we do in Shakespeare, and by reading his works the youths of Denmark lay the foundation of their education in poetry. This bard was crowned Laureate in Lund (Sweden) by the greatest of Swedish poets, Esaias Tegner, 1829. Buried by his own request at his birth-place, Frederiksberg, two Danish miles (which means eight English miles) from Copenhagen, his loving countrymen insisted on carrying ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... of former days stirred within him, rose to speak. We shall be prepared to appreciate the effect when we get an idea of the preternatural sensitiveness of those who composed the audience. A well-known poet, who may perhaps be called the poet-laureate of Bavaria, had read a poem on the occasion. It contained nothing to which any one could object, as we might infer from his position with the king, and yet I heard the poet himself say a few days afterward that ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... theory is as old as Homer. Its laureate is Montesquieu. The more northerly you go, he said, the sterner the man grows. You must scorch a Muscovite to make him feel. Gray was a convert. One of the prose hints for his noble fragment of a didactic poem runs thus: "It is the proper work of education ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... The Laureate had read this, and yet considers it the language of a heart that 'never was hardened.' He says that 'the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly overcharged, and it is taking the language of self-accusation too ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... understanding bent upon his heart to make himself and others not in words or opinion but in life and action good and great." Ben Jonson was in turn a soldier, a poet, a bricklayer, an actor, and ultimately the first poet laureate. Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through the various professions of soldiering, medicine, playwriting, and fiction, and he wrote his novel Rosalind, on which Shakespeare based As You Like It while he ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... metre in which I address thee? Doth it not sound very big, verse bouncing, bubble-and-squeaky, Rattling, and loud, and high, resembling a drum or a bugle— Rub-a-dub-dub like the one, like t'other tantaratara? (It into use was brought of late by thy Laureate Doctor— But, in my humble opinion, I write it better than he does) It was chosen by me as the longest measure I knew of, And, in praising one's King, it is right full measure ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... in which hypocrisy was regnant, and fanaticism rampant throughout the land.'[167] What a display of reigning hypocrisy and rampant fanaticism was it to see the game at cat openly played by men on Sunday, the church bells calling them to their sport!!! Had Southey been poet-laureate to Charles II, he might with equal truth have concealed the sensuality, open profaneness, and debauchery of that profligate monarch and his court of concubines, and have praised him as 'the Lord's anointed.' Bunyan was an eye-witness of the state of the times in which he ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureate. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Byron's 'Sardanapalus'?" exclaimed the actor, throwing up his hands. "Why, it's one of the finest things ever put upon the boards. Full of telling effects, and not too many bothering lengths, you know. The Poet Laureate, dear good man, worried my life out a year ago to let him write a play upon the subject especially for me. The part of Sardanapalus was to be devised so as to bring out all my particular—er—capabilities, and any little hints that might occur ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... the Waist of the Ship" in the next, the transition was considered to be rather abrupt; but when he sends an invoice of rhymes to the Governor of Fayal and another to the commander in chief and other dignitaries in Gibraltar with the compliments of the Laureate of the Ship, it is not popular with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the public to be set forth presently, he calls himself "poet of the Emperor Joseph II." He was in the habit of thus designating himself and it was small wonder that his biographers almost unanimously interpreted these words to mean that he was poet laureate, or Caesarian poet. After the mischief, small enough, except perhaps in an ethical sense, had been done, he tried to correct it in a foot note on one of the pages of his "Memorie," in which he says that he was not "Poeta Cesario," but "poet to the Imperial ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... amplifying a trifle. There is in him this-worldliness, but not other-worldliness, his characters not seeming to the full to have a sense of the invisible world. He is love's poet. His lovers are imperishable because real. He is love's laureate. Yet are his loves of this world. True, there are spurts of flight, as of an eagle with broken wing, when, as in Hamlet, he faults this world and aspires skyward, yet does not lose sight of the earth, and, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... A laureate of the Institute of France has discovered grounds for palliating this blow to property. He congratulates the princes who embraced the Reformation for having, by means of the ecclesiastical property, filled their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... the pretext and cover for the grossest sensuality; and the associations which the unlearned reader has with the name are only strengthened by conversance with the literature to which it gave birth. Horace is its poet-laureate; and he was evidently as sincere in his philosophy as he was licentious in his life. There is a certain charm in good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in a sensuality which in plain prose would seem ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... aristocratic hatred of the mob. Geibel succeeded in once more gaining the widest popularity, in days filled with partisan clamor, for the pure lyric of romantic inspiration. He was in a true sense the poet-laureate of his generation. Lacking in real originality, he was yet sincere in the expression of his emotion, and his faultless form clothed the utterance of a soul of rare purity ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Laureate in 1785 was Thomas Warton, and she corresponded with him, “our great Laureate,” ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... to being pointed out by the passer-by as the minstrel of the Roman lyre, or, in other words, as the laureate, that his satire provokes sufficient criticism to draw from him a defense and a justification of himself against the charge of cynicism, and that he finally records a greater freedom from the tooth of envy, are all indications of the prominence to which he rose. That Virgil and Varius, poets of recognized ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... poet laureate, Baston, a Carmelite friar, who had accompanied the army for the purpose of writing a poem on the English victory. His ransom was fixed at a poem on the Scotch victory at Bannockburn, which the ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... One of the greatest of English poets, born in Lincolnshire in 1809. He was made poet-laureate in 1850. Many of his poems are well known to young readers' and very popular. He died ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... Journal, provoking endless parliamentary wrangles, and perhaps helping to develop later on an editor. Memorable were the Young People's Conventions of 1886 and 1887, and Lylians will never forget the patriot Kromm, Spoopendyke Shreve, the poet laureate and a dozen others. The Fourth of July picnics at Pamrapo and Nyack are happy ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... restraint, and feminine delicacy of taste. Christian has not the grand manner of the eleventh century, and never recalls the masculine strength of the "Chanson de Roland" or "Raoul de Cambrai." Even his most charming story, "Erec et Enide," carries chiefly a moral of courtesy. His is poet-laureate's work, says M. Gaston Paris; the flower of a twelfth-century court and of twelfth-century French; the best example of an admirable language; but not lyric; neither strong, nor deep, nor deeply felt. What we call tragedy is unknown to ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... of Professor Phelps's voice. As a pulpit orator he was one of the few, and to hear him read in his own study was an absorbing experience. To this day I cannot put myself outside of certain pages of the laureate or the essayist. I do not read; I listen. The ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... the Mermaid Inn Had dubbed our London laureate, hauled the cask Out of its ancient harbourage. "Ben," he cried, Bustling into the room with Dekker and Brome, "The prentices are up!" Ben raised his head Out of the chimney-corner where he drowsed, And listened, reaching slowly for ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... honour in these latter days quite as much as it did in the classic times of Augustus with Virgil and Horace for his intimates, and of Petrarch crowned at the Capitol laureate of all Italy during the vacancy of a popedom in the Vatican. Not but that, with or without any titular distinction, authorship is practically the most noticeable rank amongst us. Many will pass by a duke who would have stopped and waited to have looked ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of the island witch-hanging or burning proceeded with only less vehemence than in Scotland. One of the most celebrated cases in the earlier half of the seventeenth century (upon which Thomas Shadwell the poet laureate, who, under the name of MacFlecknoe, is immortalised by the satire of Dryden, founded a play) is the story of the Lancashire Witches. This persecution raged at two separate periods; first in 1613, when nineteen prisoners were ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... the same door, wrapped in the flag for which he gladly died, as the symbol of human freedom. And so, drawn by the hands of young men lately strangers to him, but of whose bravery and loyalty he had been the laureate, and who fitly mourned him who had honored them, with long, pealing dirges and muffled drums, he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... column close by, but in 1551 a devoted admirer, himself a versifier, Nicholas Brigham, placed an ancient tomb here in memory of the master, with a fancy painting of Chaucer at the back. Before this monument are the graves of the two most famous poets of our generation, the Laureate Tennyson and Robert Browning, side by side. Above them is the beautiful bust of another Poet Laureate, Dryden, and the less artistic portrait bust of the American ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... to an end." On his 80th birthday, a holiday was declared in honour of Lord Shaftesbury, and vast multitudes kept it. From the Lord Mayor himself to the girls of the Water Cress and Flower Mission, all offered him their congratulations. Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, wrote him, "Allow me to assure you in plain prose, how cordially I join with those who honour the Earl of Shaftesbury as a friend of the poor." And, how ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... as well as poetic genius; and, when they wished to procure pleasant dreams, would place a sprig under the pillow of their bed. It was the symbol, too, of victory, and it was thought that the laurel could never be struck by lightning. From this word comes that of "laureate;" Alfred Tennyson being the present poet laureate, crowned with laurel as ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Chaucer, that on the steppes sate Of retorick, while they were livand here, Superlative as poets laureate Of morality ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... away. It is true we all turned for a moment to catch a last glimpse of the University dome, towering over the treetops; and we felt very tenderly toward everyone there. But there were "sweet girl graduates" on board; and, as you know well enough, it required no laureate to sing their praises, though he has done so with all the ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... there is not a trace of humor in the book would doubtless recommend it to the dignified and lethargic orientals for whom it was written. Bokhari seemed to consider himself prophet, priest, and poet-laureate in one. The work has a high position in the Malayan Peninsula, where it is read by young and old. The "Crown of Kings" is written in the court language of Djohore. The author was a Mohammedan mendicant monk. He called the book the Crown ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... long and short syllables—as far as "long" and "short" can be definitely distinguished in English—correspond precisely to the rules of Roman prosody. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whose investigations in English and Roman prosody have been incessant, has recently published a book of experiments in writing English quantitative hexameters. [Footnote: Ibant Obscuri. New York, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... people remember a Nottinghamshire poet of an earlier day who fulfilled with much conscientiousness the duties of local laureate. It was the age of Notts's pre-eminence in cricket, and that, with other reasons, inspired the bard to write some verses which opened with the line, "Is there a county to compare with Notts?" The county of Derby was jealous of its neighbour in other things besides sport, and considered ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... has been justly called the "Laureate of the South." He was born at Charleston, and being left an orphan by the death of his father, Lieutenant Hayne of the Navy, he was reared and educated by his uncle, Robert Young Hayne. His fortune was ample, but he studied law although he never practised. He became editor of "Russell's ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... led him into unpleasant rencontres with these military conservators of public order, and who mentions them so often that he may be termed their poet laureate,* thus admonishes his readers, warned doubtless ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... in four battles had set him among the national heroes; he had been, in The Persians, the laureate of Salamis; by the sheer grandeur of his poetry he had won the prize thirteen times in succession.—And by the bye, it is to the eternal credit of Athenian intelligence that Athens, at one hearing of those obscure, lofty ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... poet and philosopher, lie buried. A marble monument to his memory has recently been erected, representing him in a recumbent position, and bearing an inscription from the pen of Wordsworth, his more than literary friend for many years, and his successor to the poet- laureate-ship. A new and beautiful church, erected at the eastern part of the town by the late John Marshall, Esq., adds much to the quiet repose of the scene. Mr. Marshall became Lord of the Manor by purchasing ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... whose residence was near by at Arqua. The statement of the "Clerk" in the "Canterbury Tales" that he learnt the story of patient Griseldis "at Padua of a worthy clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet," may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed the "Clerk's Tale" from Petrarch's Latin version of the original by Boccaccio. But the meeting which the expression suggests may have actually taken place, and may have been accompanied ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the stock so grows the vociferousness of their proprietors, and soon the ear becomes deadened by the striving rush of sound. Every stall and shop has its wide-mouthed laureate, singing its present glories and adding lustre ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... their adventurous travel, excepting the Stuyvesant manuscript, which gives the substance of a pleasant little heroic poem, written on the occasion by Dominie AEgidius Luyck,[58] who appears to have been the poet laureate of New Amsterdam. This inestimable manuscript assures us that it was a rare spectacle to behold the great Peter and his loyal follower hailing the morning sun, and rejoicing in the clear countenance of Nature, as they pranced ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... been made to present in modern English the Ballad of Brunanburh, the most successful being that by the Poet Laureate. Our language is rather out of practice for kindling a poetic fervour around the sentiment of flinging scorn at a vanquished foe; but the following will serve to illustrate this heathenish element, or such relics of it as survived in the tenth century. The person ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet-laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... inquiry, whether Lady Ringrose were not particularly so. He had heard of her very often, he said; and he observed that it was very interesting to see her: he could not have used a different tone if he had been speaking of the prime minister or the laureate. Laura was ignorant of what he had heard of Lady Ringrose; she doubted whether it could be the same as what she had heard from her brother-in-law: if this had been the case he never would have mentioned it. She foresaw ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... the favour of their sovereigns, and bear away the rewards. Leviathan gave himself out as the inventor of this allegorical ballet, and was on that account thanked and caressed, although the real author of it was the Bavarian Poet Laureate, who a short time before had died of hunger, and found his way to hell. He prepared the ballet after the latest court-fashion, by the command of Prince Leviathan, who had at least talent enough to discover merit: ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... remember, too, those weighty words of warning which the Laureate of the Empire wrote nearly twenty years ago, of this Imperial ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... hopeful and cheerful man, lies in the fact that we place small premium in either honor or money on the business of teaching. As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions ranked with musicians, and the Master of the Hounds wore a bigger medal than the Poet Laureate, so do we pay our teachers the same as coachmen and coal-heavers, giving them a plentiful lack ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Padua, where he engaged in the study of Aristotle and Plato, and delivered three discourses on Heroic Poetry in the Academia degli Eterei, or the Ethereals—in which he developed the whole theory of his poetical design—which were afterwards published, the office of Laureate at the court of Ferrara was offered to him by Cardinal Lewis of Este, to whom, as I have said, he had dedicated ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... is very narrow. Dean Swift, who lodged here, is perhaps one of the best-known names, and his friend Atterbury, who first had a house facing the Embankment, afterwards came and lived opposite to him. Thomas Shadwell, Poet Laureate, was associated with the place, and also Bowack, whose "Antiquities of Middlesex," incomplete though it is, remains a valuable book of reference. Bowack lived near the Rectory, and not far from him was the Old White Horse Inn, famous for the ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... matter of record among divers great historians and learned clerks, that he was then and there grievously smitten by the charms of the lovely Matilda, and that a few days after he despatched his travelling minstrel, or laureate, Harpiton, [3] (whom he retained at moderate wages, to keep a journal of his proceedings, and prove them all just and legitimate), to the castle of Arlingford, to make proposals to the lady. This ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... on the prince during his last illness. I was supping with Veraci, the poet-laureate, on the eve of the prince's death, and in the course ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... his heart to God. He saved an empire by his warlike genius, he ruled vast provinces with justice, wisdom, and power, and lastly, obedient to his Sovereign's command, he died in the heroic attempt to save men, women, and children, from imminent and deadly peril." The nation felt that their Poet Laureate, Lord Tennyson, did but speak the simple truth when he penned the ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... shining coils which looked to Ursula (being dark herself, she admired golden hair more than anything) as bright as the sunshine. And in the light she caught the out-line of a pretty head, and of a nose slightly "tip-tilted," according to the model which the Laureate has brought into fashion. Where had she seen her before? She remembered all at once with a rush ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... language that pleased Dickens for the special reason that at the time this part of the book had seemed to many to have fallen greatly short of the splendour of its opening. Jeffrey said however quite truly, claiming to be heard with authority as his "Critic-laureate," that of all his writings it was perhaps the most finished in diction, and that it equalled the best in the delicacy and fineness of its touches, "while it rises to higher and deeper passions, not resting, like most of the former, in sweet thoughtfulness, and thrilling and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of these four I should like best, I should say as the Laureate did when they gave him his choice of two kinds of cake, "Both's ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... special popularity, indeed, of lyric as opposed to epic verse is due to this habit of feeling. A good example maybe found in the work of Mr Swinburne: the latter is the better poetry, the earlier remains the more popular — because of its eloquence of margin. Mr Tupper might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for his neglect of this first principle. The song of Sigurd, our one epic of the century, is pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full meed of glory it deserves; while the ingenious gentleman who wrote "Beowulf,'' our other English epic, grasped the great fact from ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... without the "Civium ardor!" As I have not so much dignity of character to fill up my time, I could like a little more company. With all this leisure, you may imagine that I might as well be writing an ode or so upon the victory; but as I cannot build upon the Laureate's[2] place till I know whether Lord Carteret or Mr. Pelham will carry the Treasury, I have bounded my compliments to a slender collection of quotations against I should have any occasion for them. Here are some fine lines from Lord Halifax's[3] poem on the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... Chancellor of the Exchequer. Our new artistic philosophers call for the same moral license, for a freedom to wreck heaven and earth with their energy; but the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is Poet Laureate. I do not say that there are no stronger men than these; but will any one say that there are any men stronger than those men of old who were dominated by their philosophy and steeped in their religion? ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... distinguished, that, in 1668[102], he succeeded sir William Davenant as poet laureate. The salary of the laureate had been raised in favour of Jonson, by Charles the first, from a hundred marks to one hundred pounds a year, and a tierce of wine; a revenue, in those days, not inadequate to ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... king's palace now," he reminded her, "and this is another palace where you might live if you chose. And you might be a queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest. And in New York—in New York, perhaps we shall live in ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... undoubtingly accepts their genuineness, is of a different opinion. He styles the "Book of Ruth" and the "History of Joseph" "beautiful idylls," of such high excellence that, "if we found them in the collected works of a poet laureate, we should consider that a difficult task had been accomplished successfully." It would seem almost doubtful whether Mr. Froude can have read the compositions that he commends so largely, and so much beyond their merit. The following specimen, taken haphazard, will show how thoroughly Bunyan ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... punishment. He then entered one of the colleges of Oxford University, where he became an intimate friend of Coleridge. While residing at Lisbon he began a special study of Spanish and Portuguese literature. In 1813 he was appointed poet-laureate of England, and in 1835 received a pension from the government. He died in 1843. Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth are often called "The Lake Poets," because they lived together for years in the lake country of England, and in their writings ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... within the four seas, and at the distance of less than five hundred miles from London, were many miniature courts, in each of which a petty prince, attended by guards, by armour bearers, by musicians, by a hereditary orator, by a hereditary poet laureate, kept a rude state, dispensed a rude justice, waged wars, and concluded treaties. While the old Gaelic institutions were in full vigour, no account of them was given by any observer, qualified to judge of them fairly. Had such an observer ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... explained Jarman, "this ain't an ordinary case. This chap's going to be the future Poet Laureate. Now, when the Prince of Wales invites him to dine at Marlborough 'ouse, 'e don't want to go there tacked on to a girl that carries aitches with her in a bag, and don't know which end of the spoon out of which ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... A "run" unprecedented, Or almost so; and fodder With which the Laureate's Bird had been contented: Fortune has freaks far odder Than e'en a poet's whimsies, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... To write this—"by particular desire." Wet towels! Midnight oil! Here! Everything That can induce the singing bard to sing. Shake me, Ye Nine! I'm resolute, I'm bold! Come, Inspiration, lend thy furious hold! MORRIS on Pegasus! Plank money down! I'll back myself to win the Laureate's Crown! ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... life that will ever be completed. Apart from Christ the life of man is a broken pillar, the race of men an unfinished pyramid. One by one in sight of Eternity all human Ideals fall short, one by one before the open grave all human hopes dissolve. The Laureate sees a moment's light in Nature's jealousy for the Type; but that ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... dreams is a subjective emotional unity. This is the basis of harmony in lyrical poetry, where the succession of images turns mainly on their emotional colouring. Thus, the images that float before the mind of the Poet Laureate, in his In Memoriam, clearly have their link of connection in their common emotional tone, rather than in any logical continuity. Dreaming has been likened to poetic composition, and certainly many of our dreams are built upon a groundwork of lyrical feeling. ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... one of those whom the proud and unfeeling style the dregs of the populace, a haggard, houseless, penniless man, in rags and tatters: I allude to Manuel, the—what shall I call him?—seller of lottery tickets, driver of death carts, or poet laureate in Gypsy songs? I wonder whether thou art still living, my friend Manuel; thou gentleman of Nature's forming- -honest, pure-minded, humble, yet dignified being! Art thou still wandering through the courts of beautiful Safacoro, or on the banks of the Len Baro, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... continental currency, which was ultimately redeemed by the Federal government at par. He assumed the title of Lord Dexter and built extraordinary houses at Newburyport, Mass., and Chester, New Hampshire. He maintained a poet laureate and collected inferior pictures, besides erecting in one of his gardens some forty colossal statues carved in wood to represent famous men. A statue of himself was included in the collection, and had for an inscription "I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... at Balaclava, in obedience to a blundering command, proving what a perfect machine the soldier is, has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet laureate; but the steady, and for the most part successful, charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of Slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that, as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... aimed: but he hadn't got hold of all the ideas to balance. Hence his work was not a balance of truths, like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the British Constitution. It is intensely typical of Tennyson's philosophical temper that he was almost the only Poet Laureate who was not ludicrous. It is not absurd to think of Tennyson as tuning his harp in praise of Queen Victoria: that is, it is not absurd in the same sense as Chaucer's harp hallowed by dedication to Richard II or Wordsworth's harp hallowed ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Tupper's emptiness or absurdities, the outworn platitudes again find their constant lover in Alfred Austin, Tennyson's successor as poet laureate. Austin brought the laureateship, which had been held by poets like Ben Jonson, Dryden, Southey and Wordsworth, to an incredibly low level; he took the thinning stream of garrulous poetic conventionality, reduced it to the ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... houses. War was waged also against their Thomas Moores, Samuel Rogerses, and Walter Scotts, who went about the country harping and singing against English oppression. No such turbulent guests were to be received. The plan of making them poets-laureate, or converting them to loyalty by pensions of 100 pounds per annum, had not then been thought of. They debarred the Irish even from the pleasure of running away, and fixed them to the soil ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... pity a gentleman so talented and so unfortunate. Likenesses of Mr. Crauford appeared in every print-shop in town; the papers discovered that he was the very fac-simile of the great King of Prussia. The laureate made an ode upon him, which was set to music; and the public learned, with tears of compassionate regret at so romantic a circumstance, that pigeon-pies were sent daily to his prison, made by the delicate hands of one of his former mistresses. Some sensation, also, was excited by the circumstance ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the kind that Shakespeare drew in Yorick. He was not only,—so the writer implied,—the maker of jibes and fantastic devices, but the bard of friendship and affection, of melodious lyrical conceits; he was the laureate of children—dear for his "Wynken, Blynken and Nod" and "Little Boy Blue"; the scholarly book-lover, withal, who relished and paraphrased his Horace, who wrote with delight a quaint archaic English of his special ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... record that have remained unwritten. Men who have written books have been the most fortunate in this respect, because they possess an attraction for literary men which those whose lives have been embodied in deeds do not possess. Thus there have been lives written of Poets Laureate who were mere men of their time, and of their time only. Dr. Johnson includes some of them in his 'Lives of the Poets,' such as Edmund Smith and others, whose poems are now no longer known. The lives of some men of letters—such as Goldsmith, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... will not think just now about appointing a Poet Laureate. I hardly think they can be altogether in the right mood. The business just now before the country makes a very good detective story; but as a national epic it is a little depressing. Jingo literature always weakens a nation; but ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... come after us will be more impressed than we are by the Laureate's versatility. He has touched so many strings, from "Will Waterproof's Monologue," so far above Praed, to the agony of "Rizpah," the invincible energy of "Ulysses," the languor and the fairy music of the "Lotus Eaters," the grace as of a Greek epigram which inspires the lines to Catullus and to ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... Dublin, in 1652, and educated there at Trinity College. He was appointed poet-laureate by King William III. in 1690, and it was in conjunction with Dr. Nicholas Brady that he executed his "New" metrical version of the Psalms. The entire Psalter, with an appendix of Hymns, was licensed by William and Mary and published in 1703. The hymns in the volume ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... first seven Laureates with a dash of that ruthless criticism with which Niebuhr, the regicide, dispatched the seven kings of Rome. To mark clearly the bounds between the mythical and the indubitable, a glance at the following brief of the Laureate fasti will greatly assist us, speeding us forward at once to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... This vagabond, unvalued yellow clover, To be our tenderest language. All the years It lent a new zest to the summer hours, As each of us went scheming to surprise The other with our homely, laureate flowers. Sonnets and odes Fringing our daily roads. Can amaranth and asphodel Bring merrier laughter to your eyes? Oh, if the Blest, in their serene abodes, Keep any wistful consciousness of earth, Not grandeurs, but the childish ways of love, Simplicities of mirth, Must ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... American public, and that these two antipodal poets soon appeared in person among the earliest visitors to the editor. For the coming together of East and West may prove to be the great event of the approaching era, and if the poetry of the now famous Bengali laureate garners the richest wisdom and highest spirituality of his ancient race, so one may venture to believe that the young Illinois troubadour brings from Lincoln's city an authentic strain of the lyric message ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... period when the Northern spirits lagged over military reverses, and at the time when the indecision of General McClellan drew from him the satiric broadside,—"Tardy George"—privately printed in 1865—Boker's thoughts were concerned with poetry. His official laureate consciousness did not serve to improve the verse. His "Our Heroic Themes"—written for the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa—was mediocre in everything but intent, recalling what Taylor wrote to him: "My Harvard poem, [he had read it in 1850 before the same fraternity] poor as it is, was ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... never have been," said Betty Jardine. "But Mrs. Forrester thinks of me as frivolity personified, I know, and doesn't care to admit anything lower than a cabinet minister or a poet laureate when she has her lion domiciled. She is an old darling; but, between ourselves, she does take her lions a little too seriously, doesn't she. Well, prepare for a coup de foudre, Gregory. You'll be sure to fall in love with her. Everybody falls in love with her. Captain Ashton ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Professor Wilson, declared he was Burns's rival as a song-writer, and his superior in anything relating to external nature! indeed they wrote of him as unsurpassed by poet or painter in his fairy tales of ancient time, dubbing him Poet Laureate to the Queen of Elfland; and yet his unrefined manner tempted these friends to speak of him familiarly as the greatest hog in all Apollo's herd, or the Boar ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... or out of existence, by the slow approach of the enormous ice sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that his date was somewhere about B.C. 248,000. In any case we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew Lang, the laureate of ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... phoneticians I know little. Among them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe his Miltonic sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all portraiture. But if the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most important people in England at present, it ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... all classes and in almost all places. It was smoked freely in the streets. In some verses prefixed to an edition of Skelton's "Elinour Rumming" which appeared in 1624, the ghost of Skelton, who was poet-laureate to King Henry VIII, was made to say that he constantly ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... in cases holding little volumes equal in number, but the binding various, and Mr. McLean reached his decision after one look. "That," said he, and laid a large muscular hand upon the Laureate. The young lady behind the counter spoke out acidly, and Lin pulled the abject hand away. His taste, however, happened to be sound, or, at least, it was at one with the Governor's; but now they learned that there was a distressing variance ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... some one would write of BROWNING's work as HENRY VAN DYKE has written of TENNYSON's. To the superficial and cursory reader of the Laureate, the Baron, sitting by the fire on a winter's night, the wind howling over the sea, and the snow drifting against the window, and being chucked in handfuls down the chimney, and frizzling on the fire, says, get this book, published ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... a writer in "The Argus" referred to him as "the prose laureate of pessimism." His philosophy may be summed up in a few phrases: Nothing matters, Whatever will be is, Everything is possible, and Since we live today let us make the best of it and live in Paris. And ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... neither be made more precious nor more current by empty titles. In our opinion, it is a degradation, instead of an honor, for one of nature's aristocrats to herd with the artificial nobility of an hereditary peerage. We also take the opportunity of regretting that Tennyson ever became Poet Laureate. The court poet should not survive the court dwarf and the court jester. It is painful to see a great writer grinding out professional odes, and bestowing the excrements of his genius on royal nonentities. The preposterous office of Poet Laureate ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... "more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all Tom Jones"; the two Wartons, Joseph, the Headmaster of Winchester and editor of Pope, and Thomas the author of the history of English Poetry and himself Poet Laureate; both good scholars and critics who partly anticipated the poetic tastes of the nineteenth century: Paoli, the hero of Boswell and the Corsicans, with whom Johnson loved to dine: Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, who wrote against Hume ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... Ireland." It is ingeniously recommended in a certificate by Sir Richard Steele, or the Tattler, under the fictitious name of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., and in a poem of forty-three lines, by Nahum Tate, poet laureate to her Majesty. It is a duodecimo volume of three hundred pages; a work of no inconsiderable merit and originality; and written in a style which, though not faultless, has scarcely been surpassed by any English grammarian since. I quote it as Brightland's:[78] who were the real authors, does ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the little Duke of York was torn away from her to share the captivity and dark fate of his brother Edward V. in the Tower. Among other noted persons who sought shelter here were Owen Tudor (uncle of Henry VII.) and Skelton, the first Poet Laureate. The latter from his safe retreat in the sanctuary sent forth against Cardinal Wolsey invectives so bitter and so forcible that his death would have been certain had he ventured outside the Abbey precincts. The rights ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... reason why Tate was preferred to Congreve. Dorset was too practised a courtier not to study the tastes of his master to good purpose. A liking for the stage, or a lively sense of poetic excellence, was not among the preferences of King William. The Laureate was sub-purveyor of amusement for the court; but there was no longer a court to amuse, and the King himself never once in his reign entered a theatre. The piety of Queen Mary rendered her a rare attendant at the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... had set the seal of her approval upon her, and to be approved by her beautiful godmother,—ah, that meant more to the devoted little heart than any one could dream; far more, even, than if she had been made the proud laureate of a queen. ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... among Babylonian professions that of the poet. It is true that a sort of poet-laureate existed at the court, and that we hear of a piece of land being given by the King to one of them for some verses which he had composed in honor of the sovereign. But poetry was not a separate profession, and the poet must be ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... get more humor, more keen enjoyment, out of a census report or an etymological dictionary than from a novel. My favorite literary dissipation is to read the works of that distinguished statistician at Washington, Mr. O. P. Austin, the poet-laureate of industrial America, or the toilsome and exciting verbal journeys of the Rev. Mr. Skeat. The classic humorists do not compare with them, in my humble opinion, as sources of fantastic surprises. This, perhaps, accounts for my sincere admiration ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... adulation and false judgments of those who came there. Basil was not strong. He was pleasant, idle, rather vain, and a little inclined to be dissipated. Mrs. Octagon did not know that Basil was fond of dissipation. She thought him a model young Oxford man, and hoped he would one day be Laureate ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... just celebrated its twenty-first birthday, and the silence of the POET LAUREATE on the matter is being ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... war-ships already alluded to, and which indeed the whole course of our remarks upon this subject points to—the almost universal use of machinery in modern naval tactics. Most assuredly in modern sea-warfare it may be said, in the Laureate's words—used by him, of course, with a very different sense—that "the individual dwindles," so that the prediction, which some of our readers may remember was once made by a First Lord of the Admiralty, ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... entitled 'The Chronicle of England unto the Reign of King Edward the Fourth, in Verse.' It has no poetic merit, and little interest, except to the antiquary. In the reign of the above king we find the first mention of a Poet Laureate. John Kay was appointed by Edward, when he returned from Italy, Poet Laureate to the king, but has, perhaps fortunately for the world, left behind him no poems. Would that the same had been the case with some of his successors in the office! There is reason to believe, that for nearly two ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... in conclusion, that the dates and other circumstances favour the supposed interview at Padua, between Fraunceis Petrark the laureate ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... of literature, had an irresistible charm for him; and he once declared that he would almost rather have been Ireland than Shakespeare; and then it was his delight to write Greek versions of a poem that might attach the mark of plagiarism to Tennyson, or show, by a Scandinavian lyric, how the laureate had been poaching from the Northmen. Now it was a mock pastoral in most ecclesiastical Latin that set the whole Church in arms; now a mock despatch of Baron Beust that actually deceived the Revue des Deux Mondes and caused quite a panic at the Tuileries. He had established such relations with ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Tom Taylor fall foul of Bulwer Lytton (p. 91, Vol. IX.) by reason of the dedication of "Zanoni" to Gibson the sculptor, in which it was said that the book was not for "the common herd." The story of Lytton's castigation by Tennyson is duly related where the Laureate's contributions to Punch are spoken of. In Lytton's case, at least, Punch forgot to apply Swift's aphorism that a man has just as much ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... became Chaplain to Lord Willoughby de Broke. He obtained the patronage of Lord Halifax by a Latin version of his Lordship's poem on the Battle of the Boyne, in 1718. By the influence of the Duke of Newcastle, then Lord Chamberlain, he was made Poet-laureate, upon the death of Rowe. Eusden died, rector of Conington, Lincolnshire, in 1730, and his death was hastened by intemperance. Of the laurel left for Cibber Pope wrote ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... his learned pundits, dives deep into the ancient Chinese classics, and strives, by an erudite commentary, to make plain the early history of China. While Mr. LAWES, who describes himself as the "poet laureate" of Savage Island, after completing the New Testament, prepares the first Christian hymn book, for the use of the converts he has brought to Christ. Mr. THOMPSON, visiting the Missions in Cape Colony, drives with hard ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... that the above were written by Wordsworth. I shall feel obliged if any of your readers will inform me whether the late laureate was the author of them ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... But it is rather the Persian spirit which rules,—the spirit of the Shahnameh and Firdausi,—"charming elegance, servile court flattery, and graceful wit." In none are the characteristics so manifest as in Abu Nuwas (762-819), the Poet Laureate of Harun, the Imr-al-Kais of his time. His themes are wine and love. Everything else he casts to the wind; and like his modern counterpart, Heine, he drives the wit of his satire deep into the holiest feelings of his people. "I would ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... had the honour, if it was one in those days, of being made Laureate on the accession of George I. His odes, epistles, and songs are without merit, but he gained reputation as the translator of Lucan's Pharsalia, of which Sir Arthur Gorges had produced a version in 1614, and his plays ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Mr. Mallet of indifferent memory.—Consider, one hundred marks a year! besides the wine and the disgrace; but then remorse would make me drown myself in my own butt before the year's end, or the finishing of my first dithyrambic.—So that, after all, I shall not meditate our laureate's ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore |
