"Lyrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they smack not a little of the conversation of his Long Acre friends. Johnson speaks slightingly of his lyrics; but with due deference to the great Samuel, Prior's seem to me amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems.(111) Horace is always in his mind, and his song, and his philosophy, his good sense, his happy easy turns and melody, his loves, and his Epicureanism, bear a great resemblance to that most delightful and accomplished master. In reading his works, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... substitution of Brengwain for Iseult in him and in the English Sir Tristrem, or the charming account of the "Minnegrotte" in the twenty-seventh song, with the many other things of the kind in French, English, and German of the time. Also he has constant little bursts, little spurts, of half-lyrical cry, which lighten the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of birds are as intimately allied with poetry as with music. The lark has been aptly denominated a "feathered lyric" by one of the English poets; and the analogy becomes apparent when we consider how much the song of a bird resembles a lyrical ballad in its influence on the mind. Though it utters no words, how plainly it suggests a long train of agreeable images of love, beauty, friendship, and home! When a young person has suffered any severe wound of the affections, he seldom fails, if endowed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... subject affords ground for much additional development, and later on the fugue becomes very complicated and interesting. When well played, however, the complication is only an incident of a very playful and varied composition. In the entire work there is no lyrical ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... much interested in the letters, some of which, as a statement of the matter in question, are admirable. It is perhaps not surprising that the best of them come from women—for (genius apart) woman is usually more touchingly lyrical than man in the yearning for the ideal. The most enthusiastic of all the letters I have received, however, is from a gentleman whose notion is that we should be hypnotised into mental efficiency. After advocating the establishment of "an institution of practical ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... poets, Wordsworth is the one whose poetry is to us the most inexplicable—with all our reverence for his transcendent genius, we do not fear to say the most open to the most serious charges—on the score of its religion. From the first line of the "Lyrical Ballads" to the last of "The Excursion"—it is avowedly one system of thought and feeling, embracing his experiences of human life, and his meditations on the moral government of this world. The human heart—the human mind—the human soul—to use his own fine words—is "the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... here the whole course of his life was fixed when he first saw Laura 'in a green dress embroidered with violets.' Her face was stamped upon his mind, and haunted him through all efforts at repose: and perhaps it is to her influence that he owed his rank among the lyrical poets and the crown bestowed at Rome. His whole life was thenceforth devoted to the service of the book. He declared that he had the writing-disease, and was the victim of a general epidemic. 'All the world ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... am able to see, little or nothing in technic or teaching that can be considered a Star-Chamber matter, or so much as agitating to a ladies' school; even though, to use Wordsworth's observation in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, such readers may suppose "that by the act of writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association: that he not only thus apprises the reader that certain classes ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... socialism, industrial unionism, syndicalism, birth control, feminism, and many other movements and propagandas, each of which in its turn induced ecstatic visions of a new heaven and a new earth. The same individuals have grown lyrical in praise of every bizarre and eccentric art fad. In the banal and grotesque travesties of art produced by cubists, futurists, et al., they saw transcendent genius. They are forever seeking new gods ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Lyrical emotion makes the prophet's language obscure by reason of its swift transitions from one mood of feeling to another. But the main drift here is discernible. God is guarding Israel, His vineyard, and before ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Martre, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure. In the spring he read "L'Allegro," by request, and was inspired to lyrical outpourings on the subject of Arcady and the pipes of Pan. He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn that he might dress and go out to the archaic swing that hung from an apple-tree near the sixth-form house. ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... stoutly. (Good to be back with him, good to hear his purling brogue and his lyrical construction. He talked like an old song.) The door of the boarding-house opened at their ring and Jane hurried in. "Here's Mrs. Hills! Hello, Mrs. Hills! Here I am!" She embraced the ex-villager warmly and espied Emma Ellis ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the seat of the scornful the somewhat lyrical idea of an examination in joy as a basis of admission to the typical college appeals as a fit subject of laughter. So it is. Having admitted the laugh, the question is,—all human life is questioning the college to-day,—which way shall the ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to its late birth, shows little originality. Besides, its earliest poems are of a purely lyrical and not of an epical type. Then, too, its reigning family being of Burgundian extraction, it borrowed its main ideas and literary material from France. In that way Charlemagne, the Arthurian romances, and the story of the Holy Grail became popular in Portugal, where it is even claimed ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... war, and presenting a startling and truthful picture of the real condition of that region. No pains will be spared to render the literary attractions of the CONTINENTAL both brilliant and substantial. The lyrical or descriptive talents of the most eminent literati have been promised to its pages; and nothing will be admitted which will not be distinguished by marked energy, originality, and solid strength. Avoiding every influence or association partaking of clique or coterie, it will be open ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... whose imaginary woes he has excited more sympathy, than ever were bestowed on a supernatural being. Sir Walter Scott also endowed the White Lady of Avenel with many of the attributes of the undines, or water-sprites. German romance and lyrical poetry teem with allusions to sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders; and the French have not been behind in substituting them, in works of fiction, for the more cumbrous mythology of Greece and Rome. The sylphs, more especially, have been the favourites of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... read a tragedy she has written in five acts and in verse. You will meet a good many of our celebrated literary men there. You must remember that the watchword at that house is, Admiration, more admiration, still more admiration. You must excite enthusiasm to ecstasy, compliments to lyrical poetry, and carry flattery to apotheosis. But before we go there I beg you to allow me to return your aristocratic breakfast by a poor literary man's dinner, which we will eat, not in Bignon's sumptuous private room, but outside the walls of Paris, at 'Uncle' Moulinon's, which is the rendezvous ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... which Paul's first quotation is made, is prophetic of Christ, inasmuch as it represents in vivid lyrical language the vain rebellion of earthly rulers against Messiah, and Jehovah's establishing Him and His kingdom by a steadfast decree. Peter quoted its picture of the rebels, as fulfilled in the coalition of Herod, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... and The West Wind, no less than in The Mask of Anarchy. His idea of the State as well as his idea of sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberant imagination of a lover. The whole body of his work, whether lyrical in the strictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature of a ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... are as natural and pliable as all dactylic and spondaic forms of verse are unnatural and abhorrent. As it happens, this highest central interlude of a most adorable masterpiece is as easy to detach from its dramatic setting, and even from its lyrical context, as it was easy to give line for line of it in English. In two metrical points only does my version vary from the verbal pattern of the original. I have of course added rhymes, and double rhymes, as necessary makeweights for the imperfection of an otherwise inadequate ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... for the poignancy of sensation. She was all throat. Faust's opening greeting to the dawn, his challenge to happiness, pierced her. She sat forward on her chair, anticipating the lyrical vision of Marguerite, her hands clasped over the handle of her wet umbrella, and her knees crowded up ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even though the rigid law of mine and thine must now restore to William Browne of Tavistock ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... not tire the attention of my indulgent reader with these lyrical deviations, which have no bearing on ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... Where the limelight is not, the flower blooms. Have you not frequently noticed that they who day by day cheerfully endure most unpleasant things, while helping their neighbours at the expense of their own time and goods, are often rendered lyrical by receiving a sovereign from some one who would never miss it, and are ready to enthrone him in their hearts as a king of men? The truest virtue, sir, must be sought among the lowly. Sugar and snow ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... of several books, but no book of his will yet bear out my statement. The proof of it lies in weekly papers. No living Englishman can do "the grand manner"—combining majestic dignity with a genuine lyrical inspiration—better than Mr. Whitten. These are proud words of mine, but I am not going to disguise my conviction that I know what I am talking about. Some day some publisher will wake up out of the coma in which publishers exist, and publish in volume form—probably ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... Germany during the Hohenstaufen period (1138-1294), minstrels who composed and sung short lyrical poems—usually in praise of women or in celebration of the beauties of nature—called Minne, or love songs. The names of nearly three hundred of these poets have come down to us, including all classes of society, the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... form he was apt to lose his fire. He is inspired when he has a nation behind him and is the mouthpiece of sentiments, traditional, but also living and vigorous. He represents, therefore, a new period. The lyrical poetry seemed to have died out in England. It suddenly comes to life in Scotland and reaches unsurpassable excellence within certain limits, because a man of true genius rises to utter the emotions of a people in their ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... a most flattering attention. She was deeply impressed by him. He had just aided her pet mission in China—what he had given the heathen would have buttered my children's bread for many a day. Also, he was all but lyrical in his voicing of the shibboleth that Woman's Sphere is the Home, wherein she should be adored, enshrined, and protected. Woman and the Home! All the ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... childhood, selected sometimes as Harry happened to think best for the hearers, but more often as the jubilant and uncontrolled enthusiasm of the children bade them break out in the most joyous, least studied, and purely lyrical of all. O, we went to twenty places that night, I suppose! We went to the grandest places in Boston, and we went to the meanest. Everywhere they wished us a merry Christmas, and we them. Everywhere a little crowd gathered ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... too, with no topographical connection, which express pretty well their purpose in their names—as the Shakespeare, for the old drama—the Percy, for old ballads and lyrical pieces. The Hakluyt has a delightful field—old voyages and travels. The Rae Society sticks to zoology and botany; and the Wernerian, the Cavendish, and the Sydenham, take the other departments in science, which the names given to them ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... and history as well as German poetry. From the list of translations reprinted here, however, have been excluded all translations of dramas except certain selections, such as songs or short scenes approaching the lyrical mood. In most of the portions of dramas reproduced the passages are too long for republication or the interest is wholly dramatic and not lyric. The subject of the present study is, then, specifically—the German lyric ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... Lelia, a lyrical novel—an outburst of poetical philosophy in prose, stands alone among the numerous productions of George Sand. Here she takes every sort of poetical license, in a work without the restrictions of poetic form, which are the true conditions of so much latitude. "Manfred" and ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Owen.' That was truly an important exploit of our navy. I have discovered that it was an Orbajosan, one Mateo Diaz Coronel, an ensign in the guards, who, in 1709, wrote and published in Valencia the 'Metrical Encomium, Funeral Chant, Lyrical Eulogy, Numerical Description, Glorious Sufferings, and Sorrowful Glories of the Queen of the Angels.' I possess a most precious copy of this work, which is worth the mines of Peru. Another Orbajosan was the author of that famous 'Treatise on the Various ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... rather than anything else. The style is ill suited to the thought; besides, Matthew Arnold, a master at times of blank verse, and of the statelier stanza, was less often an adept at the lighter and more rushing lyrical measures. He is infinitely more at home in the beautiful New Sirens, which, for what reason it is difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later, partly at Mr Swinburne's most judicious suggestion. The scheme is trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... songs, so natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed in miscellanies, such as the Passionate Pilgrim, England's Helicon, and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. Some were anonymous, or were by poets of whom little more is known than their names. Others were by well-known writers, and others, again, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... "I'll give you some good advice. A man must be himself. While you, you are an epic man, so to say, and the lyrical is not becoming to you. It ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... Banville, like Gerard de Nerval in earlier times, RONSARDISED. The poem 'A la Font Georges,' full of the memories of childhood, sweet and rich with the air and the hour of sunset, is written in a favourite metre of Ronsard's. Thus Ronsard says in his lyrical version of five famous ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... exclusively to the production of easel-pictures. He had, in 1773, become a contributor to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy. In 1780 he was elected an Associate; in the following year he arrived at the full honours of academicianship. Peter Pindar, in his 'Lyrical Odes to the Royal Academicians for 1782,' finds a place for De Loutherbourg. Having denounced the unlikeness of Mason Chamberlin's portraits, he satirizes the style of art of ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... urged by a particular circumstance to make various trials of translation into Latin (lyrical, etc.) verse—an exercise I always used to dislike, and have never much practised. I now find my dislike was largely caused by the unsuitable and over-stiff metres which used to be imposed on me when I was under orders.... In English and Greek versification I have long been aware of the essential ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... compass of nature and possibility. Tasso, whose design was regular, and who observed the roles of unity in time and place more closely than Virgil, yet was not so happy in his action: he confesses himself to have been too lyrical—that is, to have written beneath the dignity of heroic verse—in his episodes of Sophronia, Erminia, and Armida. His story is not so pleasing as Ariosto's; he is too flatulent sometimes, and sometimes too dry; many times unequal, ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... with literary labors. He has been writing a volume of poetry to appear in the epic form. He has also been busy upon a volume of philosophy, a drama of five acts in which Mazarin is to figure as the principal character, two volumes of lyrical poetry, and a romance upon a modern subject, for which he has been offered one hundred ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... some readers will perhaps share the feeling that it strains, without convincing, the imagination. As we read the first speeches addressed by the moon-struck poet to the wandering student of science, and read the moon-struck replies, notwithstanding the singular beauty of certain dramatic and lyrical passages, we are inclined to ask—Is this, indeed, a conjuror's house at Constantinople, or one of Browning's "mad-house cells?" and from what delusions are the harmless, and the apparently dangerous, lunatic suffering? The lover here is typified in the artist; but the artist may be as haughtily ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Caitanya is connected with eastern India as the Vallabhis are with the west. Bengal is perhaps the native land of the worship of Krishna as the god of love. It was there that Jayadeva flourished in the last days of the Sena dynasty and the lyrical poet Chandidas at the end of the fourteenth century. About the same time the still greater poet Vidyapati was singing in Durbhanga. For these writers, as for Caitanya, religion is the bond of love which unites the soul and God, as typified ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... has justly been said that its very dances are sadness intensified. But notwithstanding this strongly pronounced national type of his compositions, his music is always expressive of his individual feelings and sufferings to a degree rarely met with in the annals of the art. He is indeed the lyrical composer par excellence of the modern school, and the intensity of his expression finds its equal in literature only in the songs of Heinrich Heine, to whom Chopin has been justly compared. A sensation of such high-strung ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Lyrical Drama, and other Poems. The Prometheus ranks as at once the greatest and the most ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... with great power, in pentameter verse. The poor are the heroes of his humble epic; and he knew them well, as having been of them. In 1807 appeared The Parish Register, in 1810 The Borough, and in 1812 his Tales in Verse,—the precursor, in the former style, however, of Wordsworth's lyrical stories. All these were excellent and very popular, because they were real, and from his own experience. The Tales of the Hall, referring chiefly to the higher classes of society, are more artificial, and not so good. His pen was most at home in describing ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... philosophic, theologic, and juridic dicta, historical notes and national reminiscences, injunctions and prohibitions controlling all the positions and relations of life, curious, quaint tales, ideal maxims and proverbs, uplifting legends, charming lyrical outbursts, and attractive enigmas side by side with misanthropic utterances, bewildering medical prescriptions, superstitious practices, expressions of deep agony, peculiar astrological charms, and ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... was exclusively lyrical. The average standard of versifying was higher, perhaps, than it has ever been before or since. Every man of education seems to have been able to turn a sonnet or ode. Men of religion, like St. Francis or Brother Jacopone of Todi; statesmen, like ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... perhaps, have some difficulty in comprehending the apparently magnetic attraction which one particular side of the proscenium has for so many of our players. We say our players advisedly, for the position of the prompter is different on the foreign stage. Abroad, and, indeed, during alien and lyrical performances in this country, he is hidden in a sort of gipsy-tent in front of the desk of the conductor. The accommodation provided for him is limited enough; little more than his head can be permitted to emerge from ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... sw n. "The Old English lyrical feeling," says Ten Brink, citing the lines that immediately follow sw n, "is fond of the image of physical destruction"; but I do not think these lines have a merely figurative import. The reference is to a period ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... full of lyrical passages describing scenes or persons presented to view, or containing reflections suggested by the incidents that occur. They usually consist of four-line stanzas. The prose of the dialogue in the plays is often very commonplace, ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... signified "inventor" or "finder"; and in his title, as well as in his functions, the minstrel-poet may remind us of the Norman trouvere. Garcilasso has translated one of the little lyrical pieces of his countrymen. It is light and lively; but one short specimen affords no basis ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... "so-called romantic school" that it has infected all the Parisians, and that on the stage they think of nothing but the plague, the gallows, the devil, childbeds, and the like. Nor were the romances less extravagant than the dramas. The lyrical poetry, too, had its defects and blemishes. But if it had laid itself open to the blame of being "very unequal and very mixed," it also called for the praise of being "rich, richer than any lyrical poetry France had ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... and conciliation in every field."] ... A further supply of military material is said to have reached the Albanians from Gabriele d'Annunzio in the S.S. Knin. To the Irish, the Egyptians and the Turks the poet-filibuster had merely sent greetings. Some one may have told him that even the most lyrical greeting would not be valued by the Albanians half as much as ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... HENRIETTA SCHMALZ, the most famous German Cantatrice of the last century, and who for more than thirty years was the Queen of the German Lyrical Stage, has just died in Berlin, aged seventy-nine years. In her youth she was beautiful and she was always ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... the Comedy of Errors would suffice to show that rhyme, however inadequate for tragic use, is by no means a bad instrument for romantic comedy. In another of Shakespeare's earliest works, which might almost be described as a lyrical farce, rhyme plays also a great part; but the finest passage, the real crown and flower of Love's Labour's Lost, is the praise or apology of love spoken by Biron in blank verse. This is worthy of Marlowe ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Jest-Book, is nominally a drama in five acts. All the rest of his work, except a few lyrics and occasional poems, is also nominally dramatic. But there never was anything less dramatic in substance than this mass of admirable poetry in dialogue. Beddoes' genius was essentially lyrical: he had imagination, the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, a strange choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really dramatic power he had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a credible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... documents of Indian mythology are the Vedas, usually reckoned as four in number. The oldest, again, of the four, is the Sanhita ("collection") of the Rig-Veda. It is a purely lyrical assortment of the songs "which the Hindus brought with them from their ancient homes on the banks of the Indus". In the manuscripts, the hymns are classified according to the families of poets to whom they are ascribed. Though composed on the banks of the Indus by sacred bards, the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... impress, people would read and admire the beauties of Allan—as it is, they may perhaps only note his defects—or, what is worse, not note him at all.—But never mind them, honest Allan; you are a credit to Caledonia for all that.—There are some lyrical effusions of his, too, which you would do well to read, Captain. "It's hame, and it's hame," is equal ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... meaning exactly is, nobody knows, As he talks (in a strain of intense botheration) Of lyrical "ichor,"[1] "gelatinous" prose,[2] And ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Lydgate consist of ten lines of no merit at all, and supposed to be sent to him by Rowley, with the Ode to Ella, which has a movement that recalls Collins, a lyrical artist perhaps unexcelled in our language, and in whose manner Chatterton so obviously and frequently composes, that the fact alone might have settled the Rowley question, though we are not aware that it was ever particularly insisted on in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... has nothing in common with the sumptuous and decorative neo-catholicism of men like Huysmans or Paul Claudel. Rather one must seek his origins in the child-like faith of Saint Francis of Assisi and the lyrical metaphysics ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... instinct and how much of duty held her the servant of the children she had brought into the world, and how little there mingled with that any of those factors of pride and admiration that go to the making of heroic maternal love. She knew what is expected of a mother, the exalted and lyrical devotion, and it was with something approaching terror that she perceived that certain things in these children of hers she hated. It was her business she knew to love them blindly; she lay awake at night in infinite ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... weighty rhetoric, moving to the music not of individual emotion, but of a generalized feeling for the beauty and grandeur of high thoughts. He was essentially an oratorical poet; but unfortunately the only forms of verse ready to his hand were lyrical forms; so that his genius never found a full scope for its powers. Thus his precept outweighs his example. His poetical theories found their full justification only in the work of his greater and more fortunate successors; and the masters of the age of Louis XIV looked back to Malherbe as ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the same time not to despise anything; to give way, to yield, from policy; never to lose sight of a useful practical object (such as rent-free quarters at the government expense, pensions, decorations), to keep their eye on that object through all the enthusiasms and volumes of lyrical poems, and at the same time to preserve "the sublime and the beautiful" inviolate within them to the hour of their death, and to preserve themselves also, incidentally, like some precious jewel wrapped in cotton wool if only for the benefit of "the sublime and the beautiful." Our ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... of fourteen, as it still did to the Browning of forty, the presence of a lofty spirit, one dwelling in the communion of higher things. There was often a deep sadness in his utterance; the consecration of an early death was upon him. And so the worship rooted itself and grew. It was to find its lyrical expression in 'Pauline'; its rational and, from the writer's point of view, philosophic justification in the prose essay on Shelley, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... drifting temperament of the third, reappear in this descendant. But more than any of his ancestors, and more than most of his contemporaries, the present Jefferson is an originator in the art of acting.... Joseph Jefferson is as distinct as Lamb among essayists, or George Darley among lyrical poets. No actor of the past prefigured him, ... and no name, in the teeming annals of modern art, has shone with a more tranquil lustre, or can be more confidently committed to ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... greatest poem written on love during these fifty years—and we agree to accept love as the highest theme of lyrical poetry—is George Meredith's Love in the Valley. I say this and ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... shaft of moonlight shining upon the landing, and Mr. Morgan's black heart stood still. When her husband reminded her that in less than four hours it would be her privilege to prepare Mrs. Bumble's tea, and added that, if she felt lyrical, he felt tired and footsore, Mr. Morgan, had his emotions included gratitude, would have ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... heard in such a poem as The Shrubbery, and of Wordsworth in such a poem as that To a Young Lady. But of the lyrical depth and passion of the great Revolution poets Cowper is wholly devoid. His soul was stirred by no movement so mighty, if it were even capable of the impulse. Tenderness he has, and pathos as well as playfulness; he has unfailing grace and ease; he has clearness like ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... civil contract! I wuss it was. But, oh! Mr Tickler, to see the cretur sittin wi' a pen in 's hand, and pipe in 's mouth, jotting down a sonnet, or odd, or lyrical ballad! Sometimes I put that black velvet cap ye gied me on his head, and ane o' the bairns's auld big-coats on his back; and then, sure aneugh, when he takes his stroll in the avenue, ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... personal conclusions and reactions, leaning always toward the side of iridescent illusiveness rather than emotional blatancy and irrelevant extravagance. His nuances are perhaps too finely adjusted to give forth the sense of overwhelming magic either in intention or of execution. It is lyrical idea with Twachtman with seldom or never a dramatic gesture. He is as illusive as a phrase of Mallarme and it will be remembered that he is of the period more or less of the rose and the lily and the lost idea in poetry. He does recall in essence at least the quality of pastels in prose, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... portrait is in my possession. FitzGerald fastened it in a copy of the 'Poems chiefly Lyrical' (1830) which he gave me bound up with the 'Poems' of 1833. He wrote underneath, 'Done in a Steamboat from Gravesend ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... poor bored me: the road he wanted us to build was tiresome. I could see nothing in poverty that appealed to me, nothing; I shrank away from it as from a degradation of the spirit; but his prose was lyrical and rose on broad wings into the blue. He was a great poet and teacher, Frank, and therefore of course a most preposterous professor; he bored you to death when he taught, but was an inspiration when ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... the Balkan nationalities, Mr. Noel Buxton, M.P., writing of Sofia and other Balkan capitals, becomes quite lyrical in his praise: ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... 316-17). ten Brink thinks that the poem was not written by an eye-witness, and says (p. 92): "The poem lacks the epic perception and direct power of the folk-song as well as invention. The patriotic enthusiasm, however, upon which it is borne, the lyrical strain which pervades it, yield their true effect. The rich resources derived from the national epos are here happily utilised, and the pure versification and brilliant style of the whole stir our admiration." ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... spirit, manifested to itself in symbols with no sensual alloy. Poetry is therefore the presentation, through words, of life and all that life implies. Perception, emotion, thought, action, find in descriptive, lyrical, reflective, dramatic, and epical poetry their immediate apocalypse. In poetry we are no longer puzzled with problems as to whether art has or has not of necessity a spiritual content. There cannot be any poetry whatsoever ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... his opinion, and condemn'd by his infallibility, have been no body ever since, vox & praeterea nihil. Well, however this is determin'd, let me beg of my impartial Readers, to give me leave to try what I can be, I have had good fortune I am told by others in Lyrical Verse, which I am sure is one principal part of Poetry, I'll see now if I can match my Antagonist in Rallying Prose. Several ingenious Authors have already, I think, so well confuted his Assertions against the Stage, by proofs from the Antient Poets, the Primitive Fathers, ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... is more ancient than the lyrical, and yet none shows so little sign of having outlived the requirements of human passion. The world may grow tired of epics and of tragedies, but each generation, as it sees the hawthorns blossom and the freshness of girlhood expand, is seized with a pang which nothing but the spasm of verse ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... against Thor. Poul Moeller's Collected Works I had received at my confirmation, and read again and again with such enthusiasm that I almost wore the pages out, and did not skip a line, even of the philosophical parts, which I did not understand at all. But Hertz's Lyrical Poems, which I read in a borrowed copy, gave me as much pleasure as Poul Moeller's Verses had done. And for a few years, grace and charm, and the perfect control of language and poetic form, were in my estimation the supreme thing until, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... lyrical and other non-dramatic poetry belongs almost wholly to the first period. It consists mainly of short pieces scattered through the idyllic tales and saga-plays that nearly make up the sum of his activity in its purely creative and poetic phase. Some of these lyrics strike the very highest and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... country, the pure sky and the landscape formed a large portion of my existence, so large that much of myself depended on it, and I wondered how men could be worth anything if they could never see the face of nature. For this belief my early training on the "Lyrical Ballads" is answerable. When I came to London the same creed survived, and I was for ever thirsting for intercourse with my ancient friend. Hope, faith, and God seemed impossible amidst the smoke of the streets. It was now very difficult for me, except at rare opportunities, ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... from one rule to another. The interesting point was that this exercise of tact and tolerance seemed to proceed not from any pressure of expediency but from a sympathetic understanding of the point of view of this people of the border. I heard in Dannemarie not a syllable of lyrical patriotism or post-card sentimentality, but only a kindly and impartial estimate of facts as they were and ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... through the whole of that drama, that still dances exquisitely in the more lyrical Poems and Ballads, makes some marvellous appearances in Songs Before Sunrise, and then mainly falters and fades away, is, of course, the chief thing about Swinburne. The style is the man; and some will add that ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... advanced as steadily as the dramatic school declined from the promise of its dawn. Born with Marlowe, it rose at once with Shakespeare to heights inaccessible before and since and for ever, to sink through bright gradations of glorious decline to its final and beautiful sunset in Shirley: but the lyrical record that begins with the author of "Euphues" and "Endymion" grows fuller if not brighter through a whole chain of constellations till it culminates in the crowning star of Herrick. Shakespeare's last song, the exquisite ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... observable in this play is found in many other specimens of the Sanskrit drama, which has set itself an ideal different from that of our own drama. The lack of dramatic unity and consistency is often compensated, indeed, by lyrical beauty and charms of style; but it suggests the question whether we might not more justly speak of the Sanskrit plays as dramatic poems than as dramas. In The Little Clay Cart, at any rate, we could ill afford to spare a single scene, ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... of the East; Mr. Barrie had demonstrated what could be done in a little space through the panes of his Window in Thrums. The National Observer was at the climax of its career of heroic insistence upon lyrical brevity and a vivid finish, and Mr. Frank Harris was not only printing good short stories by other people, but writing still better ones himself in the dignified pages of the Fortnightly Review. Longman's Magazine, too, represented a clientele of appreciative short-story readers that is now ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... constant repetition not only upon the oratorio stage, but in the concert-room and choir-loft. In the presentation of the personalities concerned in the progress of the work, in descriptive power, in the portrayal of emotion and passion, and in genuine lyrical force, "Elijah" has many of the attributes of opera, and some critics have not hesitated to call it a sacred opera. Indeed, there can be no question that with costume, scenery, and the aids of general stage-setting, its effect would be greatly ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... to the Senate the forty-four Russian and Austrian flags which the hero of Austerlitz had entrusted to its care. All the houses in the streets through which the procession was to pass were decorated. In front of many of them were to be seen the Emperor's bust crowned with laurels. The ever lyrical Moniteur said: "At the sight of these noble spoils, these startling proofs of the heroism of the French army, all hearts seemed to meet in a common feeling of admiration and gratitude which was but faintly expressed by the shouts issuing from the crowd and from every window, of 'Long ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... otherwise destroy, any government property not then in the possession of an enemy, pirate, or rebel." The gem of oratory hereupon erected was paraphrased as follows by the culprit himself, aided and abetted in his lyrical flight by his room-mate, John S. Barnes, who, after graduating left the service, returned for the War of Secession, and subsequently resigned finally. To this survivor of the two collaborators I owe the particulars of the affair. ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... gauntlet of criticism in the Thalia.[13] With this for his chief occupation, Gohlis or Leipzig for his residence, and a circle of chosen friends for his entertainment, Schiller's days went happily along. His Lied an die Freude (Song to Joy), one of his most spirited and beautiful lyrical productions, was composed here: it bespeaks a mind impetuous even in its gladness, and overflowing with warm ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... cannot legislate, whatever the English nation thinks, or thinks it thinks, as to the critical events of the world, whether in Denmark, in Italy, or America, and no matter whether it thinks wisely or unwisely, that same something, wise or unwise, will be thoroughly well said in Parliament. The lyrical function of Parliament, if I may use such a phrase, is well done; it pours out in characteristic words the characteristic heart of the nation. And it can do little more useful. Now that free government is in Europe ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... ventriloquial skill is required for the entire wording of the libretto, comprise a valuable memento of bygone days, otherwise entirely forgotten. The wayang-wayang or "shadow dance" of puppets, vies with the topeng in popularity, but the latter ranks as classic and lyrical drama. A graceful girl in pink, with floating scarf, and gleaming kris in her spangled sash, exhibits wonderful skill in the supple play of wrist and fingers, through the process known as devitalization, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... on John Hamilton Reynolds ("A Friend of Keats") was written, I had not seen his "Peter Bell" (Taylor and Hessey, London, 1888). This "Lyrical Ballad" is described in a letter of Keats's published by Mr. Sidney Colvin in Macmillan's Magazine, August, 1888. The point of Reynolds's joke was to produce a parody before the original. Reynolds was annoyed by what ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... both dance through the whole if permitted. But still, by a touch all are dormant, and by another touch all are in action again. The lyricord will play either low or loud. The machine goes eight days, either as a watch clock, quarter clock, quarter-chime-clock or as a quarter chime lyrical clock. It will go with any or all parts in action, or with any or all parts dormant. It has four chime barrels, and plays sixty-five tunes, many of them in two or three parts, on nineteen musical bells, and on the like number of double musical wires. A child may do everything necessary ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... and contentment; preaching easily as from Rabelais' easy chair, with all the Frenchman's wit, without his grossness. And, as we read, we feel how the ten years of experience, of thought, of study, have matured his views of life, how again the labour spent during their progress on lyrical composition, with perhaps the increasing influence over his taste of Virgil's poetry, have trained his ear, mellowed and refined his style. "The Epistles of Horace," says Dean Milman, "are, with the Poem of Lucretius, the Georgics ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... Vere, who was born in 1814, and through a long life has put into music only noble thoughts associated with the love of God and man, and of his native land. His first work, published forty- seven years ago, was a lyrical piece, in which he gave his sympathy to devout and persecuted men whose ways of thought were not his own. Aubrey de Vere's poems have been from time to time revised by himself, and they were in 1884 finally ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... some I have said probably by another hand. Critically speaking too, not one of all the one hundred and fifty-four is of the conventional and elaborate fourteen-liner sort, with complicated rhymes; but each is a lyrical gem of three four-line stanzas closed by a distich. Milton's eighteen are all of the more artificial Petrarchian sort; which Wordsworth has diligently made his model in more than four hundred instances of very ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... beginning to discover from experience, the poetry of doubt will find itself unable to use those forms of verse which have been always held to be the highest— tragedy, epic, the ballad, and lastly, even the subjective lyrical ode. For they, too, to judge by every great lyric which remains to us, require a groundwork of consistent self-coherent belief; and they require also an appreciation of melody even more delicate, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... interesting volume of translations of Japanese Lyrical Odes has lately been published by F.V. Dickins, Esq. M.B.: Smith, Elder, ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... fond of these gradated tone compositions, and carried them to a lyrical height to which they had never before attained. His "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus," in the National Gallery of British Art, is a splendid example of his use of this principle. A great unity of expression is given by bringing the ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... of two figures. A Muse in a simple attitude leaned a little to the left in order to strike the lyre placed above the dial; on the other side, a Cupid listened attentive for the sound of the hour, presumably his hour. There was a little lyrical inevitableness in the lines of this clock, and Owen could not come into the room without admiring it. On the chimney piece there were two bowls filled with violets, and the flowers partly hid the beautiful Worcester blue and the golden pheasants. And on either side of the clock ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... of other ages and climes. They are lucid and well constructed. Their plots turn about a simple action with unique effect. Their style is alert, urbane, discreet, and rich, seeking its effect only through concrete and simple means. They deal but very slightly with lyrical emotion, they deal with ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... make his usual efforts to discover the authorship of a poem that pleased him; and a pity it is, for the poem is one of the loveliest lyrics that have been written in modern times. We hope it will find a place in the next anthology of lyrical poetry. ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... our literature between their time and the Faerie Queene is that of Sackville, Lord Buckhurst—a name of note in the history of both our dramatic and non-dramatic poetry. Sackville was capable of something more than lyrical essays. He it was who designed the Mirror for Magistrates. To that poem, important as compared with the poetry of its day, for its more pretentious conception, he himself contributed the two best pieces that form part of it—the Induction and the Complaint of Buckingham. ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... consists of twenty cantos and about 19,000 lines; and a fairly complete prose outline of the story is here given, all the tedious lyrical interludes which break its continuity, especially at the beginning of several of the cantos, being entirely omitted. For further general information respecting the poem itself we will refer to the Introduction, and will now proceed to give a short ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... at this moment, driven from the plane-trees in the square by the din of the rejoicings, to demand my hospitality. I can hear him in the top of a cypress near by. From up there, dominating the lyrical assembly, at regular intervals he cuts into the vague orchestration of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... in Baltimore. His health was not good; and he seems to have occupied a part of his abundant leisure (for he was not successful in his profession) in writing poetry. A thin volume of poems was published in 1825, in which he displays, especially in his shorter pieces, an excellent lyrical gift. The following ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... his dramatic lapses. For let it be whispered at once, without further scruple. As far as the art of the drama is concerned, Shakespeare is shameless. The poetic instinct—one might call it "epical" or "lyrical," for it is both these—is far more dominant in our "greatest dramatist" than any dramatic conscience. That is precisely why those among us who love "poetry," but find "drama," especially "drama since Ibsen," intolerably tiresome, revert again and again ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... one idea in his head, that of his bowling-green, and another, that of the Widow Wadman. Oh, spare them both! I will only add one more anecdote in illustration of this theory of the mind's being occupied with one idea, which is most frequently of a man's self. A celebrated lyrical writer happened to drop into a small party where they had just got the novel of Rob Roy, by the author of Waverley. The motto in the title-page was taken from a poem of his. This was a hint sufficient, a word to the wise. He instantly went ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... opening of his tragedy. They are modelled, as the classical reader will perceive, upon Euripides. Possibly they were not intended for the very first lines, since if Milton intended to follow the practice of his model, the lofty lyrical tone of this address should have been introduced by a prosaic matter-of-fact setting forth of the situation, as in the Euripidean prologue. There are other passages in the poem which have the air of being insititious in the place where they stand. ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... the English words he rivets incompatibly together, and partly because success, even for a more poetical translator, is impossible in the premises. The authors of the Minnelay, in their elaborate rhyme-caprice, must have remained harmonious and lyrical, which is not the case with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... remember the conclusion of the stanza, nor am I able to state whether it was founded on fact or was merely an ebullition of lyrical fancy. In the latter case the lines are a striking instance of the prophetic power of minstrelsy, and justify the use of the word "vates," or seer, as applied to poets by ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... documents of a weighty or serious character, must be spoken or written in this pompous and antiquated style, owing to which, naturally, the country is almost destitute of orators. But the poets,—especially men of the sparkling fancy of Bellman, or the rich lyrical inspiration of Tegner, are not to be fettered by such conventionalities; and they have given the verse of Sweden an ease, and grace, and elegance, which one vainly seeks in its prose. In Stockholm, the French taste, so visible in the manners of the people, has also ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Consuelo, was given on the 30th of March 1878. Ayala was nominated to the post of president of congress shortly before his death, which occurred unexpectedly on the 30th of January 1879. The best of his lyrical work, excellent for finish and intense sincerity, is his Epistola to Emilio Arrieta, and had he chosen to dedicate himself to lyric poetry, he might possibly have ranked with the best of Spain's modern singers; as it is, he is a very considerable ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Spinoza much more besides. He acquainted him with the literature of antiquity; he gave him a sound knowledge of the contemporary fundamentals of physiology and physics; and it was he possibly, who introduced him to the philosophy of Descartes and the lyrical philosophic speculation of Bruno. He did much also (we may easily infer) to encourage the independence of mind and the freedom in thinking Spinoza had already manifested in no inconsiderable degree. For although this ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... finer and more intimate style, which over and over again distinguishes Borrow from the Victorian pure and simple. The dialogue is finer; it is used less to disguise or vary narrative, and more to reveal character and make dramatic effect; and it is even lyrical at times. Borrow can be Victorian still. This example is from the old man's ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... place and period, yet it never was rustic nor homespun, and sometimes struck me with its precision and fitness. Considerably softened toward him, I tried him with other literature. But vainly. Beyond a few of the lyrical and emotional poets, he knew nothing. Under the influence and enthusiasm of his own speech, he himself had softened considerably; offered to change horses with me, readjusted my saddle with professional skill, ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte |
