"Catullus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... let who will laugh or sneer, yawn or cavil. But as literature it looks back to Sappho and Catullus and the rest, and forward to all great love-poetry since, while as something that is even greater than literature—life—it carries us up to the highest Heaven and down to the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Ut possis animo quemvis sufferre laborem. CATULLUS . . . . Nostra fatiscat Laxaturque chelys, vires instigat alitque Tempestiva quies, major post otia ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... far plain in this, that Italy, Long trammelled with the purple of her youth Against her age's ripe activity, Sits still upon her tombs, without death's ruth But also without life's brave energy. "Now tell us what is Italy?" men ask: And others answer, "Virgil, Cicero, Catullus, Caesar." What beside? to task The memory closer—"Why, Boccaccio, Dante, Petrarca,"—and if still the flask Appears to yield its wine by drops too slow,— "Angelo, Raffael, Pergolese,"—all Whose strong hearts beat through stone, or charged again The paints with fire of souls electrical, ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Petronius called the Supper of Trimalchio, for which our only authority is the late paper MS. at Paris that was found in Dalmatia in the seventeenth century. But no medieval English scholar can be shown to have read Tacitus, or the lost parts of Livy, or Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, or others of the rarer Latin authors. Next for Christian antiquity. The Vercelli MS. gives a poetical version in Anglo-Saxon of the Acts of St. Andrew in the land of the Anthropophagi which have ceased to exist in Latin (so, too, AElfric knew, and rejected, a poem ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... 4456. Catullus. "What I tell you, do you tell to the multitude, and make this treatise gossip like an ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... kneeling and holding one hand of the dying man between his own, was Angelo Poliziano, the Catullus of the fifteenth century, a classic of the lighter sort, who in his Latin verses might have been mistaken for a poet of the ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... be from us, Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus; Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach; Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach; Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home; Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech; ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... Alexandrian war, by Aulus Hirtius, the accounts of the African war and of the war in Spain, composed by persons who were unquestionably present in those two campaigns. To these must be added the "Leges Juliae" which are preserved in the Corpus Juris Civilis. Sallust contributes a speech, and Catullus a poem. A few hints can be gathered from the Epitome of Livy and the fragments of Varro; and here the contemporary sources which can be entirely depended upon are brought ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... Catullus calls him "tumidus," i.e. long-winded, 95, 10. See also Propertius, iii. 34-32. He was a Greek poet, a contemporary of Socrates and Plato, and author of a Thebaid. Pausanias mentions ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... could not cease to love her, were she guilty of all crimes. He knew that if the worst turned out true that must be his case, and perhaps for the first time in his life he understood all the humanity of Catullus, and saw how a man might love even ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... there was known, Skilful in love and verse: Anacreon, Whose muse sung nought but love: Pindarus, he Was also there: there I might Virgil see: Many brave wits I found, some looser rhymes, By others writ, hath pleased the ancient times: Ovid was one: after Catullus came: Propertius next, his elegies the name Of Cynthia bear: Tibullus, and the young Greek poetess, who is received among The noble troop for her rare Sapphic muse. Thus looking here and there (as oft I use), ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... position—whose progenitors may have taken part in the "forty-five"—to go no further back—look with disdain upon the pretensions of those who have, within the short span of a single lifetime, realised a colossal fortune. But Catullus has truly said that there's "nothing so foolish as the laugh of fools," and many men still ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... error, very pardonable in a lady, of overrating Addison's classical attainments. In one department of learning, indeed, his proficiency was such as it is hardly possible to overrate. His knowledge of the Latin poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down to Claudian and Prudentius, was singularly exact and profound. He understood them thoroughly, entered into their spirit, and had the finest and most discriminating perception of all their peculiarities of style and melody; ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... PLATO to the heights; To find in PLUTARCH'S kings and knights The human touch that more delights Than crown or regal robe; To taste the fresh Pierian springs, To see CATULLUS scorch his wings With the fierce flame that sears and stings— For this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... Block that people show off their new dresses, bow to their friends, cut their enemies, and chatter small talk. The same thing no doubt occurred in the Appian Way, the fashionable street of Imperial Rome, when Catullus talked gay nonsense to Lesbia, and Horace received the congratulations of his friends over his new volume of society verses. History repeats itself, and every city is bound by all the laws of civilisation to have one special street, wherein the ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... now the singer hears To lyre and lute and harp; Catullus waits to welcome him, And thro' the twilight sweet and dim, Sappho's forgotten songs are falling ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... Lambert. "Do you know where I got these verses, Mr. Gownsman?" and he addresses his son from college, who is come to pass an Easter holiday with his parents. "You got them out of Catullus, sir," says the scholar. ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... rolling head! Thy winking, reeling, drunken eyes, (As old Catullus would have said), Thy oven-mouth, that swallow'd pies— Enormous hunger—monstrous drowth! Thy pockets greedy ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... totus teres atque rotundus, his works are not profitable for the building up of that character. If it did, we must by parity of reasoning discard the discoveries of a misanthropic inventor and the theories of a bigamous chemist. We go to Plato and Catullus, to Shakespeare and Shelley, for what they have to give: if we go with our own pet notions of what that ought to be, we are naturally as disgusted as Herbert Spencer was with Homer and Tolstoy with Shakespeare. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... sonnet opens to the reader the aspirations of the young author, in which, after the manner of sundry poets, ancient and modern, he expresses his own peculiar character, by wishing himself to be something that he is not. The amorous Catullus aspired to be a sparrow; the tuneful and convivial Anacreon (for we totally reject the supposition that attributes the [Greek: Eithe lure chale genoimen] to Alcaeus) wished to be a lyre and a great drinking cup; a crowd of more modern sentimentalists have desired ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... ploughs, the very swains, my imagination had painted in my schoolboy days, when I sat with the page of the great pastoral poet of Italy open before me,—too frequently, alas! only open. On these shores, too, had dwelt the poet Catullus; and a doubtful ruin which the traveller sees on the point of the long sharp promontory of Sermio, which runs up into the lake from the south, still bears the name of Catullus' Villa. If these are the ruins of Catullus' house, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the time came, as I am glad to remember, not without sufficient courage if wholly without distinction, but there was ever more pleasure for me in the balancing of a rhyme than in the handling of a pike, and I would liefer have been Catullus than Caesar any day of the week. So the work that Dante did in his little leisure from application to arms is the work that wonders me and delights me, and that fills my memory, as I think of it, with ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... nourishment from eggs. "We have," somebody wrote not long ago—the exact words may not be given, but the sense is guaranteed—"perceived that Love is not merely a sentiment, an appetite, or a passion, but a great means of intellectual development." Of course Solomon did not know this, nor Sappho, nor Catullus, nor the fashioners of those "sentiments" of the Middle Ages which brought about the half-fabulous Courts of Love itself, nor Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor Shakespeare, nor Donne. It was reserved for—but one never ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... dramatic, elegiac, and indeed all sorts of poetry in the persons of Virgil, Horace, Varius, Ovid, and many others, especially if we take into that century the latter end of the commonwealth, wherein we find Varro, Lucretius, and Catullus; and at the same time lived Cicero and Sallust and Caesar. A famous age in modern times for learning in every kind was that of Lorenzo de Medici and his son Leo the Tenth, wherein painting was revived, and poetry flourished, and the Greek ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... Sotheby's Blues[27] have deserted Sam Rogers; And I, though with cold I have nearly my death got, Must put on my breeches, and wait on the Heathcote;[28] But to-morrow, at four, we will both play the Scurra, And you'll be Catullus, the Regent Mamurra.[29] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... an Ovid, with no sense of the limits of either indulgence or expression. He is not a Catullus, tormented by the furies of youthful passion. The flame never really burned him. We search his pages in vain for evidence of sincere and absorbing passion, whether of the flesh or of the spirit. He was guilty of no breach of the morals ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... life, reminding one slightly of Burns's Jolly {54} Beggars. His Phyllyp Sparowe is a sportive, pretty, fantastic elegy on the death of a pet bird belonging to Mistress Joanna Scroupe, of Carowe, and has been compared to the Latin poet Catullus's elegy on Lesbia's sparrow. In Speke, Parrot, and Why Come ye not to Courte? he assailed the powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious satire, and was, in consequence, obliged to take sanctuary at Westminster, where he died in 1529. Skelton was a classical scholar, and at ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... presumptuous rigour did Rivetus the Minister treat Grotius for proposing the means of peace? Grotius, in a modest answer, humbles his pride without naming him; humorously pointing him out by that title taken from Catullus[641], Adversus quemdam ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... of all the sons of royal Rome That are, or have been, or are yet to come, Most skilled to plead, most learned in debate,— Catullus hails thee, small as thou art great. Take thou from him his thanks, his fond regards, The first of patrons from the least ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... and make tea for myself, till one rapturous morning I discovered that Hebe was fond of rising early too, and that she would like to light my fire and make my tea. After a time she began to sweeten it for me. And then she would sit on my knee, and we would translate Catullus together,—into English kisses; for she was curiously interested in the ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... in soft guise, surrounded by a choir Of virgins melting, not to Vesta's fire, With sparkling eyes, and cheek by passion flush'd, Strikes his wild lyre, while listening dames are hush'd? 'Tis Little! young Catullus of his day, As sweet, but as immoral, in his lay! * * * * * * * Yet kind to youth,... She bids thee 'mend thy line and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... you do bear me hard, young man. To be disappointed is not the same thing as to be deceived. True, you are not, as I hoped, supercargo, but the conditions are not otherwise altered. You wished to go to India—well, Zephyr's jocund breezes, as Catullus hath it, will waft you thither: we are flying to the bright cities of the East. No fragile bark is this, carving a dubious course through the main, as Seneca, I think, puts it. No, 'tis an excellent vessel, with ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... revival'— enemy of false classicism, not of classicism—bethink you what, in his few great years, Wordsworth owed directly to France of the early Revolution; what Keats drew forth out of Lempriere: and again bethink you how Tennyson wrought upon Theocritus, Virgil, Catullus; upon what Arnold constantly shaped his verse; how Browning returned ever upon Italy to inspire his best and correct ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... carried on and perfected the native Roman growth, satire, so as to make Roman life from day to day, in city and country, live anew under his pen.... Before Horace, Latin lyric poetry is represented almost wholly by the brilliant but technically immature poems of Catullus; after him it ceases ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... proudly or indolently, aloof from the court. He never flatters Augustus nor mentions his name. He scoffs at riches, glory and war, wanting nothing but to triumph as a lover. Ovid dares to group him with the laurelled shades of Catullus and Gallus, of whom the former had lampooned the divine Julius and the latter ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... things; and I intend to make the best of things. I am going to do what I like with my life. Wrong and right are merely relative terms. They change to fit their environment. Baudelaire would not have been tolerated in the Hampstead Garden Suburb; Catullus would not have been received in Sparta. But at Paris and Rome customs were different. We only frame philosophies to suit our wishes. And I prefer to follow my own inclinations to those ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... spirited efforts made in Ireland in that day to establish periodical literature. The set is complete in four volumes: and being anxious to see if I could trace the "fine Roman" hand of him whom his noble poetic satirist, and after fast friend, Byron, styled the "young Catullus of his day," I went to the volumes, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... passion of love; a passion which the munificent establishment of the bards left them at liberty freely to indulge. While the mind is enduring the torments of fear, despair or hope, its effusions cannot be gay. The greater number of the productions of those amorous poets, Tibullus, Catullus, Petrarch and Hammond, are elegiac. The subject of their songs is always love, and they seem to understand poetry to be designed for no other purpose than to stir up that passion ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... I ought to choose you to edit and bring out Sir Richard Burton's translation of Catullus, because you collaborated with him on this work by a correspondence of many months before he died. If I have hesitated so long as to its production, it was because his notes, which are mostly like pencilled cobwebs, strewn all over his Latin edition, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... the Edda and the Niebelungenlied with me in the originals; with Jens Paludan-Mueller I went through the New Testament in Greek, and with Julius Lange, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Horace and Ovid, and a little of Aristotle and Theocritus. Catullus, Martial and Caesar ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... carried the United States almost to the verge of civil war, Hamilton accepted the treaty as the best obtainable, and infinitely preferable to further troubles. He took up his pen, having previously been stoned while attempting to speak in its defence, and in a series of papers signed "Catullus," wrote as even he had not done since the days of "The Federalist." Their effect was felt at once; and as they continued to issue, and Hamilton's sway over the public mind, his genius for moulding opinion, became with each more manifest, Jefferson, terrified ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... acquired, even before he began his reformatory work, They have found that Luther was "very well versed in the favorite Latin authors of the day: Vergil, Terence, Ovid, Aesop, Cicero, Livy, Seneca, Horace, Catullus, Juvenal, Silius, Statius, Lucan, Suetonius, Sallust, Quintilian, Varro, Pomponius Mela, the two Plinies, and the Germania of Tacitus." He possessed a creditable amount of knowledge of General History and Church History. He ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... should be justly chargeable with gross inconsistency if, while we defend the policy which invites the youth of our country to study such writers as Theocritus and Catullus, we were to set up a cry against a new edition of the Country Wife or the Way of the World. The immoral English writers of the seventeenth century are indeed much less excusable than those of Greece and Rome. But the worst English writings of the seventeenth century are ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in the original those terrifying pages that nobody has ever dared to put into English without paraphrase—the polished infamies of Martial; the exquisite atrocities of Theocritus and Catullus. Yet these books left him as unsullied as water leaves a duck's back. They infected him no more than a medical work gives the doctor that studies it the diseases it describes. The appallingly learned Professor Litton was a babe in arms compared with many of his pupils, who read little—or ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... and eccentric thinker, published in the extraordinary magazine one of his admirable "Imaginary Conversations." Mr. Julius (afterwards Archdeacon) Hare reviewed the robust works of Landor. Mr. Elton contributed graceful translations from Catullus, Propertius, &c. Even among the lesser contributors there were very eminent writers, not forgetting Barry Cornwall, Hartley Coleridge, John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant poet; and Bernard Barton, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... smiting of the Greek camp on the plain before Troy. Representing the sun, as Apollo did, the head of this god often appears radiated upon coins, particularly upon the coins of Rhodes. This was as the poets were wont to describe him. Catullus alludes to his flashing eyes,—"radiantibus oculis." Tibullus speaks of him as this youth having his temples bound with sacred laurel—"hic juvenis casta redimitus tempora lauro" The use of the laurel was reserved to this god, and in times of primitive Greek ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... Maupassant,[5] who takes his cue From Dame Bovary's bourgeois troubles; There's Bourget, dyed his own sick "blue," There's Loti, blowing blue soap bubbles; There's Mendes[6] (no Catullus, he!) There's Richepin,[7] sick with sensual passion. The Dismal Throng! So foul, so free, Yet sombre ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... too great a liberty, I am a neighbour of yours, for you'll find my little bookshop at the corner of Church Street, and very happy to see you, I am sure. Maybe you collect yourself, sir. Here's BRITISH BIRDS, and CATULLUS, and THE HOLY WAR—a bargain, every one of them. With five volumes you could just fill that gap on that second shelf. It looks ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... perfected forge of Catullus, this unvarying versification, lacking imagination, lacking pity, padded with useless words and refuse, with pegs of identical and anticipated assonances, this ceaseless wretchedness of Homeric epithet which designates nothing whatever and permits nothing to be seen, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... & PROPERTIUS. 1472. Folio. Editio Princeps. Of equal, if not greater, rarity than even the Ausonius. This is a sound and very desirable copy—displaying the ancient ms. signatures. The edges of the leaves are rather of a foxy tint. After the Catullus, a blank leaf. This copy measures eleven inches one eighth, by very nearly seven ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... that most witty of mankind, Samuel Butler. This,' he continued, tapping a protuberance which I had remarked over his chest, 'is not a natural deformity, but is a copy of that inestimable "Hudibras," which combines the light touch of Horace with the broader mirth of Catullus. Heh! what think ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... succession of disasters, the Senate at first resolved to renounce the sea; but, observing that the power of Sicily and Spain resulted from their maritime superiority, it concluded to arm its fleets again, and in the year 242 Lutatius Catullus set out with three hundred galleys and seven hundred transports for Drepanum, and gained the battle in the AEgates Islands, in which the Carthaginians lost one hundred and twenty vessels. This victory brought to a close the first ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... Nemesis answers, "What's my loss to thee? His fainting hand in death engrasped me." If aught remains of us but name and spirit, Tibullus doth Elysium's joy inherit. 60 Their youthful brows with ivy girt to meet him, With Calvus learned Catullus comes, and greet him; And thou, if falsely charged to wrong thy friend, Callus, that car'dst[413] not blood and life to spend, With these thy soul walks: souls if death release, The godly[414] sweet Tibullus doth increase. Thy bones, I pray, may in the urn safe ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... a rake that he has been said to have "merited to be surnamed every woman's husband." Antony and Augustus were equally notorious. The same sensuality pervaded the masses as reigned in the courts, and was stimulated by the erotic poems of Ovid, Catullus, and ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... isn't too great a liberty, I am a neighbour of yours, for you'll find my little bookshop at the corner of Church Street, and very happy to see you, I am sure. Maybe you collect yourself, sir; here's 'British Birds,' and 'Catullus,' and 'The Holy War'—a bargain every one of them. With five volumes you could just fill that gap on that second shelf. It looks untidy, does it ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... infamous rake and had lover's garlands and serenades for their theme. You must have noticed also that in this connexion they further attack me for calling these boys Charinus and Critias, which are not their true names. On this principle they may as well accuse Caius Catullus for calling Clodia Lesbia, Ticidas for substituting the name Perilla for that of Metella, Propertius for concealing the name Hostia beneath the pseudonym of Cynthia, and Tibullus for singing of Delia in his verse, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... Greek authors, Plutarch only is used, and he evidently by means of a Latin translation. But from the Latin large draughts of inspiration are taken, direct from the fountainhead. Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, Catullus, and Seneca, are largely drawn from, while, strangely enough, Cicero, Boethius, and Virgil are quoted but seldom, the latter, indeed, only twice, though his commentators, especially Servetus, are frequently employed. The Bible, of course, ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... epigrams), though there is, according to modern standards, a great deal of very plain speaking. They have as much frank enjoyment of physical pleasures as any classic or any mediaevalist; but they have what no classic except Catullus and perhaps Sappho had,—the fine rapture, the passing but transforming madness which brings merely physical passion sub specie aeternitatis; and they have in addition a faint preliminary touch of that analytic and self-questioning ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... dissonance of brass cymbals. Intoxicated with shouting and with uproar of the instruments, excited by their impetuous advance, breathless and panting, they surrendered to the raptures of a sacred enthusiasm. Catullus has left us a dramatic description of this divine ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... author of the Pervigilium Veneris is still a lis sub judice. Aldus, Erasmus, and Meursius, attributed it to Catullus; but subsequent editors have, with much more probability, contended that its age is considerably later. We may notice a scholastic and philosophical spirit about it, which is ill-suited to the Bard of Verona. Lipsius claimed it for the Augustan age, in consequence of the mention of Caesar which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the small first group of the poets. His little work, like that of Catullus, like that of Gray, is up, high, completed and permanent. And within that little work this famous Ballade is by ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... classics imparted not only enthusiasm, but standards. An ambitious writer of the Elizabethan age must do his best to live up to Homer and Plato, to Virgil and Catullus, just as he must ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... all. Their natural charms were no longer merchantable. She of whom Catullus speaks in connection with the lofty souled descendants of Remus was ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... heaven. But from whom are the greater part of Horace's Carmina borrowed (they should never be termed Odes), any more than those of Burns or Beranger, the analogous authors in modern times? and by what Greek minor poems are they surpassed? We say nothing of Catullus, whom some competent judges prefer to Horace. Does the lyric, then, or even the epic poetry of the Romans, deserve no better title than that of "a hot-house plant, which, in return for assiduous and skilful ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... a large quarto, but of a very different character. It is the Baskerville impression of the elegiac poets,—Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius: Birmingham, 1772. No books are more delightful to sight and touch than the Baskerville classics. This Catullus of mine is printed on the softest and glossiest post paper, with a mighty margin ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... to-day. It is questionable whether Bayard would have understood a single page of a modern love story, Tancred would certainly not have done so; but Caesar would have comprehended our lives and our interests without effort, and Catullus could have described us as we are, for one great civilization is very like another where the ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... Roman poets declare themselves pupils of the Greeks. Lucretius writes only to expound the philosophy of Epicurus; Catullus imitates the poets of Alexander; Vergil, Theocritus and Homer; Horace translates the odes of ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... he communed, honouring thus At once by service and similitude, Service devout and worship emulous Of the same golden Muses once they wooed, The names and shades adored of all of us, The nurslings of the brave world's earlier brood, Grown gods for us themselves: Theocritus First, and more dear Catullus, names bedewed With blessings bright like tears From the old memorial years, And loves and lovely laughters, every mood Sweet as the drops that fell Of their own oenomel From living lips to cheer the multitude That feeds on words divine, ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... returning into Crete, built a labyrinth there, in which, very probably, these games were celebrated. Palaephatus, however, says that Theseus fought in a cavern, where the son of Taurus had been confined. Plutarch and Catullus say, that Theseus voluntarily offered to go to Crete with the other Athenians, while Diodorus Siculus says that the lot fell on him to be of the number. His delivery by Ariadne, through her giving him the thread, is probably a poetical method of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... baskets were unknown in Rome until they were introduced from Britain, for with the article of import came the name also, and the British "basket" became the Latin "bascauda." We have curious evidence of the high value attached to these baskets. Juvenal describes Catullus in fear of shipwreck throwing overboard his most precious treasures: "precipitare volens etiam pulcherrima," and among these "pulcherrima" he mentions "bascaudas." Martial bears a still higher testimony to the value set on "British baskets," ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... the water edge: the hills to the south are smiling, beautiful, and cultivated, studded with white flat-roofed buildings, which glitter one above another in the sunshine. Our drive along the promontory of Sirmione, to visit the ruins of the Villa of Catullus, was delightful. The fresh breeze which ruffled the dark blue lake, revived my spirits, and chased away my head-ache. I was inclined to be enchanted with all I saw; and when our guide took us into an old ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... the London cockney's prefix of the letter h to innocent words beginning with a vowel having its prototype in the speech of the vulgar Roman, as may be seen in the verses of Catullus: ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... very little in twenty or thirty centuries. Achilles, in his wrath at being robbed of the lovely Briseis, brings the age of Troy nearer to most men in its living vitality than the matchless Hermes of Olympia can ever bring the century of Greece's supremacy. One line of Catullus makes his time more alive today than the huge mass of the Colosseum can ever make Titus seem. We see the great stones piled up to heaven, but we do not see the men who hewed them, and lifted them, and set them in place. The true poet gives us the real man, and after all, men are more ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... subtlety, no fluctuation of fancy or passion is left unregistered, alike in their lighter and their graver moods. Sometimes the feeling is buried in masses of conceits, sometimes it is eagerly passionate, but even then always with an imaginative and florid passion, never directly as Sappho or Catullus is direct. Love appears in a hundred shapes amidst a shower of fantastic titles and attributes. Out of all the epithets that Meleager coins for him, one, set in a line of hauntingly liquid and languid rhythm, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... charnel-houses pass their lives And seek in death life's secret! And let Those hard-faced worldlings prematurely old Gnaw their thin lips with vain desire to get Portia's fair fame or Lesbia's carcanet, Or crown of Caesar or Catullus, Apicius' lampreys or Crassus' gold! For these consider many things—but yet By land nor sea They shall not find the way to Arcady, The old home of the awful heart-dear Mother, Whereto child-dreams and long rememberings lull us, Far from the ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... comedy was written, stood upon this [foundation], and in this are they worthy of imitation: whom neither the smooth-faced Hermogenes ever read, nor that baboon who is skilled in nothing but singing [the wanton compositions of] Calvus and Catullus. ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... of neatness belonged to Isaura, and brought to mind the well-known line of Catullus when on recrossing his threshold he invokes its welcome,—a line thus not inelegantly translated by ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... they discovered Tivoli, which was the abode of so many celebrated men, of Brutus, of Augustus, of Mecenas, and of Catullus; but above all, the abode of Horace, for it is his verse which has rendered this retreat illustrious. The house of Corinne was built over the noisy cascade of Teverone; at the top of the mountain, opposite her garden, was the temple of ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... especially Martial and Catullus, were the first to give a satirical turn to the epigram, their predecessors the Greeks having employed it merely for purposes of epitaph and monumental ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Cowan, sipped his port alone, or with one rosy little man, whose memory held precisely the same span of time; sipped his port, and told his stories, and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgil and Catullus, as if language were wine upon his lips. Only—sometimes it will come over one—what if the poet strode in? "THIS my image?" he might ask, pointing to the chubby man, whose brain is, after all, Virgil's representative among us, though the body gluttonize, and as for arms, bees, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... years of age he had read Vergil, Sallust, Tacitus, Ovid, Juvenal and Catullus. He had also mastered trigonometry, surveying, navigation, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the Reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded. This exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must in different aeras of literature have excited very different expectations: for example, in the age of Catullus Terence and Lucretius, and that of Statius or Claudian, and in our own country, in the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and that of Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. I will not take upon me to determine the exact import of the promise which by ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... miss your affection and loyalty is to lose one of life's chiefest delights. You are as quick to detect the humbug who hides his mediocrity behind an affectation of dignity as was dear old Yorick, of whom you will read when you have got to know the sweetness of Catullus. This Yorick it was who declared that the Frenchman's epigram describing gravity as "a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind," deserved "to be wrote in letters of gold"; and I make no doubt that had there been a greater ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie |
