"Lyric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reticences, not easily putting herself "en rapport" with those around her. Books were her world from her earliest years; in them she literally lost and found herself. She was eleven years old when the War of Succession broke out, which inspired her first lyric outbursts. Her poems and translations written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were collected, and constituted her first published volume. Crude and immature as these productions naturally ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... rendering of "bell um pomum" by "he's a daisy," and remarks, appropriately enough, "that this was well enough for 1898; but we would now be more inclined to render it 'he's a peach.'" Again, Peck renders "illud erat vivere" by "that was life," but, in the words of our lyric American jazz, we would be more inclined to render it "that was the life." "But," as Professor Gaselee has said, "no rendering of this part of the Satyricon can be final, it must always be in the ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... a pity that truth and beauty turn to cant on the second delivery, for it makes poetry, as a profession, impossible. The lyric poets have always spent most of their time in trying to write lyric poetry, and the very attempt ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... impressions of mood and landscape reveal a remarkably receptive artistic temperament; splendid and vigorous movement of lines shows that the artist is a poet. Then we are in a cul-de-sac. There is no hint of what kind of poet—too reserved to be consistently lyric, there is not sufficient evidence of the dramatic faculty to help us on to the true scent. All we can say is that we have before us a mind capable of very complete and real illusions, haunted by imagination, always fantastic, and often terrible; ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... lyric, the pathetic tenderness of which commends it to every feeling heart, is all that Burns has left in evidence that the sea had to him, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... surrounded by wild women, with old Silenus, half falling from an ass, who would have fallen were he not held up by a satyr who carries a leathern bottle. Even the satirical poet paints the picture of the labyrinth. Now what do the lyric poets do, or the wits of Martial, or the tragic or comic ones? What do they do but paint reasonably? And what I say I do not invent, for each one of them himself confesses that he paints: they called painting ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... be subdivided into sundry more special denominations; the most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satyric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others; some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with; some by the sort of verse they like best to write in; for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... fat woman, lapsing, as she occasionally did lapse, into the easy Italian of the lyric stage. "She ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... with Pattison that "in 'Lycidas' we have reached the high-water mark of English Poesy and of Milton's own production." Its innumerable beauties are rather exquisite than magnificent. It is an elegy, and cannot, therefore, rank as high as an equally consummate example of epic, lyric, or dramatic art. Even as elegy it is surpassed by the other great English masterpiece, "Adonais," in fire and grandeur. There is no incongruity in "Adonais" like the introduction of "the pilot of the Galilean lake"; its invective and indignation ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... the "Minnesingers", to be the author, because of the similarity of the strophic form of our poem to that used by him, is not capable of absolute proof, and recent investigations go to show that Kurenberg was indebted to the "Nibelungen" strophe for the form of his lyric, and not the "Nibelungenlied" to him. The "Nibelungen" strophe is presumably much older, and, having become popular in Austria through the poem, was adopted by Kurenberg for his purposes. As to the ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... humanity, and at last himself. With him, as with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In Dramatic Lyrics he discovered the one thing that he could really do better than any one else—the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre of that field he had ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... posterity! Pray, whom should we write for, in this age which makes its own epic upon sounding anvils, and whose lyric is yelled from the locomotive running a muck through forest and field and beside the waters no longer still? Write poetry now, when noise has become normal, and we are like the Egyptians, who never heard the roaring of the fall of Nilus, because the racket was so familiar to them! The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... barbarous state of our Theatre, such a performance as Gorboduc must have been hailed as not only a novelty but a wonder. It was the first piece composed in English on the ancient tragic model, with a regular division into five acts, closed by lyric choruses. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... chief French lyric poet of the sixteenth century, whose sonnets had considerable ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem 'Innisfree,' my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric, and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must, for my ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... reading at this time so limited as might be expected from the foregoing. The study of Shelley's poetry had led me to read very nearly all the English lyric poets; Shelley's atheism had led me to read Kant, Spinoza, Godwin, Darwin, and Mill. So it will be understood that Shelley not only gave me my first soul, but led all its first flights. But I do not think that if Shelley had ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... twenty years," concluded the report in a strain of lyric prophecy, "petroleum will have taken the place of all the primitive and useless illuminating mediums now employed. It will replace, in like manner, all the coarse and troublesome varieties of fuel of our day. In less than twenty years the whole world will be lighted and heated by petroleum; and the ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... went to the Lyric Theater with some woman. Get her as she leaves, or find her back at her own place later. You'll have to hustle, ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... language and in purpose. Since Byron's dramas, we have seldom had such fiery and vigorous verse. He blends the strong with the tender, in natural and sweet proportions. His genius, too, vaults into the lyric motion with very great ease and mastery. He is a minstrel as well as a bard, and has shown power over almost every form of lyrical composition. His sentiment is clear without being commonplace, original, yet not extravagant, and betokens, as well as his style, a masculine health, maturity, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... was the greatest poet of Poland during its existence as an independent kingdom. His Laments are his masterpiece, the choicest work of Polish lyric poetry ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... broken his long silence to some purpose. Those who remember his pre-war achievements in the field of polychromatic romanticism will hardly be prepared for his present development, which lifts him at a bound from the overcrowded ranks of lyric-writers to the uncongested heights whereon recline the great masters of epic poetry. And yet it was perhaps inevitable. The thunder and the reek of war (the last two years of which, we believe, were spent by Mr. Geek in the Egg Control ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... Lyric Muse, Mr. Leslie Pinckney Hill, schoolmaster of Cheney, Pennsylvania, and authentic singer, is the newest arrival on the slopes of Parnassus. A first glance tells that he is an agile climber, sinewy, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... harmonies. By force of his imagination, which is one function of his temperament, he sends his spirit into other lives, absorbs their experience and makes it his own, and ultimately identifies himself with world forces and becomes creator. In a lyric passage in a ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... secretly written lyric poetry, and his productions, which, it is true, were imitative rather than original, were pleasant to read and correct in form. He sent some under his own name to great weekly periodicals, and they not only appeared at once but he obtained the most flattering requests for more contributions. This ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... {lyric} poems, the more easily to support his poverty, began to make a tour of the celebrated cities of Asia, singing the praises of victors for such reward as he might receive. After he had become enriched by this ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... the book, laid it back in her basket, and raising the lid of the piano, she sang that sad, wailing lyric of Kingsley's, "The ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... he varies the rhymes, passing as the subject or the accompaniment of the word-music may require, from the couplet to the quatrain, and from the quatrain to the irregularly rhymed 'Pindaric'; always, however, taking care that, except in the set lyric, the quatrain shall not fall too much into definite stanza, but be interlaced in sense or sound sufficiently to carry on the narrative. The result, to some tastes, is a medium quite unsurpassed for the particular purpose. The only objection to it at ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... adorned the grounds, as Roth's stirring "Chariot Race" and St. Gaudens's equestrian statue of General Sherman. Sculpture was profusely used to beautify buildings. Wholly original and charming were the four groups for the Temple of Music: Heroic Music, Sacred Music, Dance Music, and Lyric Music. Perched in every corner were figures of children ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... the fermenting, formless design for the tragedy, The Vikings at Helgeland, transformed itself temporarily into the lyric drama, The ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... of the pieces included in the Romantic Ballads of 1826. "There can be little doubt," writes Mr. Gosse, "that Borrow intended The Gold Horns for that volume, and rejected it at last. He was conscious, perhaps, that his hand had lacked the skill needful to reproduce a lyric the melody of which would have taxed the powers of ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... roughly, from 1150 to 1190. The lyric poets of this period were for the most part Austrian and Bavarian knights who lived remote from the French border and were little influenced by the now well-developed art of the troubadours and trouvres. They got their impulse ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... outraged humanity, her anger at the cruelties of the slave-driver aye ready with knout or knife, are manifest in every line. Beyond the intense interest of the pure narrative we have passages of a rhythm that is lyric, exquisitely descriptive of the picturesque tropical scenery and exotic vegetations, fragrant and luxuriant; there are intimate accounts of adventuring and primitive life; there are personal touches which lend a colour only personal touches can, as Aphara ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... power. The relative proportions of these two faculties vary greatly in books of different sorts. Exposition (as in most essays) cannot as a rule be permeated with so much emotion as narration or, certainly, as lyric poetry. In a great book the relation of the two faculties will of course properly correspond to form and spirit. Largely a matter of Emotion is the Personal Sympathy of the author for his characters, while Intellect has a large share in ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... usually delivered in declamation. At the same time she had contracted an unhappy habit of accompanying what she delivered with gestures, by which, in a disagreeable way, what is purely epic and lyric is more confused than ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... long poem. In our youth We rise and sing a noble epic song, A trumpet note of sound both clear and strong, With idyls now and then too sweet for truth. A lyric of lament, it swells along The tide of years, a protest 'gainst the wrong Of life, an unavailing cry for ruth, A wish to know the end—the end forsooth! 'Tis not on earth. The end which makes or ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... frolic,—and one hundred and fifty pounds,—and as copies of the "Bon Marche Ballads" are now exceedingly scarce, it may possibly be of interest to quote two or three more of its preposterous numbers. This is a lyric illustrative of cheese, for ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... on whose birth the lyric queen Of numbers smiled, shall never grace The Isthmian gauntlet, or be seen First in the famed Olympic race. But him the streams that warbling flow Rich Tibur's fertile meads along, And shady groves, his haunts shall know The master of th' ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... poet Ewald are deservedly popular in Denmark. The present tragedy, and the opera of "The Fishermen" ("Fiskerne"), in which occurs the bold lyric which has become the national song of the Danes, are esteemed ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... an interlude, in prose or verse, representing the "talk by the way," of art-students, Austrian police, and poor girls, all bearing on some part of the action. Pippa's prologue and epilogue, like her songs, are in varied lyric verse. The blank verse throughout is the most vivid and dignified, the most coloured and yet restrained, that Browning ever wrote; and he never wrote anything better for singing than some ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Persians, and is undoubtedly the least known and least regarded of the seven. Its topic—the flight of the daughters of Danaus from Egypt to Argos, in order to escape from a forced bridal with their first-cousins, the sons of Aegyptus—is legendary, and the lyric element predominates in the play as a whole. We must keep ourselves reminded that the ancient Athenian custom of presenting dramas in Trilogies- —that is, in three consecutive plays dealing with different stages of one legend—was probably ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... speaking to himself. "It might work—it might add interest—" Mr. Heatherbloom waited patiently. "Would you have any objections," earnestly, "to my making a little addenda to the sign on the chariot of cadence? What's the Matter with Mother? 'The touching lyric, as interpreted by Horatio ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... told that Cowper's poetry lacked the true note of passion, that there was an absence of the "lyric cry." I protest that I find the note of passion in the "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture," in his two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce not less marked than I find it in other great poets. I find in The ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... something strangely modern about him. He is very easily turned into English. Is it that our lyric poets have resounded but that lyre, which would sound only light subjects, and which Simonides tells us does not sleep in Hades? His odes are like gems of pure ivory. They possess an ethereal and evanescent beauty like summer evenings, <ho chre' se noein ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... the witness of her contemporaries. Sappho was at the height of her career about six centuries before Christ, at a period when lyric poetry was peculiarly esteemed and cultivated at the centres of Greek life. Among the Molic peoples of the Isles, in particular, it had been carried to a high pitch of perfection, and its forms had become the subject of assiduous study. Its technique was exact, complex, extremely elaborate, minutely ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... go out whistling it. Ned Wayburn demonstrated this in his vaudeville act "Staging an Act." He took a commonplace melody and built it up into a production—then the audience liked it. George Cohan did precisely the same thing in his "Hello, Broadway"; taking a silly lyric and a melody, he told the audience he was going to make 'em like it; and ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... A flaw, I mean, in a work of art considered not as a moral or theological document but as a work of art,—an aesthetic flaw. I add the word 'considerable' because we do not regard the effect in question as a flaw in a work like a lyric or a short piece of music, which may naturally be taken as expressions merely of a mood or ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... can only wonder at the gift of vivid imagination by which this recluse woman can delineate, by a few touches, the very crises of physical or mental struggle. And sometimes again we catch glimpses of a lyric strain, sustained perhaps but for a line or two at a time, and making the reader regret its sudden cessation. But the main quality of these poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor sometimes exasperating, seemingly wayward, but really unsought and ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... my soul and lie Blind to the beauty of the earth, Deaf tho' a lyric wind goes by, Dumb in a ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... sacred lyrics, and a lyric to be lyrical and heart appealing, must be inevitable. It must be the spontaneous expression of the heart of the author—an expression which had to come. It is the latent secret of the power of true ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... have planted their standards; and we see that they stand for tendencies in the critical activity of every nation. The ideal of the impressionist is to bring a new piece of literature into being in some exquisitely happy characterization,— to create a lyric of criticism out of the unique pleasure of an aesthetic hour. The stronghold of the scientist, on the other hand, is the doctrine of literary evolution, and his aim is to show the history of literature as the history of a process, and the work of literature as a product; to explain it ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... they are vanished, these deeds of beauty and these words of wit! The bright and glorious gardens of the tiaraed poet and the royal sage, that once echoed with his lyric voice, or with the startling truths of his pregnant aphorisms, end in this wild and solitary valley, in which with folded arms and musing eye of long abstraction, Tancred halts in his ardent pilgrimage, nor can refrain from asking himself, 'Can it, then, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... these, "On Correctness;" "The Table of Modern Fame, a Vision;" "Letter from a Swiss Gentleman on English Liberty;" and "The Balance of Poets;" besides an ode to Caleb Hardinge, M. D., and another to the Earl of Huntingdon, which has been esteemed one of his best lyric poems. In London he did not attain rapidly a good practice, nor was it ever extensive. But for Mr. Dyson's aid he might have written a chapter on "Early Struggles," nearly as rich and interesting as that famous one in Warren's ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... observations which serve as a living source losing, in the regulated channels to which they are confined, their force, depth and impetuosity. Real poetry, able to convey dream and illusion, cannot be brought forth. Lyric poetry proves abortive, and likewise the epic poem.[3227] Nothing sprouts on these distant fields, remote and sublime, where speech unites with music and painting. Never do we hear the involuntary scream of intense torment, the lonely confession of a distraught soul,[3228] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... dozen students ran in a dozen different directions. The tired horse stamped its feet impatiently, and once it whinnied. The coachman lighted his pipe and watched his dying fare. Some wag sang a drunken lyric, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... the cynic sneers At such a rule of life; That, after but a few short years, Dissension should be rife. Ah! Lady, you'll avoid heart-ache, And scorn of bard satiric, If haply you should deign to take A lesson from our lyric. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... himself: his merit is appreciated, but on the whole he gives little pleasure. Gleim, diffuse and easy by nature, is scarcely once concise in his war- songs. Ramler is properly more a critic than a poet. He begins to collect what the Germans have accomplished in lyric poetry. He now finds, that scarcely one poem fully satisfies him: he must leave out, arrange, and alter, that the things may have some shape or other. By this means he makes himself almost as many enemies as there are poets and amateurs; since every ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Thebes, who holds the first place among the lyric poets of Greece. The character and subjects of his poetry, of which the portions remaining to us are the Triumphal Odes, celebrating victories gained in the great games of Greece, are indicated by the ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... of my season erotic, When Eros was lord of my days, And I loved, with a love idiotic, The Mabels and Madges and Mays; When a purple and passionate lyric Would sing all the night in my head,— I yearned, like the young ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... of sculpture embraces all types from the playful to the very serious, it is foolish to try to appreciate the whole series at one time. Perhaps the best way is to start first to familiarize oneself with the smaller bronzes of the purely lyric type, the charming garden figures, sun-dials, and miniature fountains, that make up such an attractive part of the collection. Note how often the names of Edward Berge, Janet Scudder and Anna Coleman ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... some person or impressions of some occurrence or other, and are impromptu songs readily set to the music of wind or string instruments, so that any one who is not cognisant of their gist cannot appreciate the beauties contained in them. So you are not likely, I fear, to understand this lyric with any clearness; and unless you first peruse the text and then listen to the ballad, you will, instead of pleasure, feel as if you were chewing wax ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the watch; and under the fascination of that marvellous spectacle, he felt the spirits that wait on love awake in him, that the lyric summits of his sentiment began to gleam and glitter like the frozen shafts of the gateway under the moon. But he could not make up his mind which of the two women he would prefer as the centre of this fantastic scenery: Elena Heathfield ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... Americans. The friendly intercourse between them, and their occasional intermarriages, seemed little short of monstrous to the ferocious exclusiveness of the Anglo-Saxon. [Footnote: Michelet notices this exclusiveness of the English, and inveighs against it in his most lyric style. "Crime contre la nature! Crime contre l'humanite! Il sera expie par la sterilite de l'esprit."] The Indians in the central part of Illinois cut very little figure in the reminiscences of the pioneers; they occupied much the same relation to them as the tramp to the housewife ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... CATULLUS, of Verona, is the greatest lyric poet of Roman literature. One hundred and sixteen ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... choir upon the wind, and fancied that, if moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that. Finally, he took a draught at the Shaker spring, and, as if it were the true Castalia, was forthwith moved to compose a lyric, a Farewell to his Harp, which he swore should be its closing strain, the last verse that an ungrateful world should have from him. This effusion, with two or three other little pieces, subsequently written, he took the first opportunity to send, by one of the Shaker brethren, to ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... some slight control, But deem her of a feeble soul That doth not love my naked sword Above my sweetest lyric word," ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... index of the soul. The voice of the two Pitts was the same voice, we have been told—a deep, rich, cultivated lyric-barytone. It was a trained voice, a voice that came from a full column of air, that never broke into a screech, rasping the throat of the speaker and the ear of the listener. It was the natural voice carefully developed by right use. The power of Pitt lay in his cold, calculating intellect, but the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... necessary to define sharply the line between poetry of the people and poetry for the people.[2] The latter may still be written; the making of the former is a lost art. Poetry of the people is either lyric or narrative. This difference is roughly that between song and ballad. 'With us,' says Ritson, 'songs of sentiment, expression, or even description, are properly termed songs, in contradistinction to mere narrative compositions which we now denominate ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Pelayo pointed out that Galds lacks the lyric flame which touches with poignant emotion the common things of life. He did not entirely escape the rhetoric of his race. And he was curiously little interested in the passions of sex—too little to be altogether human, perhaps. But his work appears extraordinarily vast and many-sided when ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... not long ago befell The tear-compelling incident I now propose to tell; So come, my sweet collector friends, and listen while I sing Unto your delectation this brief, pathetic thing— No lyric pitched in vaunting key, but just a requiem Of blowing twenty dollars in by nine ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... Achilles in the sky looked down upon 20,000 young Achilles walking through the streets beneath. With what admiration do men recall the intellectual achievements of Athens! What temples, and what statues in them! What orators and eloquence! What dramas! What lyric poems! What philosophers! Yet one ideal man who never lived, save in a poet's vision, turned rude tribes into intellectual giants. Thus each nation hungers for heroes. When it has none God sends ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... like Barty to begin a lyric that will probably last as long as the English language with an innocent jingle worthy ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... a sad little love lyric which Baroni himself had set to music specially for the voice of his favourite pupil, and as Diana's low rich notes took up the plaintive melody, the audience settled itself down with a sigh of satisfaction to ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... shadow sometimes fell upon the earth And those who saw it wept with joy and fright. "Thou art Apollo, than the sun more bright!" They cried. "Our music is of little worth, But thrill our blood with thy creative mirth Thou god of song, thou lord of lyric might!" ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... images of tone. The melancholy beauty of the autumn woods, the loveliness of quiet waters under fading skies, the sapphire and emerald glories, or the ominous chantings, of the sea, the benign and mysterious majesty of summer stars, the lyric sweetness of a meadow: these things urged him to musical transcripts, notations of loving tenderness and sincerity. His music is redolent of the breath and odour of woodland places, of lanes and moors and gardens; or it is saturated with salt spray; or it communicates the incommunicable in ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... of a true festival than most men experience even in the longest life time. The major with his Greek instinct of drama was a splendid personification of poetic quality; in fact he was himself almost a lyric. From time to time he glanced back at Coleman with eyes half dimmed with appreciation. The people gathered flowers, great blossoms of purple and corn colour. They sprinkled them over the three horsemen and flung them ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... cornfield, the aromatic breath of the brown earth, giving curiously the sense of fecundity—a warm, generous odour of daylight and sunshine. Down the field, toward the corner, cutting in sharply, as though a door opened (or a page turned to another lyric), came the cloying, sweet fragrance of wild crab-apple blossoms, almost tropical in their richness, and below that, as I came to my work, the thin acrid smell of the marsh, the place of the rushes and the flags and ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... of the poets and romancists; and there are, and always will be, a distinguished minority, of which the selling prices may be expected to remain firm. Such men as Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, Massinger, and among the lyric group Barnfield, Watson, Constable, Wither (earlier works and Hallelujah), Carew, Herrick, Suckling, and Lovelace, are to be ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... watchmaker at Crickhowel. He did a good deal of journalistic work and entered the Baptist ministry in 1853. After holding various charges in South Wales, he died Jan., 1873. His fame rests almost entirely on lyric, "The Pauper's Grave," which is one of the most ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... are of a dying faith. Your prayers are futile, your altars crumbling, and the light flickers and drops down into night. Poetry is empty these days, empty and worthless and dead. All the old-world epic and lyric-singing will not put this very miserable earth of ours to rights. So long as the singers sing of the things of yesterday, glorifying the things of yesterday and lamenting their departure, so long will poetry be ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... This famous lyric poet, whose name was Tisias, and honorific title Stesichorus, was born about the middle of the seventh century B.C., in Sicily. The story of his being deprived of sight by Castor and Pollux for defaming their sister Helen ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... A lyric conception—my friend, the Poet, said—hits me like a bullet in the forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... life's road to precious gems of thought; whose gift it is to find speech in dumb things and eloquence in the ideal half of the living world; to whom sorrow is a melody and joy sweet music; to whom the humblest effort of a humble life can furnish an immortal lyric, and in whom one thought of the Divine can inspire a sublime hymn. Another stoops and takes a handful of clay from the earth, and with the pressure of his fingers moulds it to the reality of an unreal image seen in dreams; ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... Emancipation Proclamation had given deliverance to the captives, and when "the north star" was an object dear to many a slave who longed to breathe the free air of Canada. The Rev. E. H. Dewart says of it: "This spirited lyric is alike creditable to the talents, patriotism, and independence of its author. Its loyalty is an intelligent attainment, free from blind ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... recall something, in a hazy sort of way. You had on a rose-colored gown that was distinctly wonderful, and when we tracked the German to the door of your room, you were wearing an evening coat, bright blue. But the main thing was your hair!" Here I became lyric. "An oak-leaf in the sunlight, Miss ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... imagination; his words poured forth like the rapid bursts of impatience. He was the revolutionary impetus personified. The Assembly followed him breathless, and with him arrived at fury before it attained conviction. His discourses were magnificent odes, which elevated discussion to lyric poetry, and enthusiasm to convulsion; his action bespoke the tripod rather than the tribune. He was the Danton of the Gironde, as Vergniaud was ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... adversary's throat a knife which lay upon the table, for the convenience of cutting cheese; but, by the blessing of God, the edge of it was not keen enough to enter the skin, which it had only scratched in divers places. A satirist had almost bit off the ear of a lyric bard. Shirts and neckcloths were torn to rags; and there was such a woeful wreck of periwigs on the floor, that no examination could adjust the property of the owners, the greatest part of whom were obliged to use ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... became clearly recognized that he is one of the most important of all the great writers of France, and he is distinguished not only in fiction, but also in poetry and the drama. He is a follower of Andre Chenier, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo, a lyric sun, a philosophic poet, later, perhaps in consequence of the Revolution of 1830, becoming a "Symbolist." He has been held to occupy a middle ground between De Musset and Chenier, but he has also something suggestive of Madame de Stael, and, artistically, he has much in common ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... slave women that are among the gifts sent to Cleon, seems to be indicated the degradation of the spiritual by its subjection to earthly ideals, as were the ideals of Greek art. This is more particularly indicated by the one white she-slave, the lyric woman, whom further on in his letter, Cleon promises to the King he will make narrate (in lyric song we must suppose) his fortunes, speak his great words, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... affect Una? 10. Note the teachings in xxiii (prayer), xxiv (absolution), and xxv (mortification of the flesh). 11. Observe that Faith teaches the Knight his relations to God; Charity, those to his fellow-men. 12. Explain the lyric note in l. 378. 13. Give an account of the knight's visit to the Hill of Contemplation. Explain the allegory. 14. Find a stanza complimentary to Queen Elizabeth. 16. What prophecy was made of ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... and critics have been unanimous in their praise of this exquisite lyric, which, had she written nothing more, would alone have been amply sufficient to vindicate Aphara Behn's genius and immortality. It was a great favourite with Swinburne, who terms it 'that melodious and magnificent ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... literature of Wales is divided into three perfectly distinct distinct branches: the bardic or lyric, which shines forth in splendour in the sixth century by the works of Taliessin, of Aneurin, and of Liware'h Hen, and continues through an uninterrupted series of imitations up to modern times; the Mabinogion, or literature of romance, fixed towards the twelfth century, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... in these years inevitably reflected the liberal sentiment of the time; it is always the radical emotion of any revolutionary period that finds the most effective lyric expression, the conservative state of mind being more characteristically prosaic. For the group of ardent spirits who made themselves the heralds of the new day, one of their number, the novelist and dramatist Karl Gutzkow, found the name "Young Germany." Just as the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... place, particularly since Mozart has left numerous and interesting comments on "Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail." This first German opera he composed with the confessed purpose of substituting a work designed for the "national lyric stage" for the conventional and customary Italian opera. Despite its Hispano-Turkish color, the work is so ingenuous, so German in feeling, and above all so full of German humor that the success was unexampled, ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... praises of the gods. The fragments of the Orphic hymns, and those of Linus and Musaeus, show these poets entertained sounder notions of the Supreme Being than many philosophers of a later date. There are lyric fragments yet remaining that bear striking resemblance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... perturbing theme. It seems to combine the enduring lustre of a precious metal with the tenuity of gold-leaf. Even the most vivid emotions of grief and love, as well as the horrors of war, were banished from the Japanese Parnassus, where the Muse of Tragedy warbles, and the lyric Muse utters nothing but ditties of exquisite and melting sweetness, which soothe the ear, but never stir the heart: while their meaning is often so obscure as even to elude ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... faithful reproduction of the intention of both poet and composer. This reproduction includes the revelation of the characteristics of the poem itself, whether lyric, dramatic, or in other ways distinctive. It also reveals the musical significance of the composition to which the words are set. The melodic, rhythmic, and even harmonic values must be made clear to the hearer. But interpretation includes more than this reproduction, ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... to the Palazzo del Te is the Villa Farnesina, raised on the banks of the Tiber by Baldassare Peruzzi for his fellow townsman Agostino Chigi of Siena. It is an idyll placed beside a lyric ode, gentler and quieter in style, yet full of grace, breathing the large and liberal spirit of enjoyment that characterised the age of Leo. The frescoes of Galatea and Psyche, executed by Raphael and his pupils, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... could easily have. Added to which of course would be the pecuniary emolument by no means to be sneezed at, going hand in hand with his tuition fees. Not, he parenthesised, that for the sake of filthy lucre he need necessarily embrace the lyric platform as a walk in life for any lengthy space of time. But a step in the required direction it was beyond yea or nay and both monetarily and mentally it contained no reflection on his dignity in the smallest ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Decadence,' and at 'To Julia in Shooting Togs.' But, after all, Mr. Seaman's masterpiece up to date is certainly 'To the Lord of Potsdam.' ... This will live, or we are greatly mistaken, among the most effective examples of historical satire-lyric."—The ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... her. "Oh, the plodding citizen I've become will keep him from taking after the lyric idiot who begot him. Paul and I, between us, are going to ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the view of interesting her friends, or producing good humour and happiness in the family circle. She had formed the acquaintance of Neil Gow, the celebrated violinist, and composed, at his particular request, the words to his popular tune "Farewell to Whisky,"—the only lyric from her pen which has hitherto been published. In all the collections of Scottish song, it appears as anonymous. In the present work, it is printed from a copy in one of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... least, cotemporary, with the act."—Ib., p. 60. "The man has been traveling for five years."—Ib., p. 77. "I shall not take up time in combatting their scruples."—Blair's Rhet., p. 320. "In several of the chorusses of Euripides and Sophocles, we have the same kind of lyric poetry as in Pindar."—Ib., p. 398. "Until the Statesman and Divine shall unite their efforts in forming the human mind, rather than in loping its excressences, after it has been neglected."—Webster's Essays, p. 26. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... this poem is not without beauty, and the character of Nardi, the little prince who is treated as the Court fool, shows a delicate grace of fancy, and is both tender and true. The most delightful thing in the whole volume is a little lyric called April, which is like a ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... gradations of possibility and probability, into a confident assertion, believed and affirmed by hundreds. The feelings of Great Britain on this awful event have been described well and worthily by a living poet, who has happily blended the passion and wild transitions of lyric song with the swell and ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... The Lyric Poems are almost all of the light and airy kind, such as trip lightly and nimbly along, without the load of any weighty meaning. From these, however, "Rural Elegance" has some right to be excepted. I once ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... 25-59), while the "flyting" between him and Monsieur is perhaps the choicest specimen of Elizabethan "Billingsgate" that has come down to us. It was a versatile pen that could turn from passages like these to the epic narrative of the duel, or Tamyra's lyric invocation of the "peaceful regents of the night" (II, ii, 158), or Bussy's stately elegy upon himself, as he dies standing, ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... characteristic of Michelangelo's style; and, if we are really to believe that he intended to portray the god of love, it offers another instance of his independence of classical tradition. No Greek would have thus represented Eros. The lyric poets, indeed, Ibycus and Anacreon, imaged him as a fierce invasive deity, descending like the whirlwind on an oak, or striking at his victim with an axe. But these romantic ideas did not find expression, so far as I am aware, in antique ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... either of Wordsworth's, superior to Hogg's, and, though not so intellectual as Shelley's, rivals it in truth. Mackay's is the lark itself, Shelley's is himself listening, with unwearied ears and tightly-stretched imagination, to the lark. Who is surprised that Eric Mackay's lyric, 'The Waking of the Lark,' sent a thrill through the heart of America? This poem, which appeared in the New York Independent, is undoubtedly the lark-poem of the future. From the opening to the closing stanza there is not an imperfect verse, not a commonplace. The sentiment is pure, and ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... more expansive, wholly given up to rapture, an impassioned painter of crude and dazzling pictures, a lyric prose-writer, omnipotent in laughter and tears, plunged into fantastic invention, painful sensibility, vehement buffoonery; and by the boldness of his style, the excess of his emotions, the grotesque familiarity of his caricatures, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various |
